Lean Change Method: Align Your Organisation for a Change Process

When developing a change process in your company it is important to select the process that best suits your organization.

There are 4 main components to developing your own change management process as the book Lean Change Management suggests:

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

In this post, we will guide you through aligning your organization and developing your Change Agent Network.

Aligning everyone in the organization with change can be lots of work depending on the size of your organization.

There are several approaches you can take to aligning people around the change, but the key is to validate the Strategic Change Canvas and collect Insights from everyone who is part of the change.

Strategic Change Canvas is a big, visible canvas that companies create on a wall with sticky notes. Generating Insights is the first step of the Lean Change Management Model, where a company produces Insights before defining a strategy process.

It´s important to note that it is recommended to select a skilled change agent who would help you and your teams undergo this change implementation.

Aligning Your Organization

If your organization is rather small, you can facilitate a session with everyone, including management and employees.

Here´re couple of tips that might help you facilitating the "Change Alignment" session:

1. In bigger companies, re-purpose an existing department meeting and ask the manager and one member of the change team present the Strategic Change Canvas
2. In smaller organizations, do a full-day company session using any type of facilitation approaches for the large group
3. Tip: facilitate this sessions starting with stakeholders that are affected by the change
4. Do an ADKAR Assessment survey

There are some important questions you should ask to create a team or department level canvas:

• What people, departments and/or processes in our organization is supporting this change?
• What in our organization would work against this change?
• How can our team or department contribute to this strategy?
• What help do we need to execute this strategy?

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. Lack of alignment with the change team can cause fragmentation in the organization.

Here are some tactical approaches you can do to create agreement with your change team:

• Team Working Agreement: Create a visible set of team norms and create immunity to allow each team member to challenge others who don’t stick to it
• Emergent Purpose Exercise: Have the team break into groups of 4 and create a picture that represents their vision for the team
• Retrospective with the change sponsor: Assuming you have a change sponsor, review your team vision monthly with an executive that is sponsoring the change. Sometimes lack of agreement on the change team can be a result of weak executive sponsorship

Develop your Change Agent Network

It´s important you have internal change management team or anyone that is responsible for implementing change. Executives and managers need to act as change agents too. The reason is because people are more likely to work with their peers rather than external consultants (which is recommended to have 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:

• Get one person from each department that is affected by the change
• Let early adopters that are being part of the change know that the change team involves extra work
• "Promote" becoming member of a change team as something exclusive to attract the right people
• Rotate the change team members periodically, depending on the type of change you´re implementing

Do not forget to give these early adopters of the change support, training, and some autonomy too

Working with evolution4all

At evolution4all we have developed the “Organisational Mastery” product. The aim of this product is to create a coalition that drives change and internal innovation alongside shared knowledge throughout the organisation. It's extremely suitable for companies that want drastically improve the alignment between executive leadership and delivery teams.

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