Lean Change

Management
2nd Edition

A Feedback-driven Approach to
Change

Jason Little
Lean Change
Management 2nd
Edition
A Feedback-driven Approach to
Change

Jason Little
This book is for sale at
http://leanpub.com/leanchangemanagement

This version was published on 2013-10-14

This is a Leanpub book. Leanpub empowers authors

and publishers with the Lean Publishing process.
Lean Publishing is the act of publishing an
in-progress ebook using lightweight tools and many
iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you
have the right book and build traction once you do.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
Tweet This Book!
Please help Jason Little by spreading the word about
this book on Twitter!
The suggested tweet for this book is:
I’m supporting the Happy Melly crowd-funding
effort for Lean Change Management!
http://bit.ly/hmexpress #leanchange
The suggested hashtag for this book is #leanchange.
Find out what other people are saying about the
book by clicking on this link to search for this
hashtag on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/search?q=#leanchange
Contents

1 Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Lean Change Management in 30 Seconds 1
1.2 Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2 Introducing Lean Change Management . . 4

2.1 Where Lean Change Management Comes
From . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2 Why Lean Change Management? . . . 11
2.3 The Lean Change Management Cycle . 16
2.4 Chapter 1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.5 Complete 2nd Edition . . . . . . . . . . 26
1 Preface
1.1 Lean Change
Management in 30
Seconds
Lean Change Management is a feedback-driven ap-
proach to change management and applies Customer
Development and Lean Startup practices to change
management. Many industry studies come to the con-
clusion that change initiatives fail because compa-
nies don’t use structured change processes. We think
change fails because organizations push change in
structured, linear ways that are typically executed by
a change team that is isolated from the people ulti-
mately being asked to change. Change is complex and
unpredictable. Flexible, feedback-driven techniques
achieve change better than plan-driven programs. We
have developed a technique for generating Insights,
cultivating Options for change, then preparing, in-
troducing and evaluating Minimum Viable Changes.
This lets you advance change incrementally while
Preface 2

learning about the organizational system, allowing

you to improve your practice and your outcomes
based on experience. We describe this practice, and
illustrate how existing change management models
can be integrated with it. The result is a book that you
can use to change the way you change, and the way
you facilitate change in your own organizations.

Video Overview
Check out a 4-minute video introducing
Lean Change Management¹!

Lean Change Man-

agement Blog
Find more information about
Lean Change Management
www.leanchange.org²!

¹http://www.leanchange.org/the-book?utm_source=
LeanChangeBook&utm_medium=Print&utm_campaign=2ndEditionTeaser
²http://www.leanchange.org/the-book?utm_source=
LeanChangeBook&utm_medium=Print&utm_campaign=2ndEditionTeaser
Preface 3

1.2 Acknowledgements
Our approach to Lean Change Management is still
evolving. It was initially based on our work with
Jeff Anderson and his LEAN Service Offering team
at Deloitte, but has been transformed in the light
of our ongoing experience. Everyone listed in the
Credits section of this book played a role in the
development of our ideas. The content of the book
itself was put together by myself and the team of
Agile Coaches that I worked with in 2012 and 2013:
Andrew Annett, Bernadette Dario, Ardita Karaj and
Bilal Iqbal. We’ve been blogging and writing about
our experiences since May 2012.
As I learned more and connected with people in the
traditional change management and organizational
development communities, I found others who have
been experimenting with feedback-driven approaches
to change.
The references section at the end of the book contains
links and information from many change practition-
ers who have tried alternate methods to bringing
change into their organizations and with their clients.
2 Introducing Lean
Change
Management
2.1 Where Lean Change
Management Comes
From

