Hey, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with Meridian Point. I'm joined by my good buddy and friend, Glenn Marshall. We're going to be talking about things related to XSCALE. In the vast universe of XSCALE, we run into a lot of different topics, and we've covered quite a bit actually in our recent past - things like ecosystem thinking and, of course, the principles of XSCALE.
Today, we're going to be talking about change and, specifically, change management. This was partially inspired by a video that someone shared with me. It was a TED talk by Thijs Homan - I hope I'm pronouncing that name right. It's a TED talk that he did quite a while ago, maybe 7 years or so ago, and I've never seen it. I was just introduced to him and to that video. It really got me thinking about change and how we manage change.
As agile coaches, you know, that's what we do. We sort of implement these ways of working in client organizations that is a huge change for them. And the way we do it is not always the way it should be done. So I want to get my good friend here, Glenn, into the conversation. Let me ask you, Glenn, what did you think of that video first? And then we'll go into some other questions.
Glenn: As soon as I heard the phrase "change management," I kind of cringed a little bit. Change management has always, in my experience, been very traditional, very top-down, very controlled. But the video actually is talking about my very concerns. I was rather struck by a statistic - 70% to 80% or even more of change management projects fail. That's quite a shocking number. And that's kind of how he sets the stage and goes into it. So he's coming from that perspective, but he's bringing what he says is a critical view to it. It's an excellent talk. I would urge everybody to go and watch it. It's a TED Talk, it's only 20 minutes.
Kumar: Yeah, so I will provide the link in the show notes here. And just to summarize some of the things that he talks about in his approach to change management, Thijs Homan's approach is really a focus on change from within rather than a top-down mandated change. What does that mean? What does that look like, Glenn? What does change from within mean to you?
Glenn: That was one of the key insightful points that he made. You will have somebody driving change, a change manager or whatever, but thinking that you will, through your process, just change people without involving them - they'll just magically morph into this thing that you want - is not the way things work. People are constantly changing, and you can align with the changes they're making just so they can get their job done. But there's a key recognition that it's not a single source of change. Change is happening everywhere all the time by everybody. And there are groups working together to make change, but they're all very informal groups.
Kumar: Yeah. And one of the things that struck me most about the video and just the reading that I've been doing since then is the role of complexity theory in understanding organizational change. Most change efforts, at least the ones that I've been involved with, have been a very linear process. You know, we're going to do this and expect this result, and then we'll do this next thing and expect the next evolution, if you will, in the result. And it just doesn't work that way because humans are complex creatures, and what people say in front of their leaders is most likely going to be different than what they say in private with their peers or in their social groups. And so what ends up happening is that you have lots of localized climates, if you will, many of them in an organization that are sort of resisting the change and resisting the very efforts that you're trying to instill in a traditional change management approach.
Glenn: I would take a slightly different view of that. They're all a series of interconnecting forces. So it is an ecosystem, but the insight for me from this talk was that they're working together. They form alliances, people with shared interests. But these are happening offstage, as Thijs uses the phrase. And he's right, and that is powerful. It's the conversations at the water cooler, the conversations in the lunchroom. You know, people still have to do their jobs. We got this change initiative. We got this. We got that. How are we going to handle it? And so they respond. They react. They sense and respond, as people like to say. And then they go and collaborate with other people and align to respond to the change initiative and the need to get the job done. But there are also political alliances of groups that work together. It's kind of like a storm system. There are winds coming from here. There's high pressure coming from there. They work together, and then the power dynamic, the net energy of all of these meteorological systems converges in a direction, and you get a storm somewhere. It's rather like that. So I thought that was a powerful metaphor. The ecosystem model is powerful, but there's a bit more to it in that there are forces that combine within the ecosystem to influence it. And they're constantly ebbing and flowing based on what's happening in real time.
