{"id":7796,"date":"2017-10-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lei.flywheelsites.com\/the-lean-post\/articles\/the-playbook-of-sustaining-change\/"},"modified":"2020-11-30T16:03:04","modified_gmt":"2020-11-30T16:03:04","slug":"the-playbook-of-sustaining-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lean.org\/the-lean-post\/articles\/the-playbook-of-sustaining-change\/","title":{"rendered":"The “Playbook” of Sustaining Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chet Marchwinski:<\/strong> The sad fact is that most transformations fail. Hi, I\u2019m Chet Marchwinski, Communications Director at the Lean Enterprise Institute. To talk about reasons why change initiatives fail and hopefully to give you some ways to avoid it, I\u2019m talking today with Lynn Kelley.<\/em><\/p>\n

Lynn, welcome and thanks for taking the time out to talk about this important question and hopefully give the viewers some tips on how to sidestep change failure. First, in your experience, what are the keys to sustaining change?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Lynn Kelley:<\/strong> Well this is a good question because I learned through a lot of failures. For the last 30 years I\u2019ve been implementing large-scale change throughout major organizations, often Fortune 200 companies, and I failed a lot. And every time I failed I would use my lean training to try to figure out the root cause, and then, as you mentioned, I have a Ph.D. in Research and Evaluations, I would look at the research and say, \u201cWhat does the research say about this topic?\u201d And what I found is some common areas where people fail.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019ve put together over the course of my career a playbook, which I use to facilitate change with my teams. And I went from mostly failing to mostly succeeding with this playbook. And I continue to refine it, but the main thing I found that ensures success is that before you announce the change, before you go out there and say \u201cWe\u2019re going to change!\u201d, you have thought through a multitude of potential problem areas, and created answers for those and addressed them, so that all of those possible places you could fail are addressed before you start.<\/p>\n

Marchwinski:<\/strong> And you mentioned the research, and you\u2019ve noted that 70 percent of large-scale change initiatives fail, and 60 percent of continuous improvement projects fail to sustain results. That\u2019s pretty discouraging!<\/em><\/p>\n

Kelley:<\/strong> It is discouraging, and guess what? Every study has 60-70. The thing that I don’t think we understand is when we\u2019re starting to roll something out, the probability is that it\u2019s going to fail. And so what we really need to do is look beyond that. It\u2019s funny because when I teach this course, I ask the students, \u201cTell me all the ways that change fails.\u201d And they almost always name every single area. We can say some of them right now: lack of leadership; certain employees just don\u2019t want to change; employees don\u2019t have the right skills but we didn\u2019t provide them with training. There\u2019s a multitude of reasons and they\u2019re pretty well documented. The two major ones that almost tie in the percentages are lack of leadership support and employees just don\u2019t want to change.<\/p>\n

Marchwinski:<\/strong> As you note, you\u2019ve had a lot of experience with big companies, small companies and change. And at one point you were COO of a hospital. So I\u2019m wondering \u2013 do healthcare change efforts face special challenges?<\/em><\/p>\n

Kelley:\u00a0<\/strong>Actually, not in my experience. I\u2019ve used this methodology in engineering, in healthcare\u2026the automotive industry, the aerospace industry, even at E-Z-Go golf cars. Lots of different situations, lots of different applications: finance departments, IT departments, change is change is change. It always fails for the same reasons; it doesn\u2019t matter. The amount of effort you have to put in the various areas may differ, but it\u2019s usually the same categories.<\/p>\n

Marchwinski:<\/strong> And finally, you teach a workshop that\u2019s called Change That Sustains. Who is it aimed at and what will they learn?<\/em><\/p>\n

Kelley:<\/strong>It\u2019s primarily aimed at anyone who is implementing change. What we do is we start by looking at enterprise-wide or company-wide change, big change; and then we get very granular and we take it down to projects. Maybe 10 years ago my team took the change principles and we applied them to our projects because our internal customers said \u201cWait a minute; your projects don\u2019t sustain!\u201d And we looked at the data and we found that just 10 percent of our projects sustained the same metrics after six months. And I bet you that\u2019s not that unusual out there. And so we worked through this playbook and addressed a lot of areas. And last year we were at 95 percent sustainment. And what I\u2019m telling you is that metric is still sustaining the gain. And by the way, if it hasn\u2019t, if it\u2019s gone red\u2026we escalate it. So we have to get six months of sustainment in order to call it sustained, and last year it was 95 percent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Marchwinski:<\/strong> Wow, that\u2019s remarkable. Lynn, thanks a lot for stopping by and sharing your insights on this important topic.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kelley:<\/strong> Thank you Chet.<\/p>\n

Marchwinski:<\/strong> For more information about Lynn\u2019s workshop, Change That Sustains<\/a>, and for resources on lean transformations, please visit lean.org<\/a> today.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a world where most lean transformations fail, what can we do to learn from others’ mistakes and help our own transformations succeed? After 30 years of firsthand experience in change implementations, Lynn Kelley has a few tips to share. Read more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7797,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe "Playbook" of Sustaining Change - Lean Enterprise Institute<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.lean.org\/the-lean-post\/articles\/the-playbook-of-sustaining-change\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The "Playbook" of Sustaining Change - Lean Enterprise Institute\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In a world where most lean transformations fail, what can we do to learn from others' mistakes and help our own transformations succeed? 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