Its Roots in Lean Startup

Lean Change Management is a flexible, feedback-
driven approach to helping organizations change. It
was inspired by the Lean Startup movement¹ that
took the technology world by storm in 2012, after the
publication of Eric Ries’ book, The Lean Startup: How
Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to
Create Radically Successful Businesses.
In that book, Ries pointed to a problem with the
startup industry that everybody knew about. He was
¹http://www.theleanstartup.com
Introducing Lean Change Management 5

sick and tired of the industry’s well-earned repu-

tation for spectacular failure, with people investing
heavily to build products nobody wanted. He knew
from personal experience how wasteful and painful
this process was. Surely there had to be cheaper and
faster ways of determining if people really wanted
a product or service. Instead of investing millions of
dollars in “stealth mode” for years before launching a
comprehensive product, Ries suggested that startups
run small “experiments” with customers in the mar-
ketplace instead, building the most minimal product
they could use to measure and test their riskiest as-
sumptions (Minimum Viable Products - “MVPs”). The
“validated learning” that resulted from those experi-
ments could be used to detect and improve product-
market fit.
Ries based his work in part on the Customer Devel-
opment philosophies of Steven Blank, described in his
book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Blank challenged
new product developers to “get out of the building”,
to find real customers for their core value offering,
and then to further develop the product in dialogue
with customers, while remaining driven by a coherent
product vision. This appealed to Ries. By learning
from fast, cheap market failures early in development,
startups could avoid the catastrophic, late, expensive
failures of the past. Ries observed that this was a
Introducing Lean Change Management 6

“leaner” way to work, and he was also inspired by the

values of waste-reduction and customer-value from
Lean with a capital “L”; the body of organizational
knowledge emerging from studies of the Toyota Pro-
duction System. From these roots, Lean Startup was
born.
Lean Startup took the tech world by storm, and Agile
coaches were involved from the start. Lean Startup
principles fit naturally with Lean and Agile software
development practices, so we were a willing audience.
Also, many of us work with both startups and estab-
lished companies, so we were immediately exposed
to this conversation as it swept startup industry. It
wasn’t long before some of us began considering how
these concepts from the startup world might apply in
mature companies, especially in our work of helping
enterprise teams adopt Agile practices.

Lean Startup for Change

Jeff Anderson, creator and leader of the Deloitte LEAN
Service Offering, was one of the first people to develop
a process for doing this, which he initially called
“Lean Startup for Change” or “LS4Change”. Anderson
later evolved his model, and renamed it Lean Change
Management. Angel Del Maroto also applied Lean
Startup methods for Agile adoption. His presentation
Introducing Lean Change Management 7

at Lean Software 2012 in Estonia was a key moment

in the early application of Lean Startup principles to
Agile transformation. While there have undoubtedly
been more pioneers in this field than we know of,
these are the forerunners of the specific Lean Change
Management processes we built our own practice
upon.
I myself began working with a team practicing Lean
Change Management in May 2012, primarily in the
context of helping the IT department in a large public
service organization “go Agile”. We were privileged
to work with Jeff Anderson and his team from De-
loitte at the start of our project, and we benefitted
greatly from various tools, models and techniques
he made available to us. We then began adapting
the framework for our specific context, adjusting and
transforming it to help the change effort ultimately
succeed. Lean Change Management as we describe it
in this book is the result of this adaptation. I believe
orchestrating change is an art as well as a science and
as a result our approach has evolved to include more
tools and models from psychology, neuroscience and
professional coaching.
Creative adaptation is always needed when you are
helping an organization change. Organizations are
complex, and change agents need to exercise judge-
ment in how they work with stakeholders. Tools de-
Introducing Lean Change Management 8

veloped by experts are valuable, but in the end all

practices need to be adapted to fit local needs. This
observation applies to our own book as well. We are
in no way suggesting that our version of Lean Change
Management is definitive. What worked in our situ-
ation may not work for you. Our goal in this book
is simply to stimulate discussion about Lean Change
Management; especially about how Agile coaches can
combine Agile, Lean Startup and traditional change
management knowledge to boost the odds of sustain-
able transformation when “going Agile” is used as the
trigger for change.