Kumar: Right. And I guess my point was that without a realization that there are these different forces at play, right, much like in climate, you have lots of different forces at play, and it makes weather prediction difficult, but we can still kind of do a pretty good job of predicting the weather. Right? And so but what we don't do a very good job of is being able to predict how successful our change efforts can be. And perhaps we should take a similar approach to the weather because there are so many different factors in an organization that can impact change that, rather than try to force change from the top and impose change, we should take a more change from within approach that we respect the social networks that exist. We encourage those social networks, and we start, not managing, but really encouraging certain types of behaviors, rewarding certain types of behaviors in those social networks, which lead to the desired state that we want to be in, rather than impose something from the top.
Glenn: I'd like to go back to your comment on complexity for just a second. Climate systems, weather prediction is a notoriously difficult problem. You would think with air, sun, you'd be able to figure it out. And you can, but all the factors in place, it's an incredibly computationally difficult problem. We're okay at it. But we can certainly predict the weather in a few weeks. But we can't say, for example, what the weather is going to be in two years from now. We just can't do that. So that kind of computational complexity is present in the organization. So this is a highly non-trivial problem, and to think of it as a predictable problem of, you know, do this and that will happen - that's just not the way it works. People talk of the sense and respond. You see what's happening. Okay, I'll respond this way and now see what's happening. So in these complex systems, you need to do probes, experiments, observe the impact, and respond. But you can't - it's unknowable, which is why the traditional approach to change has a rather poor track record.
Kumar: Yeah, I agree. And it brings to mind the many agile change initiatives that I've been a part of, you've been a part of. You know, the approach is very much mandated, right? And those typically don't end too well. What would you say? You know, how would you balance change initiatives with a more emergent bottom-up approach?
Glenn: I've tried to be pithy about this and say use agile to become agile. Look at the various issues that you have. Look at the various tools and techniques and practices that are available. Make an assessment of their impact on the organization at this point in time based on their current pain points, bottlenecks, and issues, and apply them. But it's a dynamic fluid list, just like the product backlog is a dynamic fluid list. And it seems hypocritical to not take that approach with Agile. But oftentimes, we're constrained, and if people are coming from the directive approach, the command and control approach, we have no choice. And we do have to meet people where they are. If that's where they are, we have to meet them there. But certainly, a better approach would be being agile about becoming agile.
Kumar: Sure. That's true. And I think that is a good approach to any kind of change. Be agile in the approach that you approach change. And so actually, there's a whole lean change movement, which really adopts a very agile approach to change. However, I would say that the lean change approach is still more rigid, more structured than Thijs Homan's approach, which is very organic. It's like I almost liken it to, hey, just let it happen. Create some catalysts for influencers that are out there that sort of shape it and cajole it along, and you'll get the change you want eventually. It's a journey. It's not a destination. Where the lean change approach is a little bit more structured than that. Would you agree?
Glenn: I guess so. But I think Thijs's insight was that this is happening all the time anyway. Hopefully, you're aware of it. Hopefully, you're part of the conversation, but it's happening anyway. And that's just the way humans are. You have something to do. Well, we're creative beings. We're going to try what we have. If that doesn't work, we're going to improvise. We're going to improve. We're going to talk to people we know. That's always been going on, and I think that that's the key insight. We haven't given proper weight to that. And as such, we've missed something. And that's why sometimes it works in one area and it doesn't work in another. You can sort of touch on it by looking at it as a pain point problem, a bottleneck. What's your problem? What's the biggest issue today? And how can we deal with that? That's one way, but that doesn't really take into account the experiences and the personal views of an individual. So we do need to definitely give more attention to the conversation. And to start with, you need to get plugged into that. And not everybody is.
Kumar: Yeah. I mean, it just seems like the lean change movement is an adaptation of agile methods, experimentation, shared learning, shared understanding, all that stuff to some of the ideas that Thijs Homan brings up in his talk and in his work. So it feels to me like it's a combination of what you're saying and what Thijs is saying in a way. And I think maybe that's the balance. You have these change initiatives and you want to understand the organization where they are, and the organization isn't one organism. It consists of a very complex, emergent system of systems, if you will, with localized climates where people may have a slightly different microclimate in their area of the organization than somewhere else, where the way things work in that part of the organization is different. Their environment is different. Their hierarchies are different. The way they make decisions is different, even though they are all part of the same company.
