"Lean" Change Management or "Agile" Change Management?

The day was December 11, 2013 and I was enjoying my coffee blissfully unaware my day was about to get much better.

While I was smack in the middle of the 2nd edition of Lean Change Management, my at-the-time writing coach Jurgen Appelo was running an experiment on me.

As the ding from my iPhone4 dissipated into the ether, I prepared to take a bite out of the delicious Feedback Wrap Jurgen had given me for the re-write of Chapter 1.

It took me almost 3 weeks to re-write that chapter after the feedback from my producer originally was “this is shit, re-write it” so I was feeling anxious as I peeled back the wrapper hoping I’d find more bacon, and less bean sprouts in my wrap.

**just for fun, the feedback wrap in it’s entirety is at the end of this post**

I remember the conversation we had after I ate the wrap. “Why ‘Lean’ change management, and not ‘Agile’ change management?” he asked.

After almost 10 years working with agile teams and organizations as a product owner, scrum master, tester, internal coach, and external coach, I could see that agile coaches were coming at organizational change from the team’s perspective and change managers were coming at organizational change from the organization’s perspective. Like everything in life, this isn’t a truism, just a pattern of observation.

Both camps had great ideas and it was obvious to me these worlds would collide one day, most likely under an ‘agile’ guise, but I also knew agile would eventually become big business and magic of how it came to be and what it is would be lost. That’s the nature of all ideas. As they grow and formalize, they lose the je-ne-sais-quoi that appealed to the innovators and early adopters when the late majority gets a hold of them. When that happens, someone comes along and creates something new, or re-packages something old with new language.

When I stripped away the noise, a few patterns had emerged:

•  Great change teams are diverse in thought, experience, background and attitude.
•  Context is king and having a basket of ideas to pick from gives you flexibility in your approach.
•  Many communities (agile, cm, hr, UX etc) have a lot of great ideas that can be combined and customized and all of them are incomplete.

So why 'lean' and not 'agile'?

I ask people at the start of my workshop:

“What does Lean Change Management mean to you at this point?” Responses range from process/tools/method on one end, to values/principles/mindset on the other:

“Lean Change Management removes waste from the traditional detailed and lengthy change process and streamlines the process to make it nimble and vulnerable to new information, which can positively adjust the course of the change.”

“Involve a team of people who are affected by the change and let them create the change they can accept for the moment. Do iterations in getting insights, working on options, doing experiments to see if our assumptions prove right or wrong. Start with learning interventions, before you go on with implementation and scaling interventions. Communicate transparently with one-page information e.g. canvas. “

“LCM is an approach based on co-creation, feedback and influencing people to achieve real and meaningful change.  “

“A tool based framework and an new feedback driven approach to change where co-creation of change is essential for good change outcome.”

After they attach their own meaning to the phrase, I tell them what I think. I use “lean” in the dictionary definition of the term. That is, the process/methods/tools you use should be as thin and lightweight as possible. In times of high complexity, uncertainty, or chaos, you need to create new approaches on the fly because you are attempting something that hasn't been done before. It's the same in software, every software project is asking a team to build something they've never built before.

The purpose of this exercise is for change agents to start with who they are.

Methods, frameworks, and tools don’t have values and principles. People do.

Agile is one of many baskets of ideas, and to be truthful, most of what’s in Agile has been lifted from older ideas anyway. An example is how I see people writing about using personas in change programs and citing that it’s an agile thing. Personas are popular in agile, but they were created by Alan Cooper in the early 1980s and started becoming more popular in the late 90s along with user centric design. 

 Blinded by the Light

It’s easy to be distracted by agile this and that, and it can be limiting. It’s sort of like looking for your keys under the light pole in the parking lot, event though you know you lost them somewhere else. That said, with agile being disgustingly popular at this point, it does at least get people looking at different way to approach change. 

I’ve always been more of a patterns, big-picture thinker so for argument sake, let’s take all the noise and as many labels as we can out of the conversation. When it comes to being a change agent, there are 3 things that are important:

Outlook/Attitude: You are always the centre, always. Your personality, outlook, attitude and disposition is the seed that shapes into the change agent you will become.

Tangibles: These are the things you can see, hear, and touch that support you along the way.

