Know Your Players (your change agents)
The 4th article in the 10 Steps to a Healthier Culture series.
Your greatest asset, your greatest expense, is the people in your organization.
You pay them money to have ideas, spot problems, and create value for customers. They have a variety of skills. Different desires get them out of bed in the morning. They are individuals.
This might be a big shock: not all team members care about continuous improvement or change or process.
This comes as a big shock to people who are all excited about new ideas. Why won’t these people get excited about change?!
Well, it’s for the same reason as there’s huge conventions of people holding comic books and dressed as Deadpool, but not everyone is at them. We don’t all geek the same.
I liked the movie Deadpool, but Tonianne had to make me watch it. Literally, she made me food, sat me on her couch, and made me watch it. I liked it. It made me laugh. She’ll probably have to do the same thing with the new Deadpool movie. I’m not going to the theater to see DeadPool 2 … And I liked the first one.
So I can’t be bothered to go watch the next Deadpool and watching Deadpool was, maybe, 90 minutes of my attention. Continuous improvement is, like, eternal.
If I liked Deadpool, but I’m not going to rush to the next one, and I’m certainly not going to wear a full body costume to Comicon, what can we expect of people in the office with Lean? It’s a lot more work and, likely, a lot less funny.
The Good News
There are people in every group who really get into change. They are change g̶e̶e̶k̶s̶ agents. Tonianne was my Deadpool change agent. She created the environment in which I could watch Deadpool. She provided the enthusiasm. She make it happen.
Change agents that have your support drive change. They are the ones that will do the heavy lifting when their teams devise new ways of working. The agents can promote and reward certain actions or behaviors that everyone (even the people who aren’t excited about Lean) want to see.
Change agents are local, trusted colleagues that can promote better product, lessen resistance to improvement, remove impediments in the system, and improve better customer understanding. Change agents also understand what is happening day to day, they can work with their teams to help improve reliability of co-workers, lessen interruptions, smooth our work flows, respect professionalism, and so on.
Everyone wants to live in that improved house, not everyone wants to drive all the nails to build it, nor should they.
Find the people who will be most active in creating healthy systems of working and get them started early. After the ball is rolling, make sure they have the capacity to continue to care and engage in making the company a better place to work, more profitable, and better at crafting good product. Reward and elevate them.
(Hint, you can’t do those things if people are scared. Not to over-value #3, but good work does not arise from a malevolent working environment.)
Jim Benson is the creator and co-author of Personal Kanban. His other books include Why Limit WIP, Why Plans Fail, and Beyond Agile. He is a winner of the Shingo Award for Excellence in Lean Thinking and the Brickell Key Award. He teaches online at Modus Institute and consults regularly, helping clients in all verticals create working system. He regularly keynotes Agile and Lean conferences, focusing on the future of work.
