I interviewed Jeff Anderson the catalyst behind the Lean Change Method for next week’s Business901 podcast. More information is available about the Lean Change Method at http://agileconsulting.blogspot.com/. Jeff leads the Deloitte Lean market offering, providing advisory, transformation, and change management services to software technology based organizations, helping them transform through the use of agile and lean methods.
An excerpt from the podcast:
Joe: If you were going to sum this up, what would you say are the key aspects of the Lean Change Method?
Jeff: There are two principles that we’ve tried to base Lean Change on. One is that while it’s a managed change method, it’s co-creative. So this principle of co-creative or negotiated change is principle to the method. It’s really important that change agents don’t build changes and then just deploy them out to the organization; they have to find their kind of either eager adopters or change champions, co-create their way through a successful change, and then goes on to the next set of change recipients and keep that process going.
The second principle is taken from the Lean start up world which is enabled through this co-creation which is the validated learning. Both the change agents, change recipients and change stakeholders have to understand the validity of their change by subjecting it to experimentation, creating a hypothesis, validating those hypothesis and being ready to pursue those change tactics if they’re working, modify them or not, or do a complete change pivot.
Joe: Where are the places that they could go to learn more?
Jeff: Right now the book is available on Lean Pub. It’s still in what I’ll call beta although it’s gone through a number of iterations. I think in its current form it will be extremely useful to people who are interested in the change method, and that can be found at Leanchangemethod.com. You can also go to my blog where I actually have articles talking about Lean Change and Agile, and you can find that on Leanchngemethod.com, as well.
Joe: I think you explain the Lean Startup so well. Many people don’t really understand the finer nuances of it.
Jeff: It’s kind of funny; when I first read about Lean Startup, the big part that I missed was the validity in learning happens with co-creation with customers. You come out with the vision, and they tell you haven’t got the right problem, but it’s really them telling you what the problem statement is. It’s interesting; “it’s go and extend my vision out onto the masses and see if I can iterate through the right set of customers or problem statements.” They’re telling you until you come up with the right one. So it’s a really interesting process.
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