For
Make no mistake – organizational change is tough. There are many forms of change within an organization; from
There is only one constant in the universe – and that is change. You and your organization/team/division (whatever scope you want to work in) only need to be good at ONE thing – and that’s managing change. The rest is trivial.
I first started to get passionate about organizational change when I began to adopt Agile practices on my own teams. I was shocked at how much resistance there was. These practices made total sense to me – it was a no-brainer for me to jump right in and adopt EVERYTHING Agile – yet for others there was much skepticism and even resistance (and in some cases
Another reason I started to become passionate about the method behind agile adoption was that I got tired and angry listening to other agile zealots preaching things like “you can’t be Agile if you don’t practice Test Driven Development” or “if you aren’t following 100% of every agile practice ever invented, you’re still not Agile”. Deep
Recently, the process of Agile adoption has come to the forefront as Gartner has recently expressed that Agile is close to entering the “Trough of
I’m now certain that the process by which teams adopt Agile is more important than the Agile practices we want them to follow.
I compare
I affectionately call this process “Inception” after the movie. The entire plot of the movie centers around planting a thought into someone’s subconscious to get them moving down a course that would impact the future. When you “start with the why” you are in fact planting the seed of change and causing hunger to grow. Only when there is hunger (usually in the form of pain) change happens.
In reality, change in this way can only be stimulated by pain or gain. That’s the only true reasons that anyone would change any of their behavior or practices. They want to either eliminate pain or have something that they didn’t have before. The common element between pain and gain is emotion. Thus, managing change is much more about managing emotion than it is fixing a broken system. Unlike computers or assembly lines – you can’t simply “fix” a human system without recognizing the human qualities that got it there – and the most important human quality is emotion. Managing emotions is really what Inception is all about.
This may sound
I entitled this post “5 Steps to Enable Agile Adoption” because I actually wanted to focus on what is required to start inception (remember, inception is simply about making sure that people involved within the change deeply connect emotionally with the need). What needs to be in place even before you start making changes to your organization is a shockingly simple pattern – yet is amazingly absent from most change management approaches.
The first thing you should realize is that organizational change doesn’t happen by accident. Even when it does, it’s probably not the organizational change you want to see. The first step to enable an environment to stimulate and control change is to breathe some life into it and make it a continuous project onto itself. The method of process improvement must exist both outside and inside all other initiatives. Just like every project, you need an environment first – hence this post.
Here is a definition of a simple environment that you need to have in place prior to any form of organizational change (provided you are going to be driving that change incrementally). If you have ever worked with me, you’ll probably realize that this is the only pattern I ever follow and that the closer I follow it – the more success I have with change.
a. Timeboxed, high bandwidth discussion. These discussions can happen weekly to start and then move to a longer cadence cycle if required, however, the span between these discussions should never exceed one month. By high bandwidth I mean in-person if possible. If not in-person, then video conference, voice, etc. Try to avoid other electronic means such as email or shared chat.
b. Start the session with a round table. For each person ask the following
- What they have been working on during the last period
- What they plan on delivering during the next period
- What things may have gotten in their way
c. The participants should then engage in a retrospective where the following is discussed:
- What is working well
- What is not working
- What are the biggest impediments
- What are the biggest opportunities
- What should be the focus for next round of improvement
The nature and structure of these meetings can and will often rapidly change over time. For example, as teams mature they may want to change the meeting format to focus more on the flow of work rather than doing a round table. They key is to establish a pattern of conversation with a focus on improvement. Make a list of things the team wants to stop doing. Make a list of the things the team feels they need to start doing. In most organizations there is a lot of low hanging fruit that can be addressed without the need for more complex methodologies.
When you implement this environment (which is a change in on itself) you create something I call a “change tuned environment” – where the entire organization is “tuned into” incremental change.
Some organizations I’ve worked with start more formally by doing an assessment about some future desired state, doing a gap analysis and then attempt to plot change. For me, this has never been effective. Start by having a simple and continuous dialog. Teams should get into the habit of making smaller changes first and this is why I promote focusing on “low hanging fruit” – because any positive change is still positive and emotionally enforcing at the beginning of this process. Sometimes tackling the biggest issues within the organization makes it easy for teams to feel a lack of progress when in reality it is much more important to start the change flywheel spinning.
What’s really great about this design pattern is that just by following it you are working in a direction that will lead to you working yourself out of a job. In fact, the goal of every manager and leader should be to work yourself out of a job. Wow hey? If you do this, you become an empowering leader who can scale decision making while at the same time create an environment that is ever evolving and learning. In fact, this is exactly what the book “Good to Great” talks about. Great companies have this culture and values something called a “Level 5 Leader”. Simply stated, a Level 5 Leader facilitates an environment I just described by empowering all around them.
There are, of course, other methods that facilitate organizational change. One of my favorite is the Kanban Method formalized by David Anderson. In reality, there isn’t much new in any of these methods that hasn’t been adopted in the world of Lean Thinking (which stemmed from Lean Manufacturing that stemmed from the Toyota Product Method, which stemmed from Deming’s principles) or a derivative like the Theory of Constraints. The crazy reality is that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to how to do organizational change – it’s been perfected for the past 30 years. We just have to embrace these practices and follow them ourselves.
With that said, if you distill these methods down you get the same design pattern – one that promotes incremental small changes that are continuous over time and managed discretely. It’s not rocket surgery but when it comes to managing a human system, emotions and perception is deeply impactful.
Of course, what almost every single one of these very successful models boils down to is what Taiichi Ohno called Kaizen in the Toyota Product Method. It has become the foundation and core principle of my entire career and management style. So, whether you are following Goldratt’s Five Focusing Steps to achieving the Theory of Constraints or the Kanban Method, or even more focused methods such as Scrum.org’s Agility Path, you will need to lay a simple foundation down first – and its this foundation that will get change to manifest and stick. Establishing this environment is the first change – and is usually done from “the top down” – the goal is to ensure that all future change are manifested and delivered via facilitation instead of command and control. Unfortunately, this first change might not be done in a collaborative way – but its nature will likely not be thought of as a negative change.
Whatever pattern of change you want to institutionalize, you must have the correct environment first. Without an environment that allows change to self-realize, organizational change will not stick and will deteriorate into confrontation and dissidence. In fact, this is my one simple litmus test for any organization or team. If I sense any form of discontent or expressions of “us versus them” or claims of “stupid management” or an overly expressive emotional response – I know that the only thing that was missing was the environment of change.
Whether you are adopting Agile practices or want to simply improve your division or team in some other way, start with these 5 steps – and you will realize much greater success.
And finally here are some important links:
Joel Semeniuk is a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP Microsoft ALM. You can follow him on twitter @JoelSemeniuk.