Like every year, the program of the Lean Kanban conference in North America is simply amazing. This year it’s even more amazing because there is a track called “The Change Agent” and I am very honored to chair this track. I find it really marvelous that such an important conference puts the work of change agents to its agenda because whenever I visit conferences and listen to talks about advanced metrics, optimizing flow, risk management, etc., I often think to myself: “That’s a good problem to have.” There are so many excellent ideas out there of how to improve work life, however, the most important challenge is that you will have to make it happen. And that is exactly the point in time when you wish to have the skills of a change agent.
The summary of “The Change Agent” track reads like as follows:
There are no exact numbers but surveys show that 60 percent to 80 percent of change projects fail. The reason of failure is not the lack of processes, methods, frameworks or tools. Organizational change fails because of bad change leadership or the lack of a change process at all.
The vision of this track is that participants can lower their number of failed change initiatives. Speakers will present their experience what it needs to lead sustainable change initiatives in organizations. Topics like change resistance, emotions, behavioral aspects of change as well as tools and good practices are discussed.
To move one step closer towards the vision of this track, I proudly present the speakers (in order of their appearance):
Marius de Beer, “A Tale of Two Change Agents”
Klaus Leopold, “Good Practices to Start a Culture of Continuous Improvement”
Esther Derby, “The Language of Change”
Sigi Kaltenecker, “Strategic Change Management with Kanban”
Pawel Brodzinski, “Portfolio Kanban: A Backdoor to Organizational Evolution”
Looking forward to meeting you at the LKNA13 in Chicago, April 28 – May 2, 2013.