silk and spinach

Through bitter experience I’ve come to recognise that change works best when it isn’t imposed, and when it is allowed to occur over a period of time. So when you or I recognise that an organisation’s performance is below par, how are we supposed to get it to change. These days I try to foster change, rather than to impose it. Here are some great ways to start the ball rolling:

Current Reality Tree (CRT)

This is a great way to bring the whole organisation together in recognising and understanding current problems and the links between them. Develop a CRT together as a group to understand the very small number of root causes that lie behind today’s poor performance. Hopefully at the end of the process the whole group will feel they “own” those root causes, and everyone will be motivated to seek and implement solutions.

Simulations

Help everyone gain some experience they wouldn’t otherwise get, by running simulations. These “games” can show some specific aspect of current or future life, but isolated from the other daily crud and also speeded up. Games give the participants rapid feedback on decisions such as they make every day, and insights into their impact on other aspects of their organisation. These insights often “click” some days later (link via Keith Ray), causing folks to spontaneously begin instigating change themselves.

Hansei-kaizen

Run frequent (eg. weekly) retrospectives, and encourage participants to take ownership of the problems they observed in the previous week. Create a culture in which the “way we do things here” gradually evolves, and in which everyone sees this evolution as natural.

I’ve worked almost exclusively with the last of these, usually preceded by some root-cause analysis using CRTs. I’ll definitely be adding more simulations to the mix in future. Do you have more techniques to add to this list? And how do you mix them when asked to initiate an agile transition?