Empowering Change Agents: Strategies for Organizational Transformation

Ready to spark real change in your organization? In this episode, Brian Milner sits down with April K. Mills, founder of Engine for Change, to reveal how anyone can become a powerful change agent—without waiting for permission. Learn how to drive meaningful change, navigate resistance, and reignite Agile practices with strategies that actually work.

Overview

In this inspiring episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner talks with April K. Mills, CEO of Engine for Change and author of Everyone is a Change Agent, about what it truly means to lead change.

April explains how effective change agents focus on clearing obstacles rather than forcing compliance, and why fostering curiosity, empowerment, and collaboration is key to sustainable change.

From navigating corporate roadblocks to revitalizing Agile practices, April shares actionable insights and tactics to help you take control and make a lasting impact—whether you're in a small startup or a global enterprise.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

April K. Mills
Everyone is a Change Agent: A Guide to the Change Agent Essentials by April K. Mills
Change Tactics: 50 Ways Change Agents Boldly Escape the Status Quo by April K. Mills
Certified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum Certification
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

April K. Mills is an engineer-turned-change-evangelist and author of Everyone is a Change Agent and Change Tactics, empowers individuals and organizations to thrive through change using her proven Change Agent Essentials. With a passion for turning ideas into action, April helps people drive meaningful change with the time, title, and budget they already have.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have April K. Mills with us. Welcome in April.

April K. Mills (00:11)
Thanks for having me.

Brian (00:13)
Very happy to have April with us. April is the founder and CEO of an organization called Engine for Change. That's engine-for-change.com. That's her website. She's also an author. There's a book that she put out called, Everyone is a Change Agent, a Guide to the Change Agent Essentials. And that's what we wanted to have her on to talk about today with a little bit about being a change agent. Now I shouldn't say from the outset, April is a request. We had a listener request for April to come on. And I always love that. I always try to push those people to the top of our list and get them on as soon as possible. And it was such an interesting topic. I thought this would be just a really great way to have a great topic to have early in 2025. So April, let's start with just trying to understand when we say change agent, how do you define that? What do you mean by change agent?

April K. Mills (01:09)
Yeah, a change agent is someone who takes action to bring about the change they want to see in the world. So rather than waiting for a boss or a corporate program or somebody from HR to come in and say, hey, let's improve this process, the change agent sees the need for a change and takes action. And the big thing I talk about in my books and my work is the difference between what typically happens when somebody sees a need for a change in an organization where they decide, I'm gonna go get a boss to go make everybody do my idea. I call that driving people. And I draw the contrast with that and driving change where you choose the change for yourself and you clear the obstacles for others to choose it too. And I love talking about that with Agile audiences especially because Agile is a change agent movement. of folks who want to drive change. I see a better way to create this product and I want to be part of it. And that's always what's drawn me into the agile space.

Brian (02:13)
Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. And it is a big change, right? To think about the dynamics of someone kind of sitting back and saying, yeah, I see something that needs to be done. I see something that should be a different way, but you know, who am I to say anything about this? Who am I to do anything about versus the person who actually takes action and does things. So that kind of leads to a question about change agents. What kind of skills or traits do you think are really helpful or beneficial to someone to be a better change agent.

April K. Mills (02:46)
Well, the key is that difference between driving people and driving change. It's not what degree do you have, it's not how long have you been in the industry, it's not are you a people person, are you more focused on the data or some of those factors that we usually like to talk about. It really is, are you willing to take the step yourself first and clear those obstacles and encourage and invite people to join you? Or do you want somebody to make them obey you? And that choice is really the key for anybody to be a change agent. Because so many times we've seen people who might be able to convince the boss, hey, our team should be agile. And what happens, right? It goes on for about three months. The team gets frustrated. The boss gets angry. And then everybody starts to have a reaction when you bring it up, right? I'm sure plenty of the listeners have gone into an organization. If you're passionate about agile and you go, hey, have you guys heard about agile? And they go, ooh. And they make like a face. That's because they've encountered somebody who is driving people. And so that's the big focus I always try and talk with people about is can you show up with that willingness to let people join you and understand what their obstacles are to doing it.

Brian (03:57)
What are some kind of warning signs or signals you'd look for to kind of recognize whether I'm actually approaching this from a driving people perspective versus driving the change?

April K. Mills (04:08)
So a lot of times the key is how are you thinking about or talking about in your own head about the people around you or even yourself? We have a tendency to drive ourselves as well. So you can hear it in the language, right? I'm frustrated because so-and-so won't listen. I wish I could get more attention. It's all this sort of vague or... putting the action onto someone else and then complain the action isn't happening fast enough. You can hear it in the language. And so when someone's driving change, you don't hear that. hear, you know, I'm working on, I'm doing, the next thing is my action is I'm going to go talk with this person. I want to understand. I'm going to be curious. And you get this agency, this power coming back into your body almost, and then taking taking the next step from there. And so it's almost easy. You can almost say, well, how far outside your body would you put the power to make this change happen is a useful question to ask people. And if they say, well, it's in the CEO of the company, it's in the industry, it's in my tech lead, but it's certainly not me, well, then you're not a change agent.

