Last month marked the 3rd anniversary of the 2nd edition of Lean Change Management. 5th anniversary if you include the terrible Leanpub version, and 8th anniversary if you consider the blog post that started it all.
Much has happened since then:
- ~10,000 copies of Lean Change Management have been sold factoring in all distribution channels
- peaked at #6444 out of 8,000,000 books on Amazon, #198 in Leadership and Management
- LCM is available in German and soon to be available in French, Spanish and Chinese!
- ~2000+ people have attended workshops worldwide
- There are 42 facilitators delivering workshops worldwide
- 4.5/5.0 rating based on 37 reviews on Amazon.com (4.0/5.0 on Amazon.ca and 5.0/5.0 on Amazon.de)
- 4.04/5.0 rating based on 175 reviews, and 25 full-text reviews on Goodreads
- 63% increase in my ego
- 2500+ mailing list subscribers
- too many speaking events to count
- Inclusion of Lean Change Management in Harrisburg University’s change course
Considering my intent was to tell a cool story, I’d said this worked out fairly well. Anyone who’s started their own business knows that there comes a point in time when ‘scaling’ creates different problems, and the decisions you make today shape the path you’ll be walking down in the future. Problems I’ve struggled with are:
- How do you ensure some type of consistent experience when 42 different people with different backgrounds and experience are delivering workshops?
- How much control should me as the brand owner enforce?
- What happens when facilitators colour outside the lines?
- How do I not create brand confusion if different facilitators explain things differently?
- How many rules should I put in place for new content and workshops?
The truth is you can’t control these things. An emphasis on control not only limits growth, but it also creates the type of culture with our community of facilitators that I don’t want.
The key is finding the right constraints. As the brand owner, it’s important that the values, principles and purpose of Lean Change Management is reflected in new ideas that grow the community. First, I looked at what other professional associations and training providers do. Typically they create a closed-door brain trust of self-appointed experts who decide what their audience should learn. After thinking about that, I came to these conclusions:
- My goal is to help my facilitators grow their businesses
- Community beats centralized controlled
- The world of change is much more than one book and a 2-day workshop I created
Part the charm, or curse, of Lean Change Management, is that I specifically say it’s not a framework/method/process and I do not offer a certification because we have enough of those. Some people need more structure so in my workshops we’ll explore how to build your own change framework but I don’t call Lean Change Management a framework. Other people might, and that’s fine.
The ability to facilitate successful change is based on the right balance between art and science. Great chefs can be thrown into a strange kitchen and create a masterpiece by combining the seemingly disconnected ingredients they find. That’s why we’re offering you a choice between workshops that teeter toward the art of change, and toward the more structured, scientific side of change. The original Lean Change Agent workshop is perfect for change professionals, agile coaches, and those new to change who want to learn how to become chefs. The new Lean Change Professional, created by Joao Gama, is a workshop for people in larger organizations who need may need more structure.
Think of it this way, Lean Change Management is an API and the new Lean Change Professional is an application built on top of this API. Fundamentally it’s about co-creating change and using agile, lean and lean startup, much like the original Lean Change Agent course but it brings some additional structure for people who need it.
We are experimenting with this new workshop content in January 2018. You can find out more:
You can learn more here, or take a look at the complete event list for more information.