Interactions: How you interact with the world around you based on who you are, and your interpretation of the tools and mental models you're using.

These are (not new) concepts, so let me give my quick explanation of each and add in a few labels and noise.

Outlook/Attitude

This is how you go about things, your general disposition, how you go about life, and the lenses you choose to look through. You can call it a mindset, mantra, attitude, cognitive bias, viewpoint, or perspective.  While it's not science, MBTI, DISC, True Colours, Discovery Insights, 16PF and various other personality assessments can help you get to know yourself a little more.

As an example, I am a control freak. I will always be a control freak, but the older I get, the more I learn how to control it. Again, because I'm a control freak I need to control my need to control.

You cannot change someone else's attitude or outlook directly. You *can* create conditions for them to explore a different viewpoint, but I cringe when I see people selling workshops aimed to help you change other people’s behaviours and mindsets. It’s insulting, and it’s wrong. There is a fine line between influence and manipulation.

Tangibles

These are the tools/methods/frameworks/techniques that exist. I don’t think I need to say more about that other than there are thousands of methods/tools/frameworks/techniques out there. There are really good bits in most of them.

The tool should fit the context and solitary methods simply can’t do this.

An example would be, look at how much the old school agile community despises SAFe just because the diagram is big and scary. Having spent oodles of time in enterprise organizations, I can build a mental bridge between their existing structure and one based on SAFe. That’s probably a good starting point, but also having worked in many startups, SAFe would be a horrible idea to use as you grow. Mastering the Rockefeller Habits would be a lens to look through.  

This is not the fault of tool, this is a combination of the outlook and attitude of the person wielding this tool.

My biases will always lead me to pragmatic approaches that force you to think, like Disciplined Agile Delivery.

Interactions

This could range from sense making (Dave Snowden), systems thinking (containers and exchanges), social change dynamics, butterfly effect, and complexity thinking.

How you interact with the system you’re wanting to change is directly affected by the tools you use and the outlook and attitude you have on life in general.

Here's a quick example. I was pairing with a new-ish agile coach on a multi-team retrospective. We generally thought in a similar way, but his inexperience with large group facilitation became apparent when I asked the teams to affinity map the results of a table exercise.

He asked my why I didn’t do it because I was ‘leading the session’. I asked him, ‘am I really leading it?’ By the way, if I was working with a coach who told me that, I’d punch them. Luckily he didn’t, and he realized the subtle shift in group dynamics that comes from taking a facilitation stance.

Take the Blinders Off

As the goldrush to all-the-things-agile continues, I will share what has been helpful in removing some of my blinders over the last 20 or so years. I say *some* because we all have blindspots, at least that's what the Johari window says and my confirmation bias has told me it's true.

1. Go to a Lean Startup weekend (yes, those still exist!) and watch, or better yet participate with, a team that goes from a teeny idea to a built product is less than 72 hours. Google it, Lean Startup Machine was the first and is still around but I'm sure there are scads of them.
2. Go to an immersive retreat. For me it was AYE, and PSL. This fall I'll be going to a week long Satir retreat.
3. Take a course outside of your core discipline. I highly recommend a product design, management, or UX course because if you think of the organization you want to change as a product, that'll lead you to empathy maps, user centric design, good dialogue versus broadcasting and more. For me, it was Jeff Patton's first storymap pilot workshops 12 or so years ago. Someone going through a change can be analogous to a persona going through a customer journey.
4. Be You. It took me a long time to learn how to be me. Society seems to imply that if you're driven, focused, and competitive you're a narcissist and you need fixing. It's also implied that if you need encouragement and support, you're weak and you need saving. Zero of this bullshit is true. Do your thing, and don't apologize for it. If you're genuine, and mostly congruent, people won't always like or agree with you, but they'll respect you.

Finally, the more you step outside your core discipline and experience seemingly un-related events, your brain will start to tell you, "you know, at that lean startup thing we learned the value of validating product assumptions before building the thing...maybe we could do that with this big change we're going to be working on..."

What outside the world of change management has inspired you to be a better change agent? Leave a comment!

** the full feedback wrap **

What outside the world of change management has inspired you to be a better change agent? Leave a comment!