A stylized illustration of a woman with long dark hair, wearing a yellow shirt with white marks, holding her head with one hand and making a frustrated gesture. Behind her are multiple colorful arrows in blue, red, white, and gray, looping and overlapping, suggesting confusion or chaotic decision-making.

THINKING – Sprint 12

Leading Change

The reason for this sprint

People feel uncomfortable with change and resist it, yet startups must constantly change to improve customer and user experiences, respond to changing economic and competitive conditions, and to accommodate and assimilate new technologies and techniques.

Startup leaders NEED to understand and master the skills required to get all stakeholders comfortable and supportive of constant change.

Sprint exercises

We describe in our article “How to lead change” the five prerequisites for successful change and how to put each prerequisite into place.

These prerequisites are known as The Five Ducks. In the next sprint, 13, we describe how to align them and keep them aligned in additional articles.

Before you get to sprint 13, we want to challenge you with some questions about how you feel about lining up ducks.

  • Have you had to implement changes at a job, volunteer organization, team, or home instigated by some other people? How did it feel? How did it go?

  • What are the scariest changes you expect you will have to lead the team you assemble through in creating your enterprise?

  • What help would you seek in making sure the changes you lead are well implemented?

  • How would you deal with someone highly-respected on your leadership team who openly opposed a change you felt was critical for the well-being of your enterprise?