These Aren't the Changes You're Looking For...
Kanban Principle 2: Agree to Incremental, Evolutionary Change and Dispense With the Mind Tricks
This Principles Series was born out of a conversation I was having around the finer points of Kanban. Because the conversation jumped directly to the practices, skipping over the Kanban principles, it dawned on me that others may be in need of hearing these principles along with some pragmatic examples. I’ve already written about, “Starting with what you do now,” but in this Tidbit, I want to focus on commitment to incremental, evolutionary change.
I got into coaching because I have a passion for helping people reach their fullest, God given potential. I’ve been blessed with a knack for facilitation as well as helping people and teams improve the way they collaborate and solve problems. Having said that, there is one vital element to success when helping people reach their full potential: their cooperation (Unless you’re a Jedi). With that, your weekly Tidbit...
Commitment to incremental, evolutionary improvement
The heart of this principle is that your team must agree that the current way you’re working warrants an incremental, evolutionary approach to improvement. Let’s define some terms. By incremental, I mean pull in the next smallest improvement. Don’t try to solve everything. As Martin Luther King, Jr said,
“If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. Keep moving forward.”
Just find the next improvement that will potentially accelerate your flow. It’s an experiment, not a transformation. The transformation is something you notice at some point in the future which is why we call it evolutionary. It’s ongoing, methodical change based on an ever changing environment over the course of forever. That’s right...it never ends.
What I didn’t say was that someone else must decide for you or your team that you should change. “But Tristan, how will a team know when they need to improve unless you tell them?” That’s an interesting question.
First of all, when there’s no agreement that change is necessary, people resist. If you think about it, people aren’t resisting the change as much as they are resisting coercion. More on that in a moment. To answer your question, “How will a team know when to improve?” I would say that I have experienced healthy adults be surprisingly great at noticing when things are not working and creating novel ways to correct them. Kanban encourages these continuous small incremental and evolutionary changes to the current process by implementing cadenced, collaborative feedback loops (More on this in future Tidbits). In general, sweeping changes are discouraged because they usually encounter resistance due to fear, uncertainty, or sometimes plain old identity conflict. It bears repeating that people don’t normally resist change but instead resist coercion. But maybe you don’t want to take my word for it. How about a real example.
My Story
When I was new to coaching, and before I embraced Kanban Principles, the first team I worked with completely resisted the change that I was tasked with helping them enact. I spent a few weeks observing the way they worked and knew my resulting list of ideas could solve a ton of their process problems. Having taken the time to earn their trust, I started mentioning these solutions when the offending issues would arise. Honestly, I felt like more of a cop than a coach, but everyone involved knew this was the reason I was supposed to be there. Turns out the team saw me as more of a cop as well and wanted nothing to do with the process tweaks. It still pains me to say this, but after six months of what seemed like endless resistance, the team decided to change coaches. I was reassigned. It was the lowest point of my career. Having the answers to the teams problems didn’t seem to make me the hero I thought it would. I had to change my approach.
A few years later, armed with bumps and bruises and a new principle, I had a different experience with a new team. As before, I took the time to observe and generate a list of things I knew were areas of improvement. The team knew why I was there. This time I waited. I waited until I knew the team was committed to changing. My posture for this engagement would be that of a sounding board. A true coach; not a cop. Once the team realized I wasn’t going to push change on them, they started to open up. The team started to identify their own pain points and ask for insight, but they were pain points that the team themselves identified. That’s how I knew they were committed. They knew the pain, and they just needed to commit to finding and fixing it themselves.
Final Thought
As I was reading Drive by Daniel Pink, I found a blurb about the way we work in the knowledge industry that backs up the idea of incremental, evolutionary change.
Danny puts it this way:
“An algorithmic task is one in which you follow a set of established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion. That is, there’s an algorithm for solving it [the task or problem]. A heuristic task is the opposite. Precisely because no algorithm exists for it, you have to experiment with possibilities and devise a novel solution.”
In other words, because the problems we solve aren’t the same every time, we need to experiment with different possibilities in order to find a new solution. What’s more, I believe the way we solve problems must adapt as well. Even IF we bought in to some new method or framework, the idea that it would forever empower us to solve ever changing problems in an ever changing world seems short sighted. My challenge for you is to just have the conversation with your team. You don’t have to change anything. Just have the conversation that, from this day forward, you’re committed to incremental, evolutionary change. From there, every conversation becomes an opportunity to learn and grow, and keep moving forward.