Is it Possible to Manage Change?
AYE introduced me to the Satir Change Model. I remember feeling anxious about attending because it’s not one of those sit-in-front-of-a-projector conferences, it’s an experiential learning experience. The first session I attended was about managing change and it was hosted by Steve Smith. Since I’ve written about this before, I’ll give you the reader’s digest version. This post will make more sense if you have a basic understand of the “J curve”...
Read MoreIs Your Environment Dumbing You Down?
I was talking with a colleague today who works in knowledge management and organizational development. He told me an interesting story about when he was helping an organization move from mainframe-based systems to browser-based systems over a decade ago. The ‘dumb-terminal’ operators had extremely low proficiency in web-browsers since most of them had never used browsers before. Over the next year they hired people who were rated as having much higher proficiency in using...
Read More2 Things that are Killing Your Transformation
In my last post I referred to a few studies that show only 30% of change initiatives are successful. The US Air Force recently cancelled a 6-year program that cost in excess of $1,000,000,000. One. Billion. Dollars. Seriously. One. Billion. Dollars. So naturally I expect the reaction to range from “what a bunch of idiots” to pundits speculating why this massive program failed with little to no data or insight into the actual problem. Who knows, maybe they were only ‘doing...
Read MoreEvolving Change Management
The Agile community talks a lot about “agile failure” and I’ve seen more than enough debates about “doing vs being Agile” to want to shoot myself, but what about failure of change initiatives? Let’s face it, Agile is simply a trigger for change, not a destination. Change efforts have a lousy success record according to this article. Here are the success percentages with respect to change initiatives from the article to save you some time. 1995 –...
Read MoreIs Kanban Really Less Disruptive?
Kanban is often referred to as an ‘evolutionary approach to change‘. The approach taken with Kanban is to make visible the current state of the existing process and existing work. From there flow work through your system, measure it and then look for, and fix, problems. Yes that is an over-simplification and my explanation isn’t the point of this post. Many people have written about Kanban being a gentler approach to change because it’s less disruptive and...
Read MoreGet Lean Change
