Gemba Panta Rei is one of my favourite blogs about Continuous Improvement and Lean. Here is a great recent post that is worth a read:  A Life of Mistakes by Cynical, Unreasonable People

It includes three nice quotes from George Bernard Shaw that you might want to use in discussions about continuous improvement and Lean

• A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
• The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
• The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Worth a read

Jim Trott

Steve Denning writes a great article in Forbes, “How Do You Change an Organizational Culture.” It is worth reading. He begins by noting that

“Changing an organization’s culture is one of the most difficult leadership challenges. That’s because an organization’s culture comprises an interlocking set of goals, roles, processes, values, communications practices, attitudes and assumptions. The elements fit together as an mutually reinforcing system and combine to prevent any attempt to change it. ”

That’s why single-fix changes, such as the introduction of teams, or Lean, or Agile, or Scrum, or knowledge management, or some new process, may appear to make progress for a while, but eventually the interlocking elements of the organizational culture take over and the change is inexorably drawn back into the existing organizational culture.

My friend calls this the “Organizational Immune System.” Change can happen for a little while but then the cultural systems surround and block off the change. Inertia is one of the hardest forces to overcome. And lots of attempts to change just fail because they don’t take this into account.

After reviewing the experience of the World Bank (one of the most widely noted example of knowledge management in the literature) and its leaders, he offers a few conclusions about what that would-be leader of change should do:

• Do come with a clear vision of where you want the organization to go and promulgate that vision rapidly and forcefully with leadership storytelling.
• Do identify the core stakeholders of the new vision and drive the organization to be continuously and systematically responsive to those stakeholders.
• Do define the role of managers as enablers of self-organizing teams and draw on the full capabilities of the talented staff.
• Do quickly develop and put in place new systems and processes that support and reinforce this vision of the future, drawing on the practices of dynamic linking.
• Do introduce and consistently reinforce the values of radical transparency and continuous improvement.
• Do communicate horizontally in conversations and stories, not through top-down commands.
• Don’t start by reorganizing. First clarify the vision and put in place the management roles and systems that will reinforce the vision.
• Don’t parachute in a new team of top managers. Work with the existing managers and draw on people who share your vision.

It is interesting how much this resembles other writings on effective change. Such as the great book, Engaged Leadership.

I am in the planning stages of a transition in my organization. The change itself is pretty straightforward: introducing a new form that will help teams assess their performance over time and relative to other teams. The form helps the team have a routine intentional, reflective conversation about how they are doing in specific, known good practices. It sounds pretty normal and yet it is still a big change. Most of these teams are used to doing things their own way and naturally are skeptical of the “central office” poking its nose where it is not wanted. It is pretty much like many other KM-related projects I have done.

The challenge for us at the moment is to be sure that leadership is paying attention to the change, to the transition from ending the old ways and starting the new ways, while not making such a big deal about it that we don’t cause problems unintentionally. Clearly, leaders are worried about this.

A friend runs the organizational development arm of a large company here in the Pac Northwest. He turned me on to William Bridge’s excellent book, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change. Bridges offers a number of interesting articles at William Bridges and Associates Articles.

I’ll share what we are learning as we work through this process. And I’d love to hear your ideas for what works and what to avoid.