Lean Change Management A Mandatory Approach For Every Executive Leader

Resisting the change is a natural reaction when you don´t involve people affected by the change. Jason Little´s book,  Lean Change Management, shows how to implement successful change through examples of innovative practices that can dramatically improve the success of change programs.

We truly believe that applying the Lean Change Management philosophy is a mandatory practice for every leader who is serious about building a Digital Product Company.

ADAPT Methodology® is a unique Digital Product Development framework to change traditional project-centric companies toward product-led companies!

Society changed and leaders need support in the way how they lead and design their digital product organizations, that is the reason why the ADAPT Methodology® was created, but now let’s get a deep dive into Communities Of Practice if you want to get a deeper knowledge about this topic.

About the Lean Change Management Model

"All models are wrong, but some are useful" is a phrase acknowledged by a Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin, George Box. His idea is that simple models can be useful for making sense of complex situations, even if they´re not 100% correct.

Below you can see the picture of the Lean Change Management Model by Jason Little. It consists of 3 main parts: Insights, Options, and Experiments, and 3 parts of Experiments - Prepare, Introduce, and Review.

Lean Change Management Cycle:

Insights: It´s very important to understand the current state of the organization before you can plan any change. To do that, there are several tools, assessments, and models you can apply to understand the current position. The Lean Change Management book describes many practices to collect Insights.

Options: When your teams gain enough Insights to start with the planning, you will need Options. Options have a cost, value, and impact. Options usually include one or more hypotheses as well as expected benefits. These hypotheses are then turned into Experiments.

Experiments: Now it’s time to introduce a change and see if it works out. At this point, your teams should learn enough about your current position and consider multiple Options.

Experiments also have a sub-cycle:

Prepare: This is the planning stage of your Experiment. At this point, all you have are your assumptions about the change. In this step, you validate your approach with people affected by the change.

Introduce: In this step you start working with people affected by the change. Once a change reaches this step, it is part of the process.

Review: Here you review the outcomes of the Experiment. Normally you do this after the amount of time you thought you would need for the change to stick.

How to run a Lean Change Management Cycle

The Lean Change Management Model is a nonlinear and feedback-driven model for managing change.

As described above, in this model, Insights is when you observe the situation as it currently is. Then you move to Options, where you evaluate the cost, value, and impact of each possibility. From this, you create a hypothesis to test the expected benefits of that test. Using that hypothesis, you form an Experiment.

Insights - listening to the right way

Insights are the first step of the Lean Change Management Model. When looking for Insights, the most important thing to do is listen but we must listen in the right way.

We develop Insights by being curious, asking questions, and helping the people who want change. By asking questions we can discover what the real problem is and discover new Insights.

Insights can be generated from various practices or assessments.

Practices that generate Insights

Practices are specific processes or actions to generate Insights. Many change management processes have their practices, so you can freely combine any of these.

Jason Little is focusing on 5 main practices for generating Insights:

1.  Information Radiators - visual management tools that help build trust by making work transparent
2. Lean Coffee - Lean approach to running an informal meeting. The participants decide on the agenda, which normally has a certain theme
3. Culture Hacking - is a practice that contains 3 components: the Crack, the Hack, and the Hacking Zones
4. Retrospectives - a meeting held after every Sprint or Iteration, the team reflects on what worked well and what did not, and what needs to be changed
5. Force Field Analysis - great practice to find out what´s working against the change and what is working to support it

Assessments that generate Insights

Assessments are more formal ways of generating Insights. These assessments provide valuable Insights but require big data analysis.

There are 3 types of assessments:

1. Prosci ADKAR - a tool for understanding the current situation at the beginning of an organizational change
2. OCAI Cultural Assessment - helps leaders understand how to manage the harmony and tension that occur in the organizations
3. Schneider Culture Model - similar to the OCAI model

Options - getting the root cause of a problem

Options are designed to help people take action, which will get them to their desired future state

Now, your change agent helps people generate some Options by asking: What is the root cause of the problem they´re dealing with? Dig deeper and find out what is going on and what might be some possible solutions.

There are several exercises and practices that your change agent can perform to get the root cause problem - for example Lean Coffee Session, Five Whys, Retrospectives, etc.

All options are valid, even silly ones, so do not throw crazy ideas away. It´s always better to have more options than only one option.

Factors that affect your options

Cost - what´s the effort needed to make this option viable?

Value - What´s the benefit?

Level of disruption - How disruptive would this option be in the organization?

How to assess your options

1.  Highlight those Options you think will bring high disruption - use red sticker
2. Throw any Options you feel might not work. You may want to do them, but now it´s not the right time.
3. Ask your Change Agent/Sponsor to give his/her input

Experiments - building on curiosity

Now that there are some possible solutions, teams work together to create some Experiments to test them. They simply run one Experiment, and see what happens. The idea is to learn from that and determine the next steps.

Each experiment includes three parts: Prepare, Introduce, and Review.

What they need to do is to prepare for the experiment, introduce the experiment to those who are involved, and then review the results together. The change agent invites the team members to participate, get their feedback, and have empathy for their problems.

Experiments help you develop an approach that makes it OK to not know everything upfront.

Creating Hypotheses for Experiments

All experiments start with a hypothesis. Below you find a hypothesis structure:

We hypothesize by <implementing this change>

We will <solve this problem>


Which will have <these benefits>


As measured by <this measurement>

You can follow the following thought process:

• think about what the experiment would be
• think about who would be affected
• think about what would be the benefit
• think about how to validate the Experiment as successful

It´s important to select and develop the change process that best suits your organization. There are 4 main components to developing your change management process:

1. Developing your Strategic Change Canvas
2. Aligning your organization
3. Developing your Change Agent Network
4. Executing the Lean Change Management Cycle

Facilitating a Strategic Change Canvas session

Therefore, it is important to build your own change management process using the Lean Change Management cycle.

Here are some ideas:

1. Create a change program room: make your plan visible (using Strategic Change Canvas and Experiments)
2. Decide how often to have these meetings
   1. Change Team Daily Standups
   2. Change Team Retrospectives
   3. Strategic Change Canvas Refresh - revising the Strategic Change Canvas
   4. Lean Coffee
   5. Retrospectives
3. Do not use status reporting - ask your change team to go to your big visible room. It´ll be hard but you need to stick to open and honest dialogue

These 3 pieces are the key points you need to build your change process. Avoid creating too much process at the beginning.  The interactions among your change teams will be better equipped to deal with complexity. Therefore, creates enough processes to trigger these interactions.

If you´re interested in attending one of our Lean Change Agent workshops, please visit our training calendar page.

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