Brian Elms — a former Denver public servant and founder of the city’s “Peak Academy” change management program — likes to tell the story of the frozen yoghurt machine.

Serving 65,000 people per year, Denver city’s vehicle licensing department had a waiting time varying from 45 minutes to three hours. The machine was installed to ease the pain of waiting to be seen.

Elms hated it. “Instead of speeding up the process to get [visitors] what they came for, they created a band-aid,” said Elms. “They tried to calm you down, like you would give a kid candy to calm them when they see a doctor.”

Stacie Loucks, a graduate of Peak Academy, was appointed to the department in 2014. She pulled off the band-aid and decided to tackle the underlying problem — the waiting times. Using Elms’ model, her team came up with dozens of ideas — small tweaks, like new ways for customers to arrange their paperwork, which they experimented with and iterated on. The wait fell to just eight minutes. The frozen yoghurt machine was later removed.

Step one is to consider why change is needed. What’s driving you?

In 2016, Elms shared his experiences and models in his book, Peak Performance, and is now a consultant, working to share his change management experience with governments nationwide. He spoke to Apolitical about how he believes individuals can drive change using simple techniques — but only if they pull others along for the ride.

What was the thinking behind Peak Academy?
We wanted to create a lean program, modelling it on one called Denver Health, at the city’s general hospital. But we just couldn't get it to pop like theirs, so we adapted it.

A lean program is typically where people become certified to run process improvement events throughout the organisation. Then you work with them on their event, or multiple events.

But our rapid improvement events had a failure rate at the time of around 80%. We were not successful at creating change through our process improvements.

We found that instead, we were successful at creating change through more individual and smaller tweaks to existing programs, compared to big, collective improvement events, and we really jumped on that.

So you followed a process known as the “A3 model”, inspired by Toyota’s approach to a lean model. How does the model work?
So one of the first things that you have to do is go look at the problem.

Step one is to consider why change is needed. What’s driving you?

Then figure out what is known as the "current state". That would be step two, exploring what is currently happening.

Step three is the question: “what do I want it to look like?” I call it your “desired future”. What do you want to happen?

Step four is brainstorming. This is about moving from diagnosing problems to discussing solutions.

Step five is the gap analysis. Why isn’t the current state matching up with the future state? What’s missing? Here, you might use a process map.

“Nothing about us without us” was a huge mantra for our team

Step six is implementing "countermeasures", or what we would call innovations, that could change what is currently happening.

Step seven is to see if it's actually working. So monitor it — create an action plan, write everything down.

Step eight is to analyze what you have — go through your results.

Step nine is going through the lessons you learned. What worked? What didn’t work? What changes would you make next time? Think about making it sustainable.

And then you start the practice over again. There's no end to life in our work. The moment that we think that all we have to do is X and everything will be fine, we're in trouble.

And where steps involve coming up with practical ideas, how important is it to document these?
We have a tendency to just MUS, what is known as “make up stuff”.

When we start to document our “mussing”, we can actually see if we can use these types of techniques to move forward. The more documentation on your brainstorming activity, the better.

The fishbone diagram really helps you attack the error or defect rate of a process or service. And if you use the fishbone diagram correctly, you're attacking stuff one at a time, instead of trying to grapple with the whole.

How do you bring people along with you on this approach?
“Nothing about us without us” was a huge mantra for our team. The disability community in the 1980s used that slogan to express the feeling policymakers were doing change to them, and not with them.

So we adopted that for our organisation both figuratively and literally: participants have to work in the area you’re trying to change. So, if you're going to do something in public works, you have to work in public works. And you have to have willing participants, you cannot do anything to people.

Everyone has power and authority, and how you approach every situation can transfer power and authority

I’ll give you an example of why. The real learning behind it was that we taught people how to rearrange their work area. And one Monday, I got a phone call from a manager who worked in the Human Services office, telling me that one of my trainees had cleaned and reorganised their office. The manager speaking was on vacation while their office was reorganised, and they were furious.

I love that you're laughing. I can laugh about it now.

But at the time how did you feel?
I was mortified. They had told their boss that I’d given them permission to do it — and it went against the entire principle of the program.

We had to immediately shift our talking, our framing, everything. Because I’d love to tell you that it only happened once. But it happened all over the place.

We had people doing that to the city attorney's office, people doing that to the purchasing team. And they were all saying, “Brian gave us permission to do this.”

If, on the other hand, a junior member of staff came to you and said, “Brian, I really like what you're doing around driving change, but I just don't have the authority to do it”, what advice would you give them?
Give them a hug. I think that's the first thing. The second is, everyone has power and authority, and how you approach every situation can transfer power and authority.

In most organizations that I've worked in, the best change that I've seen is when a team tackles the problem today. I've been in tons of different transformation events or transformation projects where someone's like, “Yeah, well, you’ve got to tell Mike that he has to change the rules”. And I'll say, “No, I think you should tell Mike”. It’s about taking ownership.

And if that person says, in response to a problem, “that's out of my pay grade”, then it'll always be out of your pay grade. If you don't think that you have influence in this place, then we're not going to solve it.

It seems to me like there's a dual emphasis on managing change and driving change. What’s the difference between the two?
Instead of managing change, I would say facilitating it — what that means is that you're getting people into a place where others can change things. The more ownership that you push on to the team members, the better off you're going to be.

So I think there's a sort of happy medium. I'm a driver of change, and I struggle trying to facilitate it. But as a driver, you have a role encouraging the facilitators — you have to push them forward. They might get to a place where they'll stop, and you have to be okay with that.

And if you have a continuous improvement mantra, the cycle I referred to earlier, then we're always going to be coming back to it. We’re always going to be improving.

So if it's a little bit better, like we serve one more person per day, because we made this change, you made it better. If you come back in a month, and you work on it again and now you serve two more people, that's change. That’s literally it.

(Picture credit: Unsplash)