Ep. 138: Agile and Organizational Change Management

In this episode, Peter and David dive into the complexities of organizational change, exploring how agile transformations sometimes discard valuable lessons from past change management practices. They discuss blending systems thinking, behavioral economics, and incremental change approaches to create truly adaptive organizations. The conversation spans concepts like organizational immune systems, the human element in change, and the importance of clear strategy and communication.

This week's takeaways:

• Blindly following capital-A "Agile" transformations can lead to throwing out valuable organizational change management wisdom accumulated over decades.
• Organizations are complex systems, and sustainable change requires understanding human behaviors and making changes at a rate the organizational "immune system" can absorb rather than big disruptive shifts.
• Clear strategic direction combined with empowering teams for continuous bottom-up improvement is critical. Frequent communication and recognizing people as adaptive beings, not just mechanical components, is crucial for effective change.

 We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic related to organizational change management and creating truly adaptive systems, please get in touch with us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

Chapters

• 0:04 Agile Change Management and Strategy
• 13:10 Organizational Change Management and Agile Transformation

Transcript

Peter: 0:04

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello Dave, how are you doing today?

Dave: 0:14

I'm doing excellently. You just seeded the whole conversation by. Are you sure we've not talked about this before? I'm sure we've talked about this before. This is a favorite topic of ours, which is organizational change, and particularly how Agile gave a certain flavor to organizational change.

Peter: 0:31

let's say yeah, and I think, as I was saying right before this, I think that there was something of a if Agile and the Agile transformation, capital A, capital T, through the baby out with bathwater and said you know all that stuff we learned about how to help organizations adopt new ways of working, or we're just going to throw that out and we're going to do it our way, and if it doesn't have the word agile in it, then we're not going to do it and we'll forget about all of it because our way is the right thing. And proceeded to do that for the last couple of decades. Yeah, and I think a couple of decades is strong, but yeah, last 10, 15, 16, 17.

Dave: 1:06

Yeah, but what I find interesting is sort of a realization, sort of one of the things that we're seeing, if you like, is agile change is not being talked about. Why is it not being talked about? Potentially, one idea would be well, you don't need to talk about agile change. Agile is just the way you're doing stuff, and when we're talking about change, we go back to what we've always known. Like you said, it has decades and decades and decades of proven practice and experience around organizational change management.

Dave: 1:36

If that's the case, sorry, let me throw a question to you, peter. If that's the case, does that mean we just dust off our organizational change practices?

Peter: 1:50

management practices and bring them back to the table. Well, we were talking a little bit about flavors of that, I think. I think there is some understanding and learning that is brought in from, like what causes change? What if we start to think about um in? Well, it's, if you start bringing things like systems thinking or lean areas like this, where we start to talk about uh, systems will go back to their common state. Right, we talk about the organizational immune system.

Peter: 2:10

When we start to make changes, and how, the organization, because the system will do what the system does, which is the and uh this. When we start to introduce change, there has to be a natural reason for it, or the system or even if there isn't, the system will react to it. But if you have a crisis, if you have something that you can use to drive it, then that's kind of the necessary piece to drive change into an organization. Quite often, if the system is working and it's doing what the system does and it's profitable and there doesn't seem to be any problems that you run into the well, why change?

Dave: 2:48

Well, I find this one very interesting because there's a great and I know we've mentioned this before, but Gary Hamill talks about change itself as change and I think that's something that needs recognition and is something that we can maybe steal some of these ideas of incremental change or emergent change that many anti-transformation sort of dwelt on and that if change really has changed and you want to create a habit of being able to change, I wonder how much of these changes have to be driven by big, scary, burning platforms.

Peter: 3:25

And I think this is where there's two pieces. If we've built a habit of change, then bringing in new changes should be easier, if we can show this is the objective. This is what we're trying to achieve. This is how we're going to measure success. We've put a model into place to enable that type of change incrementally into the organization, and so we're constantly looking at, like, what are we doing for the next three months, 12 months? What is the next thing coming up? How are we setting, are we measuring towards that? Are we actually looking at our incremental progress so that we've got change coming into the organization in that way?

Peter: 4:01

I think you still have the organization, the system itself, will have to react to sort of external events that potentially come and disrupt it. Your ability to respond well for those external events, I think, will partly depend on how good a job you've done of that of building that system that can change. Remember, we've talked about that too. You don't rise to level your goals. You fall to the level of your system. If you've built a system that can respond, then it'll be better at responding.

Dave: 4:27

I love the way that, when you're describing that, I'm hearing two things. One is you know there's a continuous churn of continuous improvement. Let's think of that, which is change, but it's continually driven and very often in the best organizations it's really a long way away from leadership. It's something that is just the way they operate and they work, they being the teams and the rest of the organization. But you're also highlighting that, if I've got a strategic view on something, I can see change happening coming towards us, from the market, from competitors, opportunities that are coming along. There's still value in that, top-down directed. Here's why we need to make the change and these are some of the big moves. Think of it that way, these big issues that have to be dealt with.

