Kanban Change Leadership: Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement

10 ORGANIZATIONAL AND PERSONAL CHANGE

The German organizational consultants Klaus Doppler and Christoph Lauterburg have convincingly shown how personally people take systemic demands. “Do I need to do this? Can I do this? Do I want to do this?” These are according to their landmark book the questions every person affected by an organizational process of change ask themselves [1].

Do I Need to Do This?

The general question concerning the urgency or at times even the indispensability of the change is motivated by the following questions:

• Why change?
• What are the causes for it?
• Is management telling us the whole story or are they keeping some of it to themselves?
• Is it really so important—or might there be more urgent problems that we should be taking care of?

It is hardly surprising that trust is a critical element in processing these questions.

As we will discuss more closely later on, these seemingly neutral questions immediately indicate the quality of the various relationships: in the organization as a whole, in individual teams, between the management and the staff, and also between the employees themselves. “How open is discussion in our organization?” we were once asked right at the beginning of an interview. What the senior developer—described by the head of development (my actual client) of an international insurance group as one of my “absolute star performers”—told me might well have displeased the head of development. “I don’t have any faith in him (the ...