Agile as the Trigger for Change

The above point needs explanation. Lean and Agile
coaches and consultants are often asked to help a team
“adopt Agile”. However, Agile is not something with
crisp boundaries that can be brought in and installed
like a machine. Organizations are complex, inter-
connected systems. Small initial changes can have
huge unintended (or intended!) consequences. Fur-
thermore, every change you introduce to an organiza-
tion creates a new reality you have to deal with. That
new reality may not be limited to helping the team
“go Agile”. Once you start changing previously stable
behaviours in an organization, you will encounter
Introducing Lean Change Management 9

reactions and obstacles that extend well beyond the

boundaries of the team you are coaching. That be-
comes the reality you have to manage if you want
to help the team really succeed in its Agile trans-
formation, and it is going to be different in every
organization you engage.
I believe many Agile transformations fail because
people do not appreciate this. Focusing narrowly on
an Agile practice, like Kanban or Scrum, prevents
you from noticing peoples’ reactions to the disruption
caused by the change, and other connected reactions
developing in the broader organization. These chain
reactions can make or break the Agile transformation.
That is why in my own work, I have actually learned
to shift my focus from managing the change itself
to managing the response to change. Agile adoption
is just the trigger for a larger organizational change
journey that needs facilitation. That journey is going
to be different in every case, because every organiza-
tion responds differently to the trigger. My job as a
Lean Change Management agent is to help make that
whole journey happen as constructively as possible.
If I just focus narrowly on teaching new practices to
developers, I won’t engage the human and organiza-
tional consequences of change, and the initiative is
more likely to fail as a result.
Lean Change Management is thus not a process of
Introducing Lean Change Management 10

“going Lean” (e.g. getting a team to practice Kan-

ban or Value Stream Mapping more meaningfully).
It is an approach to change that uses Lean Startup
and Customer Development ideas for making small
changes, finding out how they impact people, and
adjusting our change facilitation work based on feed-
back we obtain throughout the process. The Lean
Change Management tools and practices we present
in this book enable that process. We hope you can
make them ingredients in your own success, as you
develop your own evolving version of Lean Change
Management practice.

Agile Change or All Change?

Lean Change Management evolved through experi-
ences with Agile transformations but its application is
definitely not limited to such changes. As stated ear-
lier, I believe Agile Transformation is simply a trigger
for organizational change and as such, Lean Change
Management can be applied to any organizational
change.
I say that because whether it’s Agile change or any
other organizational change effort, people will react
in an unpredictable way when they’re asked to do
something differently and Lean Change Management
provides a better approach for orchestrating change
Introducing Lean Change Management 11

within organizations.

2.2 Why Lean Change

Management?
Do we really need another change management method-
ology? There are so many existing models to choose
from. However, we think there is a need for Lean
Change Management. My objective with this book
is to change how people think about and approach
change, not to create yet another framework or method.
I believe that the incremental, learning-driven prac-
tice of Lean Change Management is superior to exist-
ing change management frameworks. Existing frame-
works try to reduce change management to a pre-
dictable, repeatable process, which we think is fun-
damentally impossible. You can’t control change, for
several reasons:

• You can’t control how people will react to change.

The best you can do is to learn about different
ways people react, and prepare yourself to re-
spond to what happens.
• Organizations are complex, interconnected sys-
tems. When you start disrupting routines and
Introducing Lean Change Management 12

introducing new behaviours in such systems,

you set off chain reactions you cannot predict
in advance.

Traditional management practices based on planning

and controlling do not really apply to this kind of such
dynamic, unpredictable work. Lean Startup practices,
on the other hand, are specifically designed for learn-
ing quickly in uncertain circumstances. By taking
actions and then constantly reading feedback from
the system, Lean Change Management primes you
to respond to patterns as they emerge. The iterative,
learning-driven emphasis of Lean Change Manage-
ment improves your ability to “dance with the system”
as it undergoes change. It is much better suited for
managing uncertain reactions than older, plan-and-
monitor approaches to managing change initiatives.
The best available evidence supports the need for a
new approach. Traditional change management has a
lousy track record! Studies from 1995 onward indicate
that only around 30% of organizational change initia-
tives succeed. Why this low rate? In our view, all the
traditional answers to this question are wrong. Com-
mentators often blame the low success rate on change
agents’ failure to use systematic change management
methodologies, on “change resistance”, and on human
unpredictability. It is as if they think change manage-
Introducing Lean Change Management 13