Peter: 5:13

Yeah, and some of this comes down to that, despite a lot of times, organizations when you go into them and you start to talk at the like, the team or the product level, you'll sometimes hear people say, well, we don't really have a strategy. But the reality is there is some sort of strategy somewhere, almost certainly, but it's often in people's heads and it's not written down and it's not well articulated. Something that, because that hasn't been done, it's something that changes too frequently to be really called a strategy, because it's not going to be in play for long enough to see whether there are any results, because nobody wrote it down and nobody has any idea to measure whether it was successful we don't really know what it was anyway. So, because we're not looking at the outcomes, Well, yeah, yeah, I mean, it's really interesting.

Dave: 6:01

So the first thing that we often think of if we're going through an organizational change program is what is the intent, what's the goal that we're trying to work towards, and so on. And you're, what I'm hearing is exactly that's. We need to know where we are. We need to know where we want to get to.

Peter: 6:17

Yeah, and and this. This is kind of the. The interesting thing about what often gets put into play as as strategy too is that it's it can be more of a mission statement oh, we want to go somewhere, but there's no, uh, indication of motion, like, like or what is the like, what is it we're going to do to get there? Kind of like the actual strategy, part of it, like and yeah yeah and uh.

Peter: 6:41

There's lots of um, useful references, and I've been on a bit of a reading kick around some of this stuff recently. A few more books I need to pick up, but I think that's an interesting piece. When it comes to change that, when we think of, I mean the system itself we're looking to build adaptive systems and we're talking here we're not going to talk about the individual components of that system, but the system as a whole. If we want the system to be adaptive and it wants to be constantly changing and looking at what it's going to do next, and we can start to think out into the future about where we want to go, set the longer term strategies that we can align up the underlying pieces to, and looking at both for external and internal information to guide that strategy in what direction we want to go in. And then we're building that adaptive system that is able to respond and is able to change. And so then my question back to you would be what is the role of change management in that?

Dave: 7:39

So it's interesting, as you're describing that, I was thinking you don't have to build an adaptive system, it's already adaptive because you have people in it.

Dave: 7:46

And I think that's one of the huge kind of realizations that has come out in the last sort of decade or so is many organizational change models from sort of the you know agile transformation and before for are really driven by a mechanistic perspective of we're going to change the organization, we're going to communicate it, we're going to go after a new system and shift over to that new system. And I think a huge realization in the last you know decade or so has really been that what I think of as a behavioral economics view of people, of people not being simple simple is the wrong word but driven by logical decisions, that we're involved in what we're doing. And this is where we're hearing about things like quiet quitting and we're hearing about change, fatigue and all of it. Well, this doesn't come from a logically driven, mechanistic perspective. It comes from understanding human beings are adaptive beings and they will adapt. If they don't like the system, they'll adapt the system until they get what they're looking for out of it.

Peter: 8:48

You remember the section that Mike Burrow borrowed from Stafford Beer that was at the end of the that she was talking about. So I mean, this is talking to some of those pieces. But the interesting part, which is juxtaposed to what you're describing as a staff of beers, would be look at it as it's a black box. You cannot understand what's in the box. You can only understand the inputs and the outputs. So the individual, no matter what their beliefs or their behaviors, has no direct impact on what the system will do. The system will do what the system does and what it's set up to do, and which, which is a interesting component when you start to think about this, because to change the system, I, I change the rules of the system and but the individuals within the box I feel like you're describing very kind of defined systems and processes.

Dave: 9:39

So the reason I say that is you can also move around the system. If I don't like what the black box does to what we're doing, I may find an alternative to going into the black box. So where we're seeing this a lot, just as an example, is prioritization of work and getting work done. If, as an owner of a particular business unit, I need to get work done and the black box that gets my work prioritised isn't serving its purpose from my perspective. We all know there are mechanisms, there are workarounds. We get drawn in to go and help organisations clarify those workarounds, bring it back to a working black box, as opposed to a black box that doesn't do what it needs to.

Peter: 10:24

Right. Well, you're changing when we go in and we look at how do we change the system and you can modify how that system works, right. So now the interesting connotation of that is that you change the system Right and rather than look at what, how the system behaves, rather than how the individuals within it, which is um, so which is what brings up interesting and I think that that one's that's a great way of looking at when.

Dave: 10:53

when I think about what, when we talk to organizations about what we do, I say we're putting the people into the process change we're bringing exactly to your point. There is process, there's a, there's lots that we can gain from from really good practices out there, and then when you sort of bring the people, the culture, to the table, that's where it begins to either work really really well or definitely not work, and that that part of it becomes really interesting.