Glenn: I like that. Rather than think of them as a silo, think of them as a microclimate. And they absolutely are. But you can influence them with high pressure from one area to another area. Continue with the meteorological metaphor, and of course, you can incent them. But at the end of the day, it comes down to a force in a certain direction and it goes one way or the other based on the amalgam of everything that's going on.
Kumar: Yeah, I like that. Microclimates. Yeah. I was thinking about, you know, California and specifically San Francisco and how I remember going across the bridge into San Francisco and it was like 20 degrees colder. You know, it was like, it went from like seventies to fifties and foggy and clammy and just cold. And that was the sort of the analogy that, the visual that came to my mind. And think about how some organizations are just - if you go from one department to another it can be very different. It can be very hierarchical, very strict, very rigid and you go to another area and it's completely the opposite. And I remember one of the companies that I had the pleasure of serving. It was kind of like that. It was the research and development division of this educational company. And they were operated very much in an agile, nimble way, even though they didn't know that they were doing that. It was just part of their DNA. They were doing lots of experimentation, lots of knowledge sharing, lots of collaboration, coordination, aligned workforce. They all sort of thought and worked in a way that was, you might, you would consider very agile, but you know, you go across to another part of the company and it's a totally different, it feels like a different company almost. Right? And so it's like going from San Francisco to what's the desert down in Nevada, whatever that desert's called, right? It's hot and oppressive and where in San Francisco it's open and airy and whatever it is. That's the thing that comes to my mind.
Glenn: I experienced a similar thing. I live in Toronto. I used to live very close to the lake, Lake Ontario, and we would get what they call lake effect snow and lake effect rain. But 20 miles north, nothing. I always thought that was fascinating. Your experience with the education company, leaders can have a profound influence. They influence and they can set the tone and drive the culture in an area and a different leader can have a different culture. They're all responding to the same objectives, but just in different ways.
Kumar: Yeah, I like that. The leader's role is really, in any kind of a change initiative, is very much to facilitate that change in some way, right? Actually, they don't even facilitate the change. They facilitate the change in the environment that allows for the types of behaviors that you're looking for. So if you want more self-directed behaviors, then what leaders should be doing is allowing for that to happen, not make the decisions themselves. But in fact, if someone looks to them to make a decision, they should be the first ones to say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's your decision to make. You are the closest to the work. And so I trust you to make the decision, even if it's the wrong decision. We will figure out the right decision the next time it comes along.
Glenn: Aligned with the objective. Correct. You are autonomous. Absolutely.
Kumar: Yeah. Yeah, I actually, I had this experience in that same educational environment where I was working with this team and they were implementing XSCALE Camelot model. And one of the parts of the model is the leadership as a service, right? And in that model, the leader, the service that they provide is to decide the decider in moments where the group cannot reach a consensus decision. And there was an occasion where this group, this is a group of leaders in that division, and they couldn't reach a consensus. And the VP in that group, he started to say what they should do. And then I remember him looking at me and then the little smile on his face. And then he said, no, no, no. He said this, nope, not my decision. Tom, what should we do? Because Tom, and that's actually his real name, Tom was the person to make the decision, to be the tiebreaker, if you will. And so that was a really rewarding moment for me because it was the culmination of, I don't know, a year-long effort in Agile, but really it was a change management effort. It was empowering people to make decisions, right? Creating the environment where people feel comfortable, feel they can make a decision without fear of reprisal. And that was a big thing, a big change.
Glenn: It's so ironic that it essentially can come down to, I order you to stop making decisions. That seems absurd on the one hand, but on the other hand, if that's where you're coming from, that's the only language that you can speak. So you kind of have to say that ridiculous, though it sounds.
Kumar: It does. It is. But, you know, it has a profound effect on people. It's like it's almost liberating in some ways because the person, the VP, later on we had a conversation about that. And he's like, you know what? My job is so much easier. I don't have to worry about everything all the time.
Glenn: Exactly. Because I have a team of really smart, intelligent people that are closer to the work and they can make the decisions better than I can.
