Modern Management Methods conference, LeanKanban NL 2013
 
The “Just Do It” approach to Change Management

Speaker
, Agile Coach
, Agile Coach, Qualogy


Description
Forget about seeing. Doing is believing. The As-If principle, coined by psychologist William James, tells us that changing behavior will change thinking, not just the other way around. Is that why ‘shock therapy’ Scrum works? Does this Stockholm syndrome approach to change management actually work in practice? And if so, how does that relate to current thinking about complexity and management? Based on real-life experiences, we describe the effectiveness and limitations of decisive leadership as an application of redirecting situations from the Cynefin chaotic domain into the others. We describe steps taken, contexts misinterpreted, other mistakes made, and lessons learned. All this illustrated with a tale of a failed multi-million euro project that was turned into a success, then a failure again caused by the unexpected success, and then... Well, come and listen. When an outsourced project is in enough trouble that decisive leadership is installed that can co-locate the involved vendors and impose a short-cycle (1 week) scrum, resistance really can be futile.