Change Management & The Implementation Roadmap

“Shi(f)t happens: Either guided or becoming a loose cannon” - Stephan Neck.

This episode explores change management in the context of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), which refers to the process of planning, implementing, and managing changes within an organization as it adopts SAFe practices. It involves ensuring that individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole are prepared for and supported through the transformation.

Key Takeaways:

• What are the biggest change management challenges in transformations?
• What management strategies and/or techniques are applicable for successful transformations? 
• What's "missing" on the SAFe Implementation regarding change management?
• When is change not change?

Transcript

Mark Richards: 0:01

You're listening to SPCs unleashed a shaping agility project that emerged from the 2023 Prague safe summit. The show is hosted by Swiss SPC, T Stephan Nick and Niko kaintances, Dutch, spct, Ali Hajou and Aussie safe fellow, Mark Richards. We're committed to helping SPCs grow their impact and move beyond the foundations taught during implementing safe each week, we explore a dimension from the frameworks competencies. We share stories about our journeys, the secrets we found and the lessons we learned the hard way. G'day and welcome to the final episode of SPCs Unleashed for the year. We are on episode six of our second season, where we are looking at random topics of interest to ourselves that we feel perhaps didn't get as much attention as we would have liked in the original cut of the safe competencies. And to round out the year, we're on change management and the implementation roadmap, and I don't know how it suddenly came up as stephan's favorite, but Stephan is hosting, so over to you, while I actually get the right names on the right people, Stephan

Stephan Neck: 1:10

perfect. Welcome to this episode. So when we talk about change management, we often hear and read it's about strategies, techniques, practices that are required for successful transformation, right? And when we talk change management in the safe framework, we talk about the implementation roadmap. And big question today will be, what's covered, what's not covered by the implementation roadmap? And that's where the interest is Mark. That's why I choose, chose this topic. And in the end, when it comes to change as well, how can we make stick change and reinforce it? So to kick off this episode, a question to my mates, what goes through your mind when you hear the term change and tie it to your passion or your challenges. Who would like to start? I

Mark Richards: 2:10

see Niko being very polite, so I guess I'll jump in. And I must confess, when I was doing the prep, I hadn't spotted your intent to do this warm up question. So about half an hour before we were due to go live, I was doing my kind of mic checks and all that kind of stuff, and I saw the question, it's like, what does go through my mind? And it instantly gave me a flashback. So if I roll the clock back nearly 15 years now to when I started teaching safe courses, there was a kind of almost standard set of diagrams I would draw on whiteboards or flip chart paper every time I taught a leading safe because there was stuff I thought that was important that wasn't in the safe material. And one of the diagrams that I always drew was the Satya change model. And if you're not familiar with Satya, she was a family therapist who revolutionized the world of family therapy in the 70s, but some of the people that have really been mentors to me took a lot of studied with her and took a lot of her work across into that field. And she had this thing, this change model. It said, every time you introduce change, there's a set of things that go on, and, you know, she presents it as a graph. If you're watching this, I have the graph on screen. If you're listening, I'm going to describe the graph. But basically, picture, you're beginning in a what she calls the late status quo, right? How does the world work today? You introduce some foreign element, a decision to change. What will happen next is an initial period of resistance, followed by chaos, and this is always drawn as like a valley. Life gets worse. You enter this period of chaos, and in this period of chaos, it's not as smooth up and down. It's like gets a little bit worse, a little bit better, a little bit worse, a little bit better. But life is very chaotic because the world doesn't know how to deal with this new change it introduced. And then there's some moment in time when people start to get it, and it's like she described as the transforming idea, is the moment when you start to understand how to cope with this change, and life begins to get a little bit better, but it doesn't get smoothly better. It's still better. It's still a jagged line that goes up and down and up and down and up and down. But the trend is forward as you integrate this change into the way you work, until eventually you reach the new status quo. And her theory was, every change, no matter how big or small, is going to go through this cycle with people, right? Because we respond to things emotionally. The bigger the change, the bigger the canyon is going to be in the middle. And you've just got to prepare for it and ride your way through and also know that the new status quo is not always better than the old status quo. So really good way to think about change is introduce small changes. Yes. So you go through small canyons of chaos, integrate it, reset to a new status quo, and you can learn a course correct in case it wasn't the best possible change. And recognizing everything you do as you start to change your world towards agility, you're trying to build an organization that's better at changing, but you've got hundreds, potentially 1000s of people continuously going through these curves of what's happening to them emotionally as human beings. So that's changed for me. Niko,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 5:32