ment would be easy, if not for all those people screw-

ing everything up along the way. But the whole point
of change management is to help people change their
collective behaviour! So if people are unpredictable,
we need a change management framework that is
designed around that, instead of trying to force people
to fit a linear model of change.
Furthermore, from a Lean Change Management per-
spective, “change resistance” is actually a signal of
important information that a change agent can learn
from. You can only help the system change if you
engage it. So when you make plans and expectations
about how easy change may be, and then encounter
“change resistance”, that is information about some
aspect of the system you did not know about, or
appreciate enough. You need to probe that resistance
to obtain new insights about the organization you are
trying to help change, and then fold those insights into
your next change facilitation activities. Lean Change
Management is flexible enough to allow this learning
to happen. Earlier change management frameworks
are not.
Introducing Lean Change Management 14

Change Management Has a Lousy

Track Record
Failure rates in change management have been exten-
sively studied. Several studies reviewed in an Onirik
case study of change initiative outcomes² all indicate
a success for change initiatives of roughly 30% (so a
70% failure rate).

• 1995, Kotter: 30%

• 1998, Turner and Crawford: 33%
• 2005, Procsi: 29%
• 2008, McKinsey: 30%
• 2011, Standish Group: 34%

Now, take these results with a grain of salt. Change

Management consulting firms use these stats to sell
their services and models claiming all the other mod-
els fail . . . but their model doesn’t. Here’s a curve ball
for you. Is it even valuable to measure the success and
fail rate of change initiatives? More-so, is it possible?
Can something as dynamic as organizational change
²http://www.onirik.com.au/media/Whitepapers/Cracking%20the%
20Change%20Code%20White%20Paper.pdf
Introducing Lean Change Management 15

be boiled down to a black and white ‘success or fail-

ure’ answer? I’ve been around the block long enough
to see the change project charter updated after the
project to match the actual ROI with what happened
in order to check the box in the ‘successful change’
performance scorecard.
Lean Change Management differs from earlier change
management methodologies in another way too. It
is extremely focused on change facilitation “on the
ground”, within peoples’ day to day work. Traditional
change management models are more focused on
preparing for a change, and not on the implementing
it. This reflects their origins in part. Many tradi-
tional frameworks were developed by academics and
strategic consultants to C-suite executives, instead
of workers and coaches at the implementation level.
There is a great deal of quality material from tradi-
tional change management that we can adopt in our
Lean Change Management practice, but Lean Change
Management helps us bring that material down to
earth. It is a coaches’-eye-view of change, not a senior
management view. It helps you actually do things to
move the change effort forwards, among the people
doing the productive work of the organization.
So Lean Change Management has something very
valuable to offer the change management world. It
also offers unique value to Lean and Agile coaches. It
Introducing Lean Change Management 16

is a way to enable change that fits in well with other

Agile processes, regardless of the specific methodol-
ogy you favour.
There are different camps in the Agile community.
Some say Kanban is better, some say Scrum is. Some
say you can’t be successful with Agile unless you
change your organization’s culture and mindset. This
book will not debate the merits of any of those stances.
Whatever your specific goals Agile goals are, Lean
Change Management helps you get there. It is an
open-ended, discovery-driven process for engaging
the specific team or organization you serve. It pro-
vides a frame of reference for integrating Agile with
traditional change management ideas. So whether
your goal is to help a team master Kanban or Scrum,
or you want to create an “Agile culture”, Lean Change
Management can help you get results.

2.3 The Lean Change

Management Cycle
This book is organized following what we call the
Lean Change Management Cycle. The cycle is a cleaned-
up description of our overall workflow. It involves
three key steps, one of which contains its own three-
step sub-cycle. Don’t worry, this isn’t as compli-
Introducing Lean Change Management 17

cated as it sounds. In a nutshell, the process begins

with Insights about the system we want to change,
from which we derive Options for action. We pick
an Option to launch experimentally, called a “Mini-
mum Viable Change” or “MVC”. We Prepare for that
change, Introduce it, and Review the results (this is
the three-step sub-cycle). The MVC Review generates
new Insights, and the cycle continues. We discuss the
cycle in detail in Chapter 3, but summarize it briefly
below.

