History of Lean Change Management

I remember being in line for lunch and Johanna Rothman was opposite to me telling someone a story of her recently finished session that she thought she completely bombed! Turns out her audience was far too conservative and not ready for her topic, which is odd because Managing Your Project Portfolio is one of the greatest agile portfolio management books in existence! Anyway, that freaked me out a little as my session was right after lunch, and it was the first global conference I spoke at with more than 2500 attendees. My topic was “How to Get Started with Agile When You Don’t Know Where to Start?” The premise was, not many, save Diana Larson, Michael Spayd and a few others, were talking about how agile transformation was simply a trigger for organizational change. Most talks at the time were about agile processes, technical practices and agile was largely still viewed as something those IT people do. My session was about how to de-mystify agile with your organization and how to create your own approach for change by understanding how your organization actually changes. This debuted the ideas from my 2009 blog post, 4 Steps to Agile Transformation, with an overly simplified model: Understand, Educate, Execute, Reflect. One of the attendees was a publisher from Pearson Education who offered me a book deal as no one, at the time, was talking about agile transformation in an organizational change context.

Wow, what an ugly website! Thanks Wayback Machine for keeping that archive!  Leanchange.org is officially launched with a collection of stories that made their way into the book. It evolved into a less, but still ugly website: Over the years, it’s evolved substantially to be less about selling the book, and more about helping change agents get unstuck.

Ardita Karaj, one of the coaches at The Commission, and I presented our story at the annual Agile 2013 conference. Titled, From Stone Age to Agile, we walked through the story, and oddly enough, got in trouble at The Commission for calling the session “From Stone Age to Agile” because it had bad optics. Oops. This marked a series of other conferences talks around the world.

Jurgen Appelo had created Happy Melly and one experiment was Happy Melly Express, a publisher that would sit between self-publishing options, and big publishers, created by Vasco Duarte. They were looking for a book to use for their first experiment: Jurgen was my writing coach, and used a new technique he was working on called The Feedback Wrap to give me feedback on the book. After a few months, it was re-launched in the fall of 2014. Again, in true lean startup fashion, we used IndieGogo to fund the creation of the book which included a Godfather package that would give that supporter the ability to host the first workshop based on the book. There was no intention to actually create and run one, just an experiment to see if there was demand to do so!