Lean Organisational Development (LeanOD)™

OD/Change Management is not delivering in its current form based on the level of failures being recorded.

“....most of what’s been written about transformational change is too conceptual and therefore too impractical, too inspirational and therefore too vague, or too company specific and therefore too hard to apply to one’s own situation. We have been inept at transforming troubled organizations—or even at maintaining the vitality of healthy ones—because we have never before identified the factors that produce sustainable revitalization.” (Pascale et al., 1997)

“Despite some individual successes, however, change remains difficult to pull off, and few companies manage the process as well as they would like. Most of their initiatives—installing new technology, downsizing, restructuring, or trying to change corporate culture—have had low success rates. The brutal fact is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail” (Beer and Nohria, 2000)


If we take the never ending list of requirements that is required of a Change or OD practitioner as listed in the academic literature, it is perhaps no surprise that the literature on real world examples of Change and Transformation management is dominated by failures rather than successes.

From my perspective as a long standing practitioner of Change Management both incremental and radical, I feel a need to agree with the quote above from Richard Pascale and his colleagues above.

Leading academic text books on this subject such as Cummings & Worley's "Leadership And Change Management" or Richard Daft's "Organization theory and design" are valuable encyclopedic references but their extensive coverage of "what is required to successfully deliver a Change or Transformation program" is “too conceptual and therefore too impractical, too aspirational and therefore too vague” to slightly modify Richard Pascale’s quote above.

This may be why Professor John Kotter’s more practitioner approach (backed up with the evidence gathered through collaboration with consultants, Deloitte) in his books "Leading Change (1996)" and "The Heart of Change (2002)" have achieved more traction with practicing managers than other writers from academia.

The criticism therefore that “I have made this longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter” (Blaise Pascal)) perhaps applies to the academic literature on OD & Change Management.

The dearth of “here is how to do it and you have a 95% probability of success” literature is either evidence that the complexity associated with understanding and managing the dynamics involved in effecting Radical Change is beyond managements current capabilities or, that some major cornerstones of Radical Change management has not been identified.

Failure to have such a model or framework may be the biggest challenge that OD and Change Management Practitioners face.

In a high performance organisation, OD knowledge, skills and practices could be combined with those of Lean Six Sigma and System’s Thinking to become a set of core “improvement competences” that every manager needs to have.

This “Continuous or Lean OD” would reduce or eliminate the need to have special “Interventionists” (OD or Lean) as the organisation would never drift sufficiently off-course to need “interventions”.

If we examine the range and scope of capabilities/competences required of an OD or Change agent, it becomes apparent that there are few people around who are fully competent across all these dimensions.

On the other hand, it is not unreasonable to expect that this range and scope of capabilities/competences would be present across an organisations full management team.

From my own experience in playing major roles in change programs at a wide variety of organisations, there is limited respect for the body of Change/OD knowledge amongst practicing managers.

It seems to me therefore that, rather than expecting a superhuman set of capabilities in the OD practitioner or Change agent, it is much more reasonable (and congruent with Lean Thinking) to expect that OD competences be present in all managers, thereby creating the opportunity to “do things right first time” rather than relying on “interventions” to fix what has gone wrong after the event.

The quality profession has long since seen the need to move from “fixing things afterwards” to building quality into the process. Is it time that OD learned the same lesson, is it time now for “right first time” or Lean / Continuous OD, could this be the reason why so many change programs fail?

I believe that moving OD in this “right first time” direction would create a greater opportunity for more successful change programs in the short and medium term. Additionally, such a shift in OD and management thinking would take the OD & management in general onto a new dimension worthy of the 21st century.