Peter: 11:19

Yes, yeah, as you start to think about how does the system work and what are the components of it, it's an interesting construct for starting to look at organizations and how organizational change occurs. But that's going back to the 60s and 70s. I mean, this is new stuff. A lot of books that were published on it are decades, decades old now and falling a little out of vogue. It's a lot of the practice of cybernetics actually like human interaction with systems, and which has largely been sort of stolen into cyborgs and and the word cyber gets used for all sorts of other things now as well and interesting space, for for sure. I don't know if we're veering off topic too much from this idea of like, how does gdm work today?

Dave: 12:09

I'm I'm wondering if we're in the wrong medium for this, because you're dusting off book titles that we're going to have to go into bookstores to go find, and a digital medium where people are listening to the work. So I'm not sure that the two go together, but yeah you're absolutely.

Dave: 12:22

I mean this is, you know, there are there. We're always building on the shoulders of giants in terms of of ideas that come into vogue and fall out of vogue, and I we started this conversation about an idea that's falling out of vogue, which is this agile transformation, and I think this brings us back to organizational change and appreciating. There are some great ideas that you're describing from back in the day that we can learn a lot from and intermingle, you know, spice them up a little bit with behavioral, economic type of ideas that come in with, you know, short cycle time you know the value of small steps, small changes which have small unintended consequences, instead of large changes, which can create large unintended consequences.

Peter: 13:07

Exactly, yeah. So so when? And that's, I think, often where? Where we started this, the organizational change management pieces? Today, it's the large disruptive changes to the system. Uh, well, by their nature disruptive and are going to um have the potential to both be less effective but also not necessarily have the outcomes you're expecting on the system, Whereas making lots of small incremental changes, at a rate that the system can consume them, is going to have a much greater and more sustainable effect on the organization as you look to shift how those systems in the organization behave.

Dave: 13:46

So, with that in mind, to shift how those systems in the organization behave, so with that in mind, I'm going to let you use some of that I really enjoyed and we'll have to explore this in coming weeks because you're beginning to touch on some fantastic sort of foundational concepts around systems and how the black box systems that you're talking about, stafford Beer and some of the ideas he shared. We need to pull a lot more out of that because I think there's a a huge amount has been uh, kind of put on hold in the last decade or so, as there's been this huge push to some of the changes that we've talked about, which all many of them fall under this agile transformation label. I the other things that really jump to mind is, as you kind of reopen an appetite for agile uh sorry, for organizational change. I think the two things that really fill in on that one was one we talked about earlier on, about, you know, sort of top down or burning platform big changes, but there's also that habitual how do you create an organization that is, by definition, agile when it comes to comfort level with change?

Dave: 14:46

Yes, yeah. And then I think I'd add in the two things that I really think of in addition to that is people and recognizing that you know what behavioral economics tells us about the human being in an economics decision making process, there is an exactly equivalent for human beings in a work systems related getting stuff done type of process as well. And then just you know, not trying to move everything on one big go, but small, micro steps forward, being the sort of most successful strategy for organizational change over and above big you know June 1st rollouts of huge organizational changes which rarely deliver what the promise was.

Peter: 15:31

Yeah, onwards and upwards.

Dave: 15:32

In small steps.

Peter: 15:33

In small steps.

Dave: 15:34

Anything you'd add.

Peter: 15:36

I think you covered it pretty well. I think you've brought in most of the main points there. I think it is a conversation we need to revisit and delve into some of these topics a little bit more, and perhaps I think what would be valuable for our audience too is if we start to tie this back into some sort of more solid examples, away from some theoretical like how do I actually go and apply this to my organization? How do I look at what's in front of me and think about these concepts and how I might use that to make change?

Dave: 16:10

I'm going to try and just very briefly answer that because, as you're describing it, there's two things that jumped to mind.

Dave: 16:15

One was John Cotter's book the Iceberg is Melting my Iceberg is Melting. When you and I discussed that, one of the things that popped out was the sort of informal ambassadors that went around kind of evangelizing change, and these are not part of the change group that's driving the change, but part of the sort of overall communication that goes through it. And I'm just, you know a number of engagements that we're looking at, a number of conversations we're having and continually reminded how change is about conversation, about communication. Now, we've given a whole bunch there about what you might want to have those conversations about, but the reality is that invariably we don't communicate enough, we don't listen enough, we don't talk to the stakeholders who are impacted by those changes enough, right. So I think if I was to really bring it down to the kind of core, it would be recognize that everything that we're talking about in terms of black boxes and changing systems and things like that involves communication and listening and understanding where they're coming from and where they need to go.

Peter: 17:21

Yeah, it's good. Communicate three times more than you think you need to, and then it'll still not be enough. Only three times more than you think you need to, and then it'll still not be enough. You'll need three times more than that. Awesome, and so with that we'll wrap up. If anyone wants to send us any feedback, they can at feedback@ definitelymaybeagile. com, and don't forget to hit subscribe. Until next time, dave, until next time. Thanks again, Peter. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and devops at scale.