Lean Change Management: Innovative practices for managing organizational change by Jason Little

Author:Jason Little [Little, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Change Management, Organizational behavior, HR, CIO, IT, Business Leadership, Leadership, Lean startup, organisational development, Change, software
Publisher: Happy Melly Express
Published: 2014-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

6. OPTIONS

“You know what, never mind. It’s not going to work, so let’s figure out something else.”

“You’re right John. I haven’t seen a solitary enterprise product backlog work in an organization of this size,” I replied. “I think we have more important Options to sort out first.”

And with that conversation, an extremely high-cost and questionably valued Option was thrown into the Abandon All Hope bucket. The purpose of this Option was to help deal with the project prioritization problem. Most projects involved 10-20 teams, and the idea was to have all these teams share a solitary list of priorities. We decided it was far too big of a problem to solve given we were only a few months into this organization’s Agile transformation. Option discarded.

I’m sure you’ve been involved in more brainstorming meetings and water cooler conversations that generate more awesome ideas than you can remember. Options kinda start out that way. They start out with statements like: “It might not be a bad idea if we…” The intent is to start thinking about how to solve problems you, as a change agent, have observed.

At The Commission, the QMO met weekly to discuss Options. Many of our Options started out as a “you know, I think this would work…” idea. These Options were based on Insights we collected through interviews, retrospectives, surveys, and our observations. It was during this meeting where we’d start our problem solving process.

There are many approaches to problem solving. One approach is to use tools from the Lean world, like 5 Why’s, and root-cause analysis, which are great for exploring the problem. The theory is that by lingering in the problem space, you understand the problem better and only then can you come up with the right solutions.

Another approach is to focus on solutions. Some feel this is a better approach because it relies on thinking about a future state where the problem doesn’t exist, rather than dwelling on the problem. This is called solution-focused thinking, and it has its roots in the therapeutic approach called Solution-Focused Brief Therapy 1(SFBP) devised by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Burg. According to this theory, change happens when people construct solutions, rather than dwell on problems. The question associated closely with SFBP is referred to as the Miracle Question:

“Suppose you went to bed and overnight, a miracle occurred. What are some of things you would notice that would tell you things are better?”

According to SFBP, this question gets people thinking about goals instead of focusing on obstacles, or reasons why the change won’t work.

I prefer this solution-focused thinking, and that’s the primary method we employed at The Commission. We were transforming to a new state at The Commission, so in some respects, we wanted to ignore the current state, and the reasons why agile “wouldn’t” work. In Lean Change Management, Options are designed to help people take an action that will get them to their desired future state without worrying about the current state. That’s the difference between transformation and change.

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