Kumar: Exactly. And you get a higher quality decision and faster. And then you can focus on vision and direction things. So many leaders are just completely swamped. They have ridiculous schedules. They're working late at night. And they're trying to do more and control more and be on top of more. And it's just impossible. I feel for them being so overworked. But sometimes you don't see the forest for the trees.
Kumar: Yeah. One other thing that comes to mind is sort of this idea of resistance to change, right? And that resistance to change is a negative, and there's a notion that, oh, we need to squash that. We need to get buy-in from these people, and how do we do that, right? What is your opinion on resistance in general?
Glenn: Resistance is a fact of life. People have, and I even see this in myself, there's a capacity for change. You can only change so much before people feel uncomfortable. But you need to go and focus on people's needs and objectives. The status quo is comforting for humans psychologically, but if you're experiencing pain, well then maybe a change actually would be appealing. But the idea is to rather than force it, is to show the compelling value, particularly if you can address a concern. And rather than position it as change, I don't even like to use the C word. I prefer Glenn: I prefer to say, well, let's just do an experiment. It's not a change. I emphasize it is not a change. We're wondering about this. We're not sure if it'll work. Well, let's make a hypothesis, try it for a period of time, get some data and either continue it if it's working well or tweak it or stop it. But it's not a change. And a number of these, the accumulation of a number of these can actually be a rather large change, but you don't need to talk about it as a change. It's just...
Kumar: Yeah, it's kaizen, right? Small little changes over time.
Glenn: Yep.
Kumar: Result in big change eventually. You know, Thijs Homan, his view on feedback is that it's valuable. I'm sorry, not feedback. On resistance is that it is feedback. That is feedback. It's the resistance that you're, you know, it's the storm clouds that are coming in. That's resistance, right? Or the storm clouds break into a downpour of rain. That's the manifestation of that resistance probably because a cold front comes through and, you know, the clouds open up. And so in a way, the feedback, the resistance is a form of feedback and it's the change leader's job to assess it. Why? What's causing this feedback? And learn more about it. Go talk to those people and understand that point of view, because you're going to have lots of points of view across the organization. And so from a change perspective, it's not wise to squash it or to gain buy-in. You don't want agreement. You want alignment. And traditional change approaches may get you agreement on the surface, but behind the scene, behind the stage, I don't know if that's true, if there's alignment.
Glenn: I think the meteorological metaphor is powerful here. There's forces going on all the time. It's not resistance. It's just a force from here or a force from there. So figure out where the forces are coming from. Try and align your goal with those forces and then become a more powerful force.
Kumar: Right. I love that. All right. We're coming up on about 24 minutes or so. What have we not covered?
Glenn: There were some assumptions that we make. Would it be useful? I think it might be useful to go and talk about them.
Kumar: Okay.
Glenn: There's an assumption that change comes from one single source, but that's actually not true. It comes from everywhere.
Kumar: That's the traditional...
Glenn: Right. Because it's complex, organizations are complex, right? And so it's bound to come from everywhere.
Kumar: Yeah. The fancy word is complex adaptive system.
Glenn: Correct. That's right. I was looking for that phrase, but I couldn't remember it.
Kumar: Yeah.
Glenn: And the traditional approach is if you don't manage it, it will fail. And people don't want to change. Those are false. And the final point was that people are the same and a single message works for everybody. And that's, again, a further assumption is simply not true. Everybody's experiencing different forces. They will form groups to go and work together. But the traditional, there's a number of assumptions that are just simply incorrect.
Kumar: Yeah, I agree with that. And I think there's a lot of good material in his talk and certainly in the work that Thijs Homan has produced. And there's a lot of really good material on the lean change site. There's slightly different approaches of course. But I think both start with the assumption that change cannot be mandated. There needs to be a balanced approach to change and an organic way to shepherd it along, I suppose, and the role of leaders being very critical to the change effort.
Glenn: I would put a slightly different spin on it. It is constantly mandated and fails. And then you go, oh well, then let's try a different mandate or different tools or different metrics or different monitoring. And we'll do it again. So the mindset of this is how it's done needs to be examined. I think Thijs speaks to that quite well.
