"This presentation was given at the Lean Software and Systems Conference 2012 (LSSC12).
Lean/Agile is not just about delivering early and often, it is even more importantly about continuously adapting the way we work towards an improved capability of delivery. Yet how many of us have worked in a continuously improving organization? How many of us have seen one in real life?
It's hard to keep management interested in Improvement for very long, making Continuous Improvement a holy grail of sorts. As Lean/Kanban practitioners we believe the only sustainable way to improve is via evolutionary emerging change. But if we the organization is not interested in pursuing it, we have a big problem.
Through some challenging situations from real client work we will see a few patterns that fail and a few patterns that show more promise for energizing improvement. We will also look at improvement pace and how to apply kanban approaches to make the improvement more sustainable.
We will also explore some local cultural aspects that might affect the drive (or lack of) towards improvement, and how to deal with them, with some interesting insights about the Israeli culture…"
"The Kanban Method - Fixing Continuous Improvement - AgileIL12
How Kanban provides a more sustainable and viable approach to Continuous Improvement
by Yuval Yeret on 1 October 2012
"Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior
After decades of observation and organizational consulting, here are Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior. These are observations rather than laws to follow ;)
1. Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level manager and "specialist" positions & power structures.
2. As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be reduced to redefining or overloading the new terminology to mean basically the same as status quo.
3. As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be derided as "purist", "theoretical", and "needing pragmatic customization for local concerns" -- which deflects from addressing weaknesses and manager/specialist status quo.
4. Culture follows structure.
i.e., if you want to really change culture, you have to start with changing structure, because culture does not really change otherwise. and that's why deep systems of thought such as organizational learning are not very sticky or impactful by themselves, and why systems such as scrum (that have a strong focus on structural change at the start) tend to more quickly impact culture. i discovered that john seddon also observed this: "Attempting to change an organization's culture is a folly, it always fails. Peoples' behavior (the culture) is a product of the system; when you change the system peoples' behavior changes." "