Lean Change Management Cycle

Introducing Lean Change Management 18

Check out the Video

If you prefer, check out the 4 minute
video introduction³ of Lean Change
Management. It’ll give you a high-level
overview, then come back and start at
Chapter 2!

Insights:
• Generate insights from a variety of Agile meth-
ods, like retrospectives, or from a classic change
management instrument such as a Prosci AD-
KAR®⁴ assessment. ADKAR® is a core compo-
nent of a larger change management method-
ology created by Prosci which we review in
Chapter 2. However, using only the ADKAR®
component of the model can still help you gen-
erate Insights, as we demonstrate in Chapter 3.
• As you generate Insights, cluster them to look
for patterns. Those will feed your list of Op-
tions.
• Keep in mind you’ll likely generate tons of data.
Filter this using use any technique that fits your
situation.
³http://www.leanchange.org/the-book?utm_source=
LeanChangeBook&utm_medium=Print&utm_campaign=2ndEditionTeaser
⁴http://www.change-management.com
Introducing Lean Change Management 19

• It’s important to consider insights from multiple

perspectives. This is best done by:
• Involving change stakeholders ahead of time,
during feedback events like retrospectives, or;
• Scheduling and conducting explicit Insight meet-
ings with change stakeholders.

Understand the System

Insights help you clarify what’s going
on at multiple levels in the organization.
Equally importantly, involving change
participants in the Insight generation
process helps you build trust. People
will know you’re trying to make things
better for them when you pay attention
to what they say, and base your work on
that.

Options:
• Insights must be transformed into Options for
taking action. There’s a value/cost trade-off
discussion that happens here, e.g.:
• Options that are low value and high cost can be
taken off the table right away.
Introducing Lean Change Management 20

• Options that are low cost, and high value are

where we want to focus.

In the context of Lean Change Management, “cost” is

a measure of the difficulty of implementing a change.
A high-cost Option might be an action that requires
the co-operation of people beyond our sphere of influ-
ence, or one that requires participation from a fairly
large number of people. These Options will take more
time and effort to implement, and carry a higher risk
of failure than smaller, more local Options. An exam-
ple of this could be a change that requires disruption
to multiple departments with an organization such
as implementing a new budgeting model for Agile
projects. In larger organizations the blast radius of
such a change can be quite wide.
Visualizing Options can help you compare their cost
and value. We put up sticky notes on a 2 x 2 grid,
using the horizontal axis for cost, and the vertical axis
for value. This helps us visualize low-hanging fruit vs.
big bang changes, and shows us the costly, low-value
Options we can take off the table right away. Options
that seem to offer high value at low costs become our
Minimum Viable Changes (MVC).
Introducing Lean Change Management 21

Minimum Viable Change (MVC)

• A minimum viable change is a change you
believe is small enough to be successful, and
offers high value relative to the disruption it
will cause in the organization.
• The process of selecting an Option from among
your Insight(s) will have convinced you that
this MVC is the right change to introduce right
now. At this point you move into the MVC sub-
cycle of Lean Change Management.

What’s “Minimal” To
You
…might not be for someone else. Aiming
for MVCs helps you get into a mindset
of trying to make micro-changes instead
of big-bang changes, but you can never
know for sure how disruptive a change
will be until you try it.
Introducing Lean Change Management 22

MVC Sub-Cycle (Prepare, Introduce,

Review):
Prepare: In this step you can use any number of tools
like Kotter’s 8-Step change model⁵, a Change Canvas,
an Lean A3 report, or a Lean Kata. We review these
tools and concepts in Chapters 2 and 3.
Preparing for the change is sort of like feature decom-
position in software. You want to break the change
down into chunks, understand who will be affected by
the change, who needs to support it, where obstacles
might come from, and a bunch of other things based
on which preparation approach you’ve chosen (A3,
Change Canvas, etc.). As you figure out how you want
to implement the MVC, you will also clarify it. You’ll
spell out what your understanding of the current state
is, and what future state you expect, after the change
has been Introduced.
*Introduce:** This step occurs when you are actively
working on the change: telling people about it, mod-
elling new behaviours, getting them to experiment
with new tools and routines, or what have you. Some
changes will have dependancies and involve multiple
actions. This step is the “Work In Progress” of Lean
Change Management, so you don’t want to take on
⁵http://www.kotterinternational.com
Introducing Lean Change Management 23

too much at once.

