Jørgen Vig Knudstorp
The major thing I learned when implementing change management and leading through change, and this was a challenge for me because I’m a very sort of cerebral kind of thinker. I think a lot, and it’s actually not about – you believe you need to think your way into a new way of acting, but actually what you do is you act your way into a new way of thinking, and so it was about less talk and more action, so what do you do? Well we implemented change management through closing offices, we sold off businesses, and we shut down activities.
So for instance in the factories where we weren’t really in control, rather than introducing an IT system and elaborate reporting, we implemented change by reporting up on a white board, and we created something we still use to this day. We call it a visual factory. So every Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. we’d get together and managers would write down how the factory was performing in front of all of us. Green numbers for good outcomes, red numbers for bad outcomes, and people look at that and say, “When are you gonna put it in an IT system?” and I say, “It’s never gonna go into the IT system because it’s all into doing the sharing of data and how we are doing.”
It’s a social mechanism that starts driving change, because once you’ve written that red number up there you don’t need to be told I need to change that. You start leading through change and changing it.