Everyone is talking about improvement, change, change management, change leadership, etc. But what does these change-related terms really mean?  What is it that has to be changed? Organizations? Individuals? Cultures?  What actually takes place during the change process? What does one have to take into account? Can one introduce and drive forward change? What does all this to do Kanban?

There are a host of reasons for change in the corporate world:

• New technologies 
• Globalization of labour and consumer markets 
• Internationalization of cooperation 
• Individual customer requirements 
• Demographic change 
• Aggressive competition 
• Insecurity in the financial markets 
• Etc. 

If a company intends to succeed, it is forced to adapt continuously to changing conditions. In reality companies can no longer decide if they wish to undergo change or not – today change cannot be the exception but must be the rule. “Business agility” is becoming the mantra of companies in the 21st century.

Increasing pressure to implement change causes many companies to finish change processes as quickly as possible otherwise they run the risk of becoming obsolete during the change process.  Frequently companies are overwhelmed with several simultaneous waves of change: Outsourcing,  continuous improvement with Kanban and software developments using Scrum, in addition to initiatives related to customer value management and corporate social responsibility.

60 to 80 percent of efforts to change fail 

However, change projects which are adopted rarely reach the set goals. There are no generally valid numbers in this context but various samplings show that 60 – 80 percent of change projects do not reach their intended goal. As a result frustration among employees grows. I have often been told in many preliminary discussions that “Kanban comes and Kanban goes“. Instead of changing attitudes, the waves of changes are simply ticked off in a routine way. This attitude can also be exacerbated by the fact that many organizations do not react properly to a crisis in their commercial environment:

• Solutions are discussed before consensus has been reached on the problem. 
• Current challenges are not diagnosed jointly but simply dictated.  
• The benefit of the actual situation is not given adequate attention.  

Failure because of wrong basic assumptions 

If one takes a close look at the top of the flops, it is easy to identify that many of these change efforts do not fail because of adopting the wrong processes, methods frameworks or tools. It is much more frequently the case that such projects were simply based on false assumptions. This is the trumpet which the organizational researcher, Dietrich Dörner, blows in his “Logic of Failure”:

• Acting without prior analysis of the situation 
• Acting while ignoring processes 
• Acting without looking precisely for the problem 
• Acting without organisational awareness 
• Acting without critical self-reflection 

In essence: Simply integrating a shiny new method, a few practices, rules, processes or tools into the everyday operations and then hoping that everything will improve is nothing more than an illusion. The desired quick fix very quickly turns into a damp squib. In my experience this also applies to Kanban: Whoever thinks that simply though prescribing visualisation, WIP limits, classes of service, etc. will fix everything is unfortunately simply on the wrong track. In addition to the mechanics, modern change and management skills are needed.