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.
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"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.
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.
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 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 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:
Assessments are more formal ways of generating Insights. These assessments provide valuable Insights but require big data analysis.
There are 3 types of assessments:
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.
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?
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.
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:
By using the Lean Change Model and conducting small Experiments, you can cause transformations in your company or on your team.
There must be a strong alignment between you - executive, management, and staff using this approach and making it successful.
Developing your own Lean Change Management process
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:
There are several different approaches to group facilitation. The most important thing is to visualize the canvas on a wall using sticky notes.
First, create a canvas on a wall and use the following questions to guide you to complete the canvas:
Several key persons should be involved in this session: the Change Sponsor, the Change team, and optionally executive team (depending on the size of the organization).
Once the Strategic Change Canvas has been created, it´s time to start aligning stakeholders in your organization with your change strategy.
If your organization is rather small, you can facilitate a session with everyone, including management and employees.
Here are a couple of tips that might help you facilitate the "Change Alignment" session:
It´s important that you, as an executive, and change sponsors leave details to the team when aligning with change. That includes measurements too; Avoid telling teams how you´ll measure them, let them figure out their own progress measurements.
Creating organizational alignment around change is difficult and time-consuming, especially in bigger organizations.
You must have an internal change management team or anyone responsible for implementing change. You (the executive) and managers need to act as change agents.
The reason is that people are more likely to work with their peers rather than external consultants (which is recommended, too).
People might feel threatened or feel that change is being forced on them if they don´t see their peers being involved first.
Here are some tips for expanding your change team:
Implementing a successful change program requires these basic building blocks. Change only fails when the people managing it blindly follow a structured process that isn´t compatible with the organization.
Therefore, it is important to build your own change management process using the Lean Change Management cycle.
Here are some ideas:
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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