in my case, it's a impatience. So if you summarize it to one word, is the people have not the patience to do it the right way, like you show in the graphic you need. There is a phase where you are slower, where you have pain, and you need the patients to go through this well, to become to become better. So that's really one important thing. That's why I love change when I'm not affected by it, because we can just coach it. You're from the outside, but when you're inside the change, it's really hard. And I said in the warm up with Stephan, it's like when your kids learning ride the bicycle, they will fall down. They will be slower than before. And you never will say, You know what? Continue walking. You're faster with walking. You don't need to learn this bicycle thing because you're slower now than before. You have the patience. They need the patience, and you will be faster. Same with my swimming lessons, when I learned go away from this style to the crowd style, I remember I was so slow, and after 20 meters, I was really full of water everywhere. And I told to my trainer, I think I will stop it. And he told me, yeah, you need patience. I told him, I have patience. What are you talking about? I'm the most patient people in the room. Yeah, but you need it, and you have to know that it starts to become worse than better in the beginning and at the end is the patience of the people who are who are affected patients, of the people who are leaders and of the coaches that the other thing I also see coaches not having the time or not taking the time they need. So it comes to a similar graphic as you showed mark, but on the world, on the word patient, patience. Sorry, not patient.

Stephan Neck: 7:15

Thank you very much. Niko. What goes through my mind when I hear changes, and I also have a little flashback, like Mark, like years ago, when I was preparing a presentation about innovation and change, I stumbled upon this title. Shift Happens. And if you put the F into bracket, the title changes drastically, right? Shift happens. Take the F away, and you will find out, and that's what was my experience. You either have a guided change, the shift is appreciated, is anticipated, or it becomes a loose cannon, and then shit happens, and that's not good for change, right? Because it can go in all directions. And for me, change is finding the right balance to bring in innovation from one stable condition to the other. So yeah, let's pick up the threads that are on the stage. The next question I would throw into the arena is, what were your unique but overall biggest challenges in those transformations? You already brought in some hooks and some hints and some ideas. So let's start with Niko. You. You mentioned those impatient people. What about impatience?

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 8:41

Yeah, what also happens in such environments, or at least in environments I've been is the people think, Okay, now we're doing something new. We're doing this agile thing, or the safe thing, and they just forget everything they knew before. Because, or at least it's my opinion, maybe I'm wrong. I didn't found so much change management skill help in the safe process, except of the roadmap and except of there's also an accelerated book by Kotter that's not really what you need. No, you need more than this. And I was really surprised that great project leader just forgot about what they knew before, about change management, about people, and I think that's one thing that's really important from for myself, is to wake up the people and say, just because you're doing something new, or a new technology or a new framework or a new way of working, don't forget all the things you knew before, because you will need them. It's just something a new a new operating system you just install and forget everything else, because it's an update. Now you need all your past with you. So the biggest challenges was the impatient people, impatient coaches, too, and also just forgetting your skills and not using them, because now some other coach has to do the work, and not me. So. Interesting.

Stephan Neck: 10:00

Does that resonate with you as well? Mark,

Mark Richards: 10:03

you know, the funny thing, I actually wound up having flashbacks as I listened to Niko. And the flashback for me was to when I first started doing Agile, 25 years ago, and I started it like not because the organization had decided to go Agile, the organization hadn't heard of agile, and we were using extreme programming, and the organization wouldn't necessarily have been happy if we told them that we're doing extreme programming because it was BMW, and that wouldn't necessarily fit with their culture. But we as a dev team went, this is just a better way to work. And so we certainly went, this makes so much more sense to us as a dev team in terms of how to work. Let's fight for the right to work this way. And and that for me, was agile. My first, you know, seven, eight years as a practitioner of agile, was always just going, this is so much better as a way of working for team. I'm going to find some way to give us the chance to do it, because it's a much better way of being. And then I got involved in my first kind of corporate Agile transformation, and in my head, it was like, Oh, wow, all those dev teams so lucky. They're not going to have to fight for it, because, you know, the CIO is out there saying we want to become an amazingly agile organization. And you know, all we're here to do is to clear the way so these teams get the chance to work this way, better way, only to encounter a whole bunch of dev teams who really want to. And I think there's that piece of the puzzle, which is the change you choose. And Niko already alluded to it, the change you choose is very different to the change that's chosen for you. And the trouble at scale is that if you wait for everybody to choose it, the organization is going to be too impatient for that. But if you don't let anybody choose it, and it's all you trying to choose it for them, then it's also going to be a disaster. So you've got to find some way to sit in the sweet spot between inspiring change and choice, and managing change and choice that's interesting,

Stephan Neck: 12:05

listening to you guys spark something in my head when it comes to change that often, and I'm picking up what you said, Mark what you change and what will be chosen for you is often very different in a context or in an organization. And what I see quite often in when it comes to change, some people, some leadership has some idea, and then there is kind of a delegation of this change to a group of people, or certain people, and they have to deal with the change. And that was probably the biggest challenge I faced in many transformations, in many engagements, I was that probably leadership thought about different about the change than those who had to deal with the change, or received some mission, or received some Some mandate to do that right so this buy in of everyone who's who's in, this change was kind of different, leadership, management, buy in was different than the buy in of the people. And you mentioned that mark, and then I would like to hand back the talking stick to you. What about this difference? Do you see that similar? Did you experience that in a similar way? How was, how was your experience in the past when it came

