A company with 4,700 employees and a 32-person Kanban team doesn't need a massive transformation program to fix stakeholder resistance. It needs what Masayoshi Son proved works: stop focusing on the present, start painting the future, and let the destination do the convincing.

#Kanban #HealthcareB2B #StakeholderManagement #ChangeManagement #VisionDrivenAlignment #AgileLeadership #ProductDevelopment #FlowManagement #WIPLimits #FeedbackLoops (31/31)

You're a twenty-six-person company. Your sensor team is three people. You lost $97,000 last quarter to resistance. Ma proved the fix is to stop building in isolation and start building something that connects everyone. When everyone is connected, everyone benefits. Nobody wants to leave.

#StakeholderManagement #PlatformBusinessModel #IndustrialIoT #SAFe #AgileLeadership #ProductManagement #ChangeManagement #FactoryAutomation #WirelessSensors #BusinessStrategy (15/15)

Start this week. Have the product owner build the market evidence dashboard. Then create the roadmap, present it to the family, and add the review step to your Kanban board. A 148-person company that does this will stop bleeding revenue and start competing again.

#HealthcareSaaS #Kanban #ProductManagement #StakeholderManagement #AgileTransformation #ChangeManagement #MarketDriven #AssemblyLineInnovation #ProductRoadmap #RevenueGrowth (15/15)

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The pilot trap

Context: The organisation wants to test a new way of working before committing to it fully. A pilot team is selected. They get more autonomy, a flatter structure, and direct access to the people they serve. The experiment is watched closely. Leadership visits. Consultants evaluate. Progress is tracked and reported. The team delivers well. They are energised and proud of what they have built together. Then the question of scaling comes up. Resistance appears, not from people far away, but from those closest to the experiment. The managers whose teams were not selected. The HR department asked to create exceptions for the pilot. The architects whose standards the pilot bypassed. The steering committee that was promised a clear verdict. The experiment ends, or quietly returns to normal. The organisation concludes that the approach works in theory but is not right for them.

OST explains: Merrelyn Emery identified this dynamic as paradoxical inhibition, drawing on Pavlov's research on conditioning: the people and areas closest to structural change feel most threatened by it and develop the strongest resistance, while those at a safer distance are more likely to adopt it. Norway lived this in the 1960s. The Industrial Democracy Programme experiments worked. The experiments did not spread. Sweden picked up the ideas and ran with them instead. Treating change as a pilot produces exactly this effect. Those around the pilot are confronted daily with a visible alternative to their own way of working. That is not a neutral situation. It is a structural provocation. Partial DP2 in a DP1 organisation is inherently unstable, not because the experiment fails on its own terms, but because the surrounding system has every structural reason to absorb or eliminate it. This is not cynicism or politics. It is the immune system of DP1 doing exactly what it was designed to do. The only way to avoid the pilot trap is not to pilot. You cannot sneak DP2 past DP1 one team at a time. The fence will hold.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #changemanagement