Kumar: Yeah. One of the other key things that stuck in my mind with Homan's approach is that change is a constant to what you said earlier, right? It happens whether you want it or not, whether you have an official change initiative and process or not. Change is always happening, no matter what, within an organization. And so it's about understanding the change. Let's see, what does he say about that? It's an ongoing process, understanding the reasons for the change, where resistance is happening, where the feedback is and going and investigating that, facilitating the environments that are required to get to whatever the desired state is if there is one. He doesn't talk about an end state as much as I think he could.
Glenn: Continue the metaphor is breaking down a little bit here, but I'll try and run with it. The organizations create giant funnels to direct the wind, if you will. They call them financial constraints or capacity constraints or this or that. So it's like they're creating these giant control mechanisms. Those are extremely expensive, don't work terribly well, and we would be well advised, I submit, to consider having an objective that we align around and then we autonomously and organically work to achieve that in a rigorous fashion. But in terms of having building all these tunnels and mechanisms to control the organization, let them align them and let them loose.
Kumar: Yeah, I see what you're saying. But basically, the organization is always constantly changing. It's not a linear process. It doesn't have a strict beginning or end.
Glenn: It's like the weather. Weather doesn't end.
Kumar: Yep. Although we're having a severe impact on our weather on this planet. Maybe the end of us eventually, but that's a topic for another podcast.
Glenn: Climate versus weather is a whole other thing.
Kumar: It is. But like the weather, change in an organization doesn't end. And so it's really about inspiring the people with those objectives. What is it aligning them towards those objectives and figuring out ways to motivate them, to empower them, to achieve them.
Glenn: Well, I'm wondering what's on the ground. Where are we actually going? I've heard the words, what are we actually doing? But yes, it all comes down to touching people's hearts. And when you do this and you are aligned, you're tremendously more efficient and effective.
Kumar: Yeah, that's right. I would say we should probably summarize this and call it a day. I think we've done a good job of at least summarizing these concepts. And for more information, just take a look at the website leanchange.org or the Thijs Homan video. And also leave your comments in the comments below because we'd love to get your feedback and see what you think of it. But for me, the summary is, from Homan's perspective, focus on change from within, look at resistance as an opportunity to assess feedback and not as a way to sort of manage that resistance. It's really about understanding what the feedback is. What is the resistance? Where is it coming from? And what can be changed in the environment that will ameliorate that resistance, if you will. And I think it's an important fact to recognize that there are multiple realities within an organization, multiple microclimates within an organization. So as a leader managing change, it's about recognizing that. You can't do anything about it. You can't change it.
Glenn: Exactly. You cannot make it a homogenous system. It's never going to work. And so it's recognizing and accepting the fact that you're going to have multiple realities. And as a leader, your job is to understand those realities and facilitate the creation of environments that accommodates them towards that, whatever the common goal is.
Kumar: You can influence them in various ways, but it's just influence. It's not control. It's influence.
Glenn: That's right. You're absolutely right. It's influence. And the reward models, I think, can be used to influence behavior. And it doesn't have to be monetary. It's just acknowledging certain behaviors that are desired and not acknowledging behaviors that aren't.
Kumar: Social media does a great job at this. We should learn from it, right? When you post something on social media, I don't know that you do, but when people do and they get a million likes, it reinforces that behavior to create more content that gets those likes, right? So we should learn from that and not to manipulate people into doing things, but just learn that there are certain behaviors that we should reward on a regular basis. Just a pat on the back and say, thanks for doing a great job or whatever it might be.
Glenn: I can tie this. I think I can tie this all together. And organizations have laws and rules around certain practices that are unacceptable, for example, being abusive to a colleague. Social media doesn't seem to go quite as far as they could or should, in my humble opinion, on that, but perhaps there's a lesson for social media from corporate limitations on behavior.
Kumar: Yeah, I love that. All right. Well, thanks for watching. We'll be back in a month with another episode. Well, actually not another month, another month with you, Glenn, on a topic related to change, XSCALE, agile, and maybe AI. We do have a couple of burning topics that we've been working on, on the future of agile and AI. And so we might be talking about that maybe in a month or so, month or two. Thanks for watching. See you all next time. Bye-bye.