Unknown: 13:29

to change,

Mark Richards: 13:30

it was and again, probably going to that moment of my first enterprise agility work. I had never worked closely with an organizational change manager before that, but I came from a dev background, and organizational change managers dealt with stuff that was very uninteresting to me as a dev, and then I'm coaching this large program of work, which eventually became the first place I applied safe. And as a large program of work, they had a whole bunch of change managers. And this thing had initially been spun up waterfall. It was converting piece by piece to Agile, and every agile stream had a change manager associated with it. And I'm in their coaching, and my initial interactions with these change managers was trying to control them, because they were all freaking out because we're doing things that didn't look all that polished. We had teams in there doing demos, and the demos didn't have beautifully prepared PowerPoint packs, and we didn't have great communications decks, and, you know, we weren't doing all this stuff that was really important to these change managers at the same time as I'm in there talking to the team, to the coach, going, you know, if you're spending time polishing your demo, it's not really a demo, right? Less PowerPoint, more working software. That's what makes a good demo. And so there's this real tension between me and the change managers, where it felt like they were pushing for all this polished, pre thought stuff, and I was. Pushing for we've got to learn, we've got to be transparent, and it was almost like we were opposing forces. But I was curious, and, you know, I started to spend time with them, and I realized there was all this stuff they knew that I didn't know. In my research on agile coaching, had I learned a whole bunch of techniques that they already knew. And in actual fact, there was stuff that they could teach the teams that would make the teams better teams that I didn't know how to teach the teams. And you know, it could have been just literally, you know, communication skills, and you know how to do follow up after a demo to check in with your stakeholders and find the things that they didn't say to you in the room, and how to maintain a communications register so you knew who you're talking to and you didn't talk to and it's like, oh, cool. They know all this stuff that not a single agile person I know knows about or cares about, and if I can get them to stop worrying about trying to over polish and hunt for all these things that really smell a bit more Waterfall and Agile, and tap into the goodness they bring life will be amazing. And so it was a question of building a relationship with them, learning from them, and then learning how to activate them as a part of the force for good, where initially, probably a lot of them were very, very dubious about agile and the way that it was going to impact change management. Interesting.

Stephan Neck: 16:29

Niko, how about polishing your assets and tidy up your house? What's needed as well? Exactly

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 16:39

what I realized why Mark was talking is that change is never a war you were doing. It's not something it's not me against the others or me have to change them. Change always has a reason why it's happening, and usually, most often, it's because you want to improve something, improve your product, improve your company. You want to continue, so please take another mindset. They started just installing some some events or some meetings. We have to do a demo, but explain. Why are we doing this? Why are we inviting the people? So it's a lot of we are back in coaching. Sorry for that, but it's together, together with the people, try to understand what's the idea behind the collaboration we are doing. And yeah, save has some great meetings, but they have a meaning. And don't do them just because you want to transform to save. Do them because you want to be ready for the new time where everything changes them dynamically, radically and fast. And yeah, it's not a war. Try to find out why you're doing this together, and that is why you need all these old skills and all the people already there who were same with me, like with Mark, they are mostly better skills than I am in creating a vision, creating a mission, creating a purpose. It was something I had to learn, by the way, as a developer. So when I was a developer, I thought to myself, What the heck is this? So if you have visions, stop smoking pots. I don't get it. I just want to do my work. I don't need this. But then I realized how important this stuff is. And then I learned from the best, and those are were not agile coaches, they were just people great in creating great products and creating great companies. And so I learned to involve in this area too. You guys

Stephan Neck: 18:26

kicked it already off this if I'm listening to you guys, it's about, how do you prepare for change? How do you manage change? So what are probably some prerequisites needed for good change. Well, what is probably biggest leverage effect you could, you could instill in such an organization

Mark Richards: 18:50

they're both queuing up not to go first

Stephan Neck: 18:55

moment. That's good. That's good.

Mark Richards: 18:58

Niko, why don't you take it away?

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 19:00

I mean, I forgot the question, sorry. Oh, gosh.

Stephan Neck: 19:05

So I think, Niko, there is for change. You need some prerequisites, right? Because you have to prepare for change. You have to kick it off, kind of, you have to manage it. So what are those ingredients you would throw in and say, Okay, if this happens, if this is existent, it will leverage some big effect,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 19:31

yeah, just a warning ahead. It's just my style. I don't know if it's right or wrong. Usually it fits the way I'm doing it. So there is no big literature look behind of it. It's just my experience. It's really understanding the why. So try to find out, why are we doing this? Why I want to change? Is it because my body's also doing something similar and I want to also go in this way? Or am I just bored? Or am I a new manager and I just want to make a footprint? Because I'm new and I have to bring new ideas in. It shouldn't be the reason, by the way, why they changing it, but understand it. Why are we going this way and then having the right people around you, supporting you in in make it crystal clear the direction where you want to go. I think that's the most important part. I've seen many, many organizations just missing that just starting somehow we have to do something. Let's take this framework, let's take the other framework, and let's do it, and three years after, they just have to redo it again. So the why, understand the why, and find people who helps you. Help you, finding the way

