Having just completed the LCM workshop in Perth, Western Australia, I was keen to apply my learning. One of my client organisations is very traditional in its management and operations and, being a local government utility, the idea of not having detailed plans and mountains of paper does not sit comfortably with them. Nevertheless, I decided to ‘bite the bullet’ and moved the conversation away from having detailed change implementation plans, and shared some of the techniques Jason has shown us.

I suggested that we allow the process to be guided by feedback and enable the employees to co-create the change. The client initially felt uncomfortable with the idea, he was used to going to his leadership team with a detailed change implementation plan and felt under pressure to deliver a gantt chart and associated documents. However, after reflecting on our conversation, he confidently presented his ‘agile’ approach to the project steering committee, stating that more detail on implementation would follow once ‘consultation’ had taken place with employees.

So we are now ready to start the first ‘experiment’ and gather feedback to help with designing the next ‘experiment’. We are now using the character cards – Inspirational Leader, Change Architect, Fence Sitter, Bad Idea, to gather information on how key stakeholders respond to the change and I’ll let you know how we go.