chapter fifteen

15 Leading Lean change

 

This chapter covers

  • Influencing your team's practices when you hold no title or authority
  • Applying the Coaching Kata: what, why, how, pattern
  • Communicating and celebrating small wins to build team momentum
  • Handling identity-based resistance, including the disruption AI brings to roles
  • Converting production incidents into structured learning that updates standard work
  • Knowing where change agents fail and how Lean change unfolds

The hardest part of every improvement in this book is not technical. Value stream maps, WIP limits, kaizen cycles, and andon signals all sit on a shelf until someone convinces a team to actually use them. That someone does not need a manager title or a change management certification. They need a different skill: the ability to treat a people problem as a people problem, not a code problem. Consider: you write a script that automates a deploy step your team has been doing by hand for two years. You measure it, test it, and open a PR with before-and-after numbers showing three hours saved per week. Three days later, no reviews. Someone suggests getting approval from the team lead. The team lead is on vacation. The PR goes stale and gets closed a month later.

15.1 Influence without authority

15.1.1 The pattern: Act, measure, share

15.2 Micro coaching

15.2.1 Micro coaching framework

15.2.2 From micro coaching to coaching kata

15.3 Demonstrating value through small wins

15.4 Scaling improvements across teams

15.5 Handling resistance to change

15.5.1 We have always done it this way

15.6 Building a culture of continuous learning

15.7 The change agent’s toolkit

15.8 Exercise: Plan your first team Kaizen event

15.9 Summary