Kanban Change Leadership: Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement

16 DEEPER UNDERSTANDING

In the style of a master steeplechase runner, you’ve cleared the first few hurdles and converted your first improvement ideas into a real Kanban initiative. However, now you’re back at the beginning and have to settle the specific demands on this initiative in detail—together with those making the demands. The magic term here is “stakeholder management.”

In this section, we will let you in on a secret—we will introduce several tools for stakeholder management that have proved themselves in diverse change initiatives:

• The personal retrospective, where you apply the principle “Start with what you do now” to yourself and commence the Kanban initiative with a more detailed specification of your own perspective
• The team constellation, where you answer the question of existing power relationships in your immediate area of responsibility, thus helping you clarify your own assumptions in terms of willingness to change
• The change dialog, with which you can prevent the onset of skepticism, worry, and fear arising from tangible conflict
• The team conversation, in which you can work constructively on a challenging starting point at the team level
• The team retrospective, which invites everyone to review what worked well, what did not work so well, and what did not work at all
• The stakeholder map, which visually defines your most important business partners and their relationships, created together in the group
• The stakeholder interviews, through which ...