Review: During the “Prepare” step, you formulated
a hypothesis about how you would go from current
to target state. In the Review step, you assess your
results. Are the benefits you achieved the ones you
thought you’d get? We like to flag changes with green
(it worked!), yellow (um, sorta worked) and red (oh
man we were way off) so we can visually see how
well we are doing.
I don’t believe you can structure change efforts into
pass/fail results. You also cannot quantify every aspect
of it. Human behaviour and team dynamics involve
all kinds of tacit, unspoken factors, as well as diffuse
factors like the overall mood of the team, or a growing
sense of trust in the change program. You often need
to rely on your intuitions about these things when
Reviewing your MVC.
The results of an MVC will either confirm something
you hypothesized, or reveal something new or puz-
zling. Either way, it will stimulate new Insights, and
the Lean Change Management Cycle repeats itself.
That, in essence, is how we work.
Introducing Lean Change Management 24

A Quick Note about Measurements

Ah, measurements. Everything must be measurable
right? I’m sure some folks would debate me on this,
however as I hinted at above, I don’t believe every-
thing can (or should) be measured in objective terms.
The Lean Change Management Cycle is feedback-
driven, so in a sense you are always “measuring” or
evaluating the response to change, but that evaluation
needs to include your hunches and intuitions. We
do use measurement instruments of various kinds
in our Lean Change Management practice. However,
for several reasons, we tend to use our measurement
tools as diagnostics, not as overall evaluations of the
success of the change effort. Since the goal of this
book is to lay out the actual methods we use, we
won’t debate the merits of various quantitative and
qualitative measurement methodologies here. We will
share the actual practices that have worked for us.

2.4 Chapter 1 Summary

Organizations are complex adaptive systems, and they
react in unpredictable ways to change. Traditional
change management methodologies have a lousy suc-
cess rate, and the creators of those methodologies
often insist that if companies used a more structured
Introducing Lean Change Management 25

and planned approach to change, they would get

better results. But plan-driven management is not
effective for managing a dynamic process involving
high uncertainty. We think that overly prescriptive
change methodologies may very well be a cause of
the high failure rate for change initiatives, instead of
being the remedy for them.
However, there is a new approach for doing things
in dynamic contexts of high uncertainty, namely the
Lean Startup movement. Lean and Agile coaches play
roles in both the startup world and in larger, tradi-
tional organizations, and as a result, some of us are
starting to apply Lean Startup principles to enter-
prise change management. The resulting Lean Change
Management frameworks are a much better fit for the
unpredictable and messy work of facilitating organi-
zational change. The nice bonus for Lean and Agile
coaches is that Lean Change Management fits nicely
with the rest of what we do, but that isn’t the only
reason we should be excited about it. It truly is a more
fitting way to manage the unpredictable process of
organizational change.
This chapter offered you the Lean Change Manage-
ment backstory; how it came to be, how we developed
our own version of it, and how our version works
via the Lean Change Management Cycle. Next, we
want to take you deeper into our understanding of
Introducing Lean Change Management 26

how change can be understood. While Lean Change

Management is our overall framework, we of course
borrow many ideas from traditional change manage-
ment and behavioural science that help us understand
and interpret reactions to change. We want to intro-
duce you to those next. We also want to introduce
you to the real-life organization where we have done
our work. Together, these two areas of background
knowledge will give you the context you need to
understand our detailed account of our tools and our
practices, which fills up the rest of the book.

2.5 Complete 2nd Edition

Thank you for reading the first full chapter from
the 2nd Edition of Lean Change Management! I am
excited to be working with Happy Melly Express⁶ on
the next edition! Join the crowd-funding program⁷
and get early access to new material, templates, videos
and more!
I expect the 2nd edition to launch in late 2013 and you
can keep up to date with what’s happening by visiting
http://www.leanchange.org⁸

⁶http://bit.ly/hmexpress
⁷http://bit.ly/hmexpress
⁸http://www.leanchange.org