Stephan Neck: 20:39

that sounds interesting. You. You mentioned already the why, and I would add the purpose, if change is not conveyed in a way and communicated in a way that people understand, what is the need for change, which is being busy, right? And and as well, I'm, I'm always throwing in this analogy of the bowling alley, if you just throw the balls towards the pins, but you don't see where the pins are, and if you hit the pins, if there's like a curtain in between, what's the first about going to a bowling alley? I want to see the impact. I want to see that's something we do, that we deliver. That really makes sense. It has a purpose, which is, by the way, one of the intrinsic motivations, right? And how can we bring that in as a prerequisite? For me is quite crucial. And probably handing over the talking stick back to Mark, it's a people business, right?

Mark Richards: 21:37

So, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna take the people talking stick and run with it for a second. And if you, if you spend any time with a real change manager, one of the first things I'll always talk about is change champions. And you know, when you frame this question for Stephan and your comment was leverage? Where do you find leverage? For me, leverage is change champions. Now I don't necessarily call them change champions and do all the formal stuff that change managers do with change champions groups, although sometimes that can be an amazing thing to do. But I look for right who are the real people on the ground, who are influencers, and if those people who are locally respected and locally influential start to get it and be excited about it and and learn the art of it, possible, they will drag people with them, right? They will pull people in their wake and And so recognizing like what I will be doing, let's say, if I'm doing a safe for teams, because the people I'm looking for, I'm looking for team members. When you do a safer teams, and you're launching an art and you've got, you know, 100 people in the room, you know, you see some bright sparks. There are some people always who stand out as like they get it, they're excited by it. They're thinking, they're leaning in in their group discussions, and, you know, they're triggering their group to think differently about stuff, and they're the people that other people are looking at to see how they're responding. And I look for those people, I go, how can I go build a relationship with them? Because if I can really take those people and amplify it right, lean in, listen to them, and go, you know what's what's happening. And so I look for who are the 810, 15 team member level people that I believe are going to be the heart of possibility for that art. And I go, how do I build a personal relationship with them? And then when I get to PR planning, and like, I've got a spare moments, like, let me go and check in. How's it going? What's the reality? Because there are often also true speakers. But you know, if those people move, and maybe it's, you know, how do you apply Agile to a you know, data bricks, data lake, with very sensitive health data and a lot of concerns about data governance, and go through an iterative approach to data modeling. Now, once upon a time, 15 years ago on 15 years ago, technology, I could do that. I can't do that anymore, but if I'm kind of guy who knows how to do that, and I can just spend time to give them a chance to inspire change in the engineers and designers and models around them. Good things are going to happen. So that's it for me, right? You want leverage, find your change champions on the ground who know the product, the technology, the organization, the context, who are respected by their peers and see what you can do to lift them now with

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 24:41

others. That's great. I think you answered my next question, because my question would have been, what makes a real manager, a real change manager real, and what makes them fake? So it's really using the change champions, makes them real, and not doing everything alone. Or what is your definition of a real change manager? Yeah.

Mark Richards: 25:00

Generally, they've got certifications I don't like. Okay, okay,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 25:04

perfect, perfect. Thank you, Mark, big ex, okay, let

Stephan Neck: 25:10

me pick that up. Are we talking about leadership? Mark, not only champions.

Mark Richards: 25:17

Look it can be like leaders can be champions. And there are, certainly there are some leaders who will stand up and be logical champions of the change you're looking at it. It's one of the things, if we write one back to when we talked about facilitation, right? And one of the things I try and teach people with facilitation is, you know, look for eye contact and look for the people that people look to, that they take the lead from, if that person and sometimes we did a beautiful exercise one day last year with a bunch of people, and I had one person paying attention to how often different members of the group spoke, and another person paying attention to how often people looked at other people and who they looked at. And there was this one woman who said less than anybody else, but was referred to more than anybody else. And it was like she was very quiet, but hugely influential in this group and and that can be at any level for me, but it's like if you find those people who others look to, and all of a sudden they start to catch fire for something new. You know, others will be drawn with them because they respect them. They don't necessarily respect you as an outsider. You could just be the latest person preaching agile at them, but they're a reference point internally, and if they get excited and inspired, things will fall on the back. So I'm going to be quiet for a second because we've had a comment come in LinkedIn. So you guys take the ball. I'm going to read the comments See if we need to talk about

Stephan Neck: 26:54

it. Yeah, Niko, take it off

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 26:57

exactly. And it's one thing that mark just mentioned, that it's really important you just mark, just added one important skill for a change manager, and this one is reading the room. So reading the people. And not everybody has this skill and they cannot learn it. Let's go, go back to teachers. I know I have three kids. I had to visit classes. And some teachers are really great in feeling what's happening around the room, what where to intervene, where not to intervene, and other just having a playbook and playing it. And that's a really a skill you need. As a change manager, feeling the room, realizing who is talking, how, with which body language, who has an influence and not. And that's really an important skill, which you have to you have to learn it by a book. You have to learn it by being part of it and seeing others doing it.

