Our Story
Built by a practitioner, for practitioners.
Lean Change Management didn't start with a business plan. It started with a frustrating night at work and a blog post that asked a question nobody else was asking: why do change frameworks tell you what to do but never help you figure out what's actually happening?
How it started
A New Year's Eve epiphany in 2009
Jason Little was an agile coach. He was good at it. But on New Year's Eve 2009, sitting inside a large enterprise going through an agile transformation that wasn't working, something clicked. The problem wasn't the methodology. The methodology was fine. The problem was that nobody actually knew how to help people through change.
Around that same time, a mentor — coach Esther Derby — said something simple that reframed everything: “Jason, it isn't about you.” That shift in perspective — from expert-with-answers to curious facilitator — became the philosophical core of everything that followed.
The blog post that resulted, “4 Steps to Agile Transformation,” started a conversation. That conversation became a framework. The framework became a book. The book became a community.
The book that started it all
Lean Change Management: Innovative Practices for Managing Organizational Change
First published on Leanpub in 2013 as live, serialized chapters — written in public, while the work was actually happening. Formally published in 2014, it became the foundation for workshops, a facilitator network, an academy, and eventually the Lean Change OS. The book didn't describe a finished methodology. It described one practitioner figuring it out in real time.
“It isn't about you.”
Esther Derby — the words that changed everything
Timeline
From blog post to global community
Jason Little, working as an agile coach inside a large enterprise transformation, has a New Year's Eve epiphany: the problem isn't agile — it's change management. A blog post titled "4 Steps to Agile Transformation" starts the conversation.
First public presentation of the ideas at the Lean Software Systems Consortium conference.
Leanchange.org launches. Work begins at The Commission — the real organization at the centre of the first book.
The first edition of Lean Change Management is published on Leanpub as serialized chapters, released as the work happens.
"Lean Change Management: Innovative Practices for Managing Organizational Change" is formally published. First international workshops run in Munich.
The first official facilitators join the network. What started as one person's blog post is now a global community.
Lean Change Management Academy launches, alongside a formal Association for practitioners.
The 500th workshop milestone. Facilitators and practitioners now active across 21+ countries.
Today
An approach. A community. A body of knowledge.
Lean Change Management is a Canadian-founded, practitioner-driven approach to organizational change built on co-creation, experimentation, and real-time feedback. It integrates principles from Lean Startup, agile methodologies, and design thinking — not as a rigid framework, but as a way of thinking about what's actually happening in your organization and responding to it.
The tools, canvases, and resources are free. The deeper body of knowledge — 136 Elements of Change organized across four dimensions — lives in the Lean Change OS. The community spans change practitioners, agile coaches, HR leaders, and organizational designers in over 40 countries.
It all still comes back to the same question from 2009: not what should you do, but what's actually going on — and what would help?