Brian (05:20)
So that brings up a good point because I think I can try to channel what the listeners might be thinking here. I know that in times I've been in organizations where, yeah, you have the ideal, you have the thing that you think is the best thing to do. But because the power dynamics in the organization, you don't really have the power to make that change and you depend a little bit on others that have the power to to help affect it. And so there is a sort of an aspect of, I don't really have the capability or the power to cause this change to happen. How can I still stay with that mindset of driving change versus driving people when I know I need someone else's help?

April K. Mills (06:03)
Right. So that's a great conversation. And I've started to call it phase one Agile versus phase two Agile. I'm old enough in this space where when I first joined, a lot of Agile was team-based. Somebody on the team or several people on the team said, yeah, I want better. And these are the things that we can do as a team to deliver better. And let's do them together. And then the problem was the teams could do it, but they couldn't scale it. And they were like, if only we could get the senior leaders to pay attention to us, that would solve all our problems. And then you get phase two agile, which was executives buying agile implementations and forcing it down on people. There is one right way and we will do exactly this and you must conform and no other versions are allowed. And then we got the fractures and all of the fights about all of the different aspects. And so we tried it both ways, right? We tried it with the team effort and then we tried it with this thou shalt effort. And I think the key to actually making Agile work across organizations and deeper into organizations is to keep that energy from the team-based Agile to say, we're choosing something better, but it's that piece of driving change. What are the obstacles for others to choose it to? We didn't do that step. We went from my team does it, now the boss should make everybody else do what my team does. And I think that's where we got off track. in really scaling Agile into something that was sustainable and brought that joy and commitment and everyday wanting to show up and be better across the organization. So that's what I would encourage folks to do is not try to cheat that step of getting your fellow teams and larger systems to join you by finding somebody with the power to make them be like you.

Brian (07:50)
That's fascinating. I know that in some of these changes I've been involved with as well, there can be things that happen that kind of find yourself stalled a little bit, right? The initiative or the changes you're trying to affect just doesn't feel like it's going where it needs to go. What advice do you have for people who feel like they're in that place where they feel like they're kind of stalled out? in the change.

April K. Mills (08:16)
Yeah, so a lot of the things I talk about in that book you mentioned everyone is a change agent are different tactics you can use to overcome that. One of the key things that I talk about is what I call a change buffer, which is how can you make the rules where you're at different than those rules across the organization? I mean, let's take a simple example. Let's say there's five software teams in a business. Very simple example, right? And one is doing some practices and they'd love for those practices to spread. but they're not spreading as fast as they would hope. One of the ways to protect your change is to say, on our team, we will behave this way, declare it, make it what I call a policy buffer. So when one of those other four teams says, well, why are you doing it that way? You can point to the piece of paper and say, we've agreed to behave this way. Now, if you'd love to join us, we'd love to share that with you, but this team behaves this way. So then it's not every developer having to defend in effect the practices, which can get exhausting. But then you can start to ask them, what's your policy on your team? How do you do this? And get curious. Not in a, I'm trying to lure them in and trap them into my way of behaving, but in a, really want to understand, do they have a different measure that they're being exposed to? How can we help maybe get that measure off of them? Do they have a boss who's got a different standard for what quality looks like? Well, should we have a corporate conversation around, quality across the five teams should be the same. We don't tend to have those because we want to skip the step of coming into that alignment together and just have a policy somehow drop from the stars that aligns with my values. yeah, policy buffers are really big to protect a change and help it spread and have those curious conversations at the edges. Think of it like system integration, right? You can't just dictate, you have to understand and merge.

Brian (10:11)
Let's say we put in place a policy buffer like that on our team and our whole team agrees to doing something and we think this is the right way of doing things. And someone higher in the organization, some manager or leader finds out about this and says, no, I don't want that to happen. We've been trying to affect the change, right? And not push the individual. But now we do have the individual who's saying, you shall not do this. How do you overcome that when you're the change engine?

April K. Mills (10:38)
Yeah, so a lot of times you have to understand what are the assumptions that that leader is making and again get curious, right? Because if we focus not on the method but on the outcome, we should be able to get alignment faster. So rather than going into a boss and saying, method A is my choice, method B is yours, you know, it's a cage match, two will enter, one will leave. You instead want to show up and say, Well, I think we both agree we want to deliver quality products on time that customers love at the lowest possible production costs. Are we aligned on that or not? And if they say yes, then you say, okay, now let's just understand what are you asking for? And from my perspective as a person who has to implement that, here's how I think that impacts our ability to deliver quality products that customers love at the lowest possible production costs. And these methods that I'm using are doing this and here's my data or evidence. And so you in effect want to shift it where it's not me looking at you, but as people are probably going to see on this podcast, it's us next to each other. So if we instead frame it as me and the leader looking at the issue together, because we want to win together, we're not in competition. So again, it's about seeking to understand, removing those obstacles so that we can be aligned together to