Stephan Neck: 27:51

Let's stay in that area. We're talking about management strategies and or techniques for change. What did you guys apply in the past? What was successful, or perhaps also what wasn't so successful? Where did you have some havoc? Where did you create some mess, instead of leveraging the champions and being more successful?

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 28:20

Some misunderstandings I've seen in the past is people who read Cotter misunderstood the idea of the guiding coalition. They always thought that the only thing you need is just support from top management and just aware there and looking for support and try to make make a guiding coalition upward. But they completely forgot that you need people on you need pilot projects. You need people leading this thing. You need, yeah, now it's called also the volunteers army, if you read the new material of culture, and this was, for me, also always an important part. So I remember one of the biggest change projects, I was able to accompany something like that, choose a proper English word, be part of it, or to coach. Was around with 600 people, and one of the first thing we tried to do is, first of all, management support. And second, who could be part of a great pilot project or a lighthouse project, and it was cool to see, okay, I need this and this person, because if they are part of this movement, although we look up to them and say, hey, if they are doing it, we have to do it too. And if the cool people are are going in this direction, or the important people are going this direction, we have to go too. So you need both. You need you the guiding collision upwards and the guiding coalition downwards to the people who are doing the work. So you need some kind of both. And in the beginning of my change management career, or else, code career, I've seen too many people ignoring the people doing the work and just trying to be part of management. And. Part of of guiding and not of doing that

Stephan Neck: 30:03

sounds plausible. That's a good advice. What was good in your experience when you applied some strategies and techniques? Mark, look,

Mark Richards: 30:15

I'm going to take this question and I'm actually now that I've had a chance to think I'm going to use the segue based on the comment that came in from LinkedIn. So thank you very much for giving us a little bit of live feedback and a question along the way. The feedback was, we've been talking about agile coaches through our change lens. We've been talking about traditional change managers. What about RTEs? And then, where does the lace fit into all of this? I think you know, the short version of the question, the segue I'm going to take, is I actually having, based on my very early learnings, I've done an awful lot of work around integrating traditional change management skills in the journey over the years, and I published a community contribution article for safe last year on that topic based on a presentation I gave in I think it was Prague last year as well. So if you're interested, and this really gets to this idea of the integration between the various parties and different models and things you might focus on. The community guidance article was called Building the change in communication competency for effective arts. You can find it straight on the safe website under community contributions. Or you can go and you can look at the summit videos from Prague, and you'll find that I gave a talk where I shared a lot of stories and some photos from from there. So that's my kind of segue moment. The thing that I would add to that segue is, if you think about change management frameworks, there's really two that dominate the world today, but one of those, of course, is Cotter, and, you know, build a Family Coalition, etc, etc, etc. The other is Prosci. And Prosci is known for the Add car model awareness, desired knowledge. I always forget the A and then reinforcement. And if you go to any professional change manager, they'll come from, generally, one of those two schools. There might be a little bit of an extra flavor to it, which is Jason Little's work with Lean change. And that would be probably the kind of other places I'd be looking in terms of traditional, classic stuff, would be Jason little and the Lean change, his book, his website, various tools he's got that are very useful there. The other one is Lena Ross, who has written a couple of books on agile change management that find a good way of kind of hitting that what needs to change about the traditional mindset. But personally, I love switch, and I know I'm not the only one in this conversation he loves switch, and switch. For me, there's so many powerful techniques and ideas in switch, and probably my two favorites, one of those are, shine a spotlight. If you're looking for something to be different, there's probably somebody already in place who's doing different Can you shine a spotlight on them so that people can see one of their own who's made this shift? And so, you know, drawing attention to good things that are happening and amplifying them. The old Extreme Programming guys used to say, you know, turn up the good so find good things. Put attention on the good things, and that's a great way of getting the inspiration for change. The other one I love in switch is this idea of recognizing the progress you've made rather than obsessing about the progress you haven't. And they actually had some beautiful quotes of some psychology studies that looked at what happened when they took and one of the one that sits in my head is they took hotel modes, and it was the hotel cleaning staff, and they were talking about fitness, and one of them, they basically went, you're already pretty active because you've got an active job. We're going to show you how much you're already achieving. And they literally, they just installed, you know, step counters and things so that these hotel cleaning staff could go home at the end of the day and go look how much exercise already done today, and that acknowledgement of what they're already doing, and the belief that that would lead into reinforcement and and, you know, some pretty phenomenal results. And I think quite often with change, we can really get caught up in, you know, what's the road yet traveled? Road yet to travel, as opposed to pausing to take a breath and go, how much we've done look, how much life is different and and I think there are moments where people get very frustrated. You can, you can sit and do a workshop and you go, Okay, well, let's look back a year ago. It, what did our world look like a year ago? And if you can start to see all the things that have already changed, it gives you a new wave of energy to lean into the next things. Thank

Stephan Neck: 35:10

you. Mark, you just described how European people work, right? We first look for what hasn't been achieved, instead of celebrating what we achieved cool Ta da, we are in jiggles time over to Niko,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 35:28

yeah, I thought this time we are so close to Christmas. And I asked myself, hmm, change manager, Christmas tree. What does the Christmas tree of modern church? Change Manager look like if it was a tree designer?

Stephan Neck: 35:44

Really hard question. Let me kick it off. I was roaming on the internet a little bit, looking at pictures of Christmas trees, and I found one that wasn't the usual Christmas tree with needles on it. It was one that had a timeless design. It was designed with baubles and candles with glass, and it was nice and shiny. And as a modern change manager, I would like to have a design and a change approach that is timeless, so that every year comes Christmas time, you might have to change this Christmas tree, but it's still shiny, and it's pointing into the future and showing us the path

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 36:34

somehow went in the opposite and the same direction at the same time. So I went to classic and thought to myself, I see a tree with old wooden ornaments like in the black and white movies, really old stuff, but it also matches to the new world. So I wrote wooden ornaments. It will it will be full of wooden ornaments, because you still need your old skills. You need your own ornaments to make a modern tree because they fit also in the modern world, so somehow close and not close to what you wrote Stephan or showed Stephan. Perfect mark. I don't get your picture.

Mark Richards: 37:15

Life shouldn't be too easy or predictable when it jiggles time and I thought about it, and it was, was actually funny, because we're having a lot of debates about Christmas trees in our family right now, because we're at that point where all the kids are grown up, but none of them have their own kids, yet, unlike Stephan, who's now in the joys of being A grandfather and liberation, and so I'm like, you know, do we really bother with a tree? I don't necessarily want to bother with a tree, because for me, trees, it's about the kids, but all our kids are grown up kids, and I'm not very popular for that stance, but yeah, I'm the guy who thinks about what the doll does to the tree and the mess, and certainly not the guy who makes it look beautiful.

Stephan Neck: 38:04

I can relate to that.

Mark Richards: 38:07

But when I, when I started thinking about this, and it's like, what is it? Well, I come back to that a great change manager creates change champions and unleashes them. And so I instantly didn't want to look for a Christmas tree. I wanted to look for a Christmas tree farm where I have lots of young Christmas trees growing and waiting to be released into the world to bring Christmas cheer everywhere they went. Call me Connie.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 38:35

I love the chickens. That's cool. Thank you both.

Stephan Neck: 38:37

It's really cool. Thank you very much guys. Um, to round up this topic for the last third of our time, I have two additional thoughts that I would like to throw in when it comes to change we are in product discovery and development mode as value streams, right and quite often, or almost every time, we have unpredictable fluctuations in requirement demand, and that creates change as well within the system. Right? How can we create a completely flexible organization so that we have maximum innovation speed? Because for me, that's related to change, change, about how we organize, and are we still focused on creating, delivering value and as fast as possible and as sustainable as possible? Who would like to elaborate on that one mark?

Mark Richards: 39:36

I should jump straight on that one, and maybe I'm going to be a little bit boring. Now, one of the things that I learned from classical change managers is they're very focused on understanding the ability the organization to absorb change, and they have tools like change impact assessments, where they look at a potential change and they say, you know, what's the potential in. Impact of this change? What's the ability the organization to absorb that impact? How does that influence our strategy, so on and so on and so forth. And if you think about something like predictability versus innovation, right? And at the end of the day, if you had a back when it used to be popular, we used to use the old sliders techniques, you know, you can pick your sliders, right for me, predictability and innovation are almost opposite ends of a slider, and you've got to pick your scale. Where do you want the balance to sit? Can you do maximum innovation speed? Well, there might be certain situations where you can do maximum innovation speed, knowing that the downside of that is going to be minimum predictability. But is your organization? Is your entire organization able to do that? And, and you've got to figure out where on the slider you're sitting in context and, and part of this, and if I really peel it back into, you know, the change management aspect, and something that I spent a lot of time on in my community, contribution guidance, is when you move down the Agile path, the change is not just to the people now working in an agile way. The change ripples to the entire organization. I'm now delivering smaller, more frequent releases. I'm now balancing between innovation and predictability, and there's a there's a wave of education and preparation of, you know, what's the why that needs to happen and and a wave of awareness to start to go, you know, is this group of people able to accept this more innovative, less predictable way of working. How much can we turn that dial up for them at the moment? You know, how do we take the journey of finding the sweet spot and moving the sweet spot as time goes by? Because, you know, there's all kinds of controls you can put on. You can put guardrail controls. But what's the guardrail that says how much of my capacity goes to reasonably predictable work versus how much goes to innovation work. How do I set the slider in the right place? How do I sense what the new right place is? And how do I educate the people who are impacted by the way the slide is set, not just the people doing the work, but the people impacted by the product of the work Niko, I can send ready to roll, yeah,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 42:25

and it's only picking the sliders. It's also living it and being part of it. Is it only I want you behaving this way. It's also as a leader. Now going to the leader, leader perspective, it's also behaving this way, being a role model there and for our culture in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, also praised the people for this behavior. So usually in our culture, if you don't praise anybody, or if you don't hit anybody, that's a compliment. Saying nothing is always great job. So if a German Swiss, Swiss guy, an Austrian guy, says nothing, it means you're doing a great job, but so please praise the people who are behaving the way you want to. You want to you want to go and also live this with the vocabulary, with your body language, with what you are doing as a leader. And not only I want to be more more creative, more innovative, or I want to be more more predictive, you also have to live that, and also, if somebody is innovative, to praise those people even if they failed and did something not so predictable. So it's also being a role model.

Stephan Neck: 43:34

Listening to you guys is for me, how do we convert uncertainty into certainty, right? And what you just mentioned Niko, is being an exemplar is really helpful in change, right? Because you have an uncertainty how to behave, because it changes, we also have an uncertainty when it comes to the content, because demand can change. The question is also, as an organization, how do we evolve over time? What changes regarding governance? But again, let me go back to this change and innovation. We assume that the organization can and should adapt to capacities, as you mentioned, Mark, right. It's a trade off between, how do we keep the light on, how do we how do we work on life cycle stuff, and how do we work on innovational stuff? But also, how do we adapt skills and competencies over the times? What do you see as a limitation when it comes again, to speed of innovation? What has to be considered when it comes to change regarding capacities, skills and competencies, your experience in when you are in change mode as a change agent.

Mark Richards: 44:57

Let's start at the very beginning of. It, which is innovation is an easy word to say and a hard word to do.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 45:07

Agreed, bingo,

Mark Richards: 45:10

good, successful. Innovation is structured, right? There's a discipline around experiment life cycles. There's a discipline around expressing and testing hypotheses. There's a discipline around balancing time that you're spending on innovation versus on other work, and there's a discipline around thinking about the type of innovation you're doing. I will never forget some work I did with a client a few years ago where we looked at all of the people in the organization who theoretically were responsible for doing innovative work, and they all worked a different way with their innovation. They all use different language to talk about it, and we're just working on trying to categorize it and go look, can we get some common language for how we talk about innovation? Can we try and uplift it to look at an entire strategy? And, you know. So we had various ways you might categorize innovation, you know, is it disruptive innovation? Is it adjacent innovation? You know, is it effectively just continuous improvement? What kind of Horizon Are you trying to innovate in? Is it innovation applied to Horizon one product versus horizon three product? And what we found when we actually mapped it all, and boy, there were some incredible ideas people were playing with, but when we mapped it all, we found that there were areas of innovation that were being completely ignored, and nobody was actually doing any super disruptive innovation. We had literally 40 innovation groups. Nobody was doing disruptive innovation, very few people were doing adjacencies. Most were innovating on a delivery of an existing product to an existing market segment. So there was a complete imbalance to it. So that'd be part of it, to me, is from a change management perspective, part of change management is bringing into play the tools and techniques that are going to enable people to successfully and responsibly employ some of these new things and give them the uplift and the education. There you go. Niko Bucha, some time, what are you going to add?

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 47:15

You haven't seen our back channel. I just posted the next It's okay with me, because on my side, I would just double, double down what you said. It's a it's also, again, back to what I said before. It's you yourself has also my English. Sorry if you're accepting people be innovative. You have to be innovative yourself. So you must be innovative to see the missing skills. You cannot sit in your chair and demand from others becoming innovative. So part of change management is having all the skills you accept, you you want from others, also on the Yeah, on your daily work. It's like, if you do Agile transformation, you have to do it in an agile way. So if you, if you using change to be more innovative, you have to be innovative while doing that. So it's just saying, again, what I said before, interesting

Stephan Neck: 48:08

to use one of Mark's favorite words. The penultimate question is about the implementation roadmap. We talked about different strategies, techniques. We mentioned Cotter, we mentioned switch guys. What do you miss on the safe implementation roadmap regarding change management the last

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 48:29

50 minutes? We just talked about no.

Stephan Neck: 48:33

Thank you for the summary. No. In

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 48:35

my case, What I miss is really change management skills there so or maybe I haven't found it could also be, but, uh, really saying, at least to the people go there, there is your knowledge. Uh, connect to people who have the skills. So I miss some kind of like with coaching. I miss the coaching skills, and I miss the change management skills.

Mark Richards: 48:57

Well, we know we agree about that.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 49:00

I'm so happy because you were so quiet a lot. Okay? He disagree? He disagree? Oh God,

Mark Richards: 49:06

no, I'm we have a commitment to be generative and talk about opportunities for improvement more than things that are blatantly missing. So living in a generative mode. I'm going to add a second piece to this puzzle, and it's probably there's a parallel for me between the gap in the implementation roadmap and the adjustment that a lot of classic change managers need to make coming into an agile world. Because if you look at most change management disciplines, the activities they're doing, the artifacts they're producing, the way they're doing things are designed for waterfall style change, right? Big batches and the journey for a classical change manager is moving from big batch change to small batch change. And what does that do? Does it mean you're now starting to live with living artifacts instead of not living artifacts? Does it mean that you know you have less certainty about the roadmap, and you've got to adapt your communication style to that less certainty? So moving from large batch to small batch, moving from one single change journey to many small change journeys is the shift for classical change management and agility. And I think the same thing happens to the roadmap. It's easy to look at the roadmap and go, Oh, there's one change journey. My organization of 50,000 people, we start at the beginning of that, that snake and and we follow the S curve and we get to the end of it. But that's not the truth. Your organization, different parts of it will go through different parts of that route, like it's great guidance, don't get me wrong. But no organization goes on a linear journey to agility. Different parts of the organization are different stages of it at different times and and it's really the set of continuous, small changes, not one large batch change you can install.

Stephan Neck: 51:03

I'd like to second on that one mark. Change always happens in an existing system, right? It's not a new world. And I've seen that quite often we are so focused on the transformation, creating and finding out those value streams, identifying them, starting them, training them, first, pi planning, and we forget all the other people around us, right? And for me, it's about the cohabitation of the work system topology, as is bring that in, into the implementation roadmap. So it's the implementation roadmap. As you said, it's not a linear thing. It's cyclical. It's something we have to make congruent with the existing world, with the existing context, right? Otherwise we forget some people, we forget some some interfaces. And for me, that was the biggest aha moment years ago when I went into another transformation, because the good change manager showed up and said, Hey, what about us? You're doing something and it doesn't fit. And that was for me, probably the thing that we have to think more in depth in the future when it comes to the implementation roadmap, so that we get better over the time. And by the way, it's a framework. You have to map it to the context again, and I'm getting boring again. It's about context. And if we don't understand the context, we probably will apply some change that is not really change. Which leads me to the last question, when is change? Not change? Guys,

Mark Richards: 52:49

your experience when it's a jar? Yeah, what else? Sorry, I'm being very Australian with myself. No, no, easy.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 52:59

When it's all a change, just using new names and behave like before, one

Mark Richards: 53:03

of my colleagues used to talk about safe washing.

Unknown: 53:07

Yeah, agreed. There's

Mark Richards: 53:09

a lot of people using new words and putting on various shows, but nothing's really changed. Under the surface, my addition to that would be, it's really easy to fund manager metrics. You know, how many people have we trained? How many arts have we launched? As opposed to, how much have we changed? So, you know, don't measure the change activities that you've performed. Measure the change outcomes you're achieving. Empath ownership,

Stephan Neck: 53:42

yeah, yeah. And to to summarize that a little bit, what Niko you said, and Mark change for the sake of change, it's not what we are after, right? It's, it's, it's, it's an name. You change the names, but you don't change the game, really. So for me, important, if what's the true north, where are we heading to with the organization, not the transformation the organization, and the transformation and the change should be helpful and should create those activities that really create true value for our organization. Which leads us to what's the key takeaway? Who would like to start just one key takeaway,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 54:33

I start use and develop your pre agile change management skills. Use them and develop them,

Stephan Neck: 54:39

and I'm using one that Niko mentioned in one of the other episodes, the person in the mirror matters, make a change, and

Mark Richards: 54:49

I'm going to stick with Niko on this one. It's find the change management professionals your organization already has and make them part of your guide and coalition. And

Stephan Neck: 55:00

with those statements, Back to you Mark,

Mark Richards: 55:04

all right, so that brings us to the end of SPC is unleashed for 2024 we are going to take a well earned break. I'm going to play at the beach, and Stephan and Niko are going to play in the snow, and we'll be back, and I guess I'll be a lot more tanned, and they'll be a lot less tanned on the 18th of January, where we're gonna do a follow up. We had a session on PR planning a couple of weeks ago. We're gonna come back, and we're gonna devote a whole episode talking about distributed PR planning and things we've learned about how to make it work. So in the meantime, we wish you a Happy Christmas. Very new year. Happy festive seasons, whichever things you're celebrating in these festive seasons. And from me, that is sayonara 2024, I'll let the boys say a final goodbye, and I'll take us off the air. Goodbye.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 56:06

All I want for next year is for you,

Stephan Neck: 56:09

and in Swiss German and got the roach CEO in 2025