John Ediger

Hi everybody. I'm John Ediger, and I'm a transformation leader and transformation consultant. I'm gonna spend some time going over an opportunity I had. I was honored enough to be invited into a company — a healthcare company — to help and lead their transformation. So I'm gonna talk through that a bit.

I wanted to honor a few people here first. I did most of my learning over the last decade actually doing transformation work on multiple companies. I would not have been able to do this without the leadership, the mentorship, and all the guidance from these people — many more than this, but I just wanna honor these folks.

So now what I'm gonna do is go through, in lightning fashion, 12 of the key learnings I've had from this transformation over the last couple of years.

All right. Number one: transformation is continuous. There is no end to transformation. Damon Edwards said, about 10 years ago or so — and this stuck in my mind — that there's only how you operate today, and then there's better. My favorite quote from Jon Smart is "impediments are the path." So we use this as kind of our guidance as we did this continuous transformation.

Number two: outcomes over outputs. This was probably the biggest change, the biggest result we got across the company over the last couple of years — now top to bottom, the teams are focused on the overall outcomes instead of just outputs. We use the value canvas approach. I learned this from Jon two years ago at this conference, and it works wonders. We learned that this could actually scale — it could actually be done at the top leaders of the company all the way down.

Number three: we break dependencies. There's a strong tendency to try to manage dependencies rather than break them down. And we learned that this really takes some top-down leadership, and this takes some coaching. There was a talk by Scott Prugh two years ago that I thought really summed this up well, about how astronomic extra dependencies are really — really went a long way in shaping this.

Number four: we ruthlessly prioritized. We learned that when you do this at the very top of the company all the way down, and everything is aligned, not only do you increase the satisfaction and morale of everyone in the company, but you actually get organic focus on value outcomes.

Number five: we treat all requirements as hypotheses. This is challenging, but it's a game changer — makes a huge difference. And this also takes a lot of learning and coaching.

Number six: we focus on agility more than just Agile. So rather than a framework/methodology approach to Agile, we look across the company. We look for having our teams be cross-functional, be empowered, and we look at some of the basics rather than just the methodologies. We found that worked really well across this large company.

Number seven: we know that the secret sauce of transforming is kaizen. And what really helped us get that spread throughout the company was doing the Gene Kim–like seminars and showcases where everyone shares out what they did and what they learned and what they got out of it. We do those regularly, and that helps spawn the change.

Number eight: we know that the worst thing we can do is implement Agile in a waterfall business context. So instead, we focused not only on the teams, but even spent more time on the strategy and planning. We spent time at the leadership layer, we spent time at all levels of the business leaders. It's not easy, but it makes a bigger difference than just focusing on the tech team.

Number nine: we continuously shift from project thinking to product thinking. The biggest change was to fund the teams rather than funding the big initiatives or the projects. And the way we learned to do this best was by the book — we used slices and did it bit by bit and experimented. All the antibodies of the company come out when you do this, but you learn, and people realize, okay, we can actually do this.

Number ten: we engage vendors as part of one team. So rather than the outsource model, we try to bring the vendors in and staff augment — treat them as part of our team and work together on the ways-of-working improvements. We're starting this with a couple of vendors, and we have a long way to go, but that works really well, so we've got a lot of learnings there.

Number eleven: we leverage a ways-of-working enablement team. No brainer — everyone should do this. This is working really, really well.

And number twelve: as leaders, we model humility, curiosity, and respect.

Thank you. I would love to talk to you more about your experiences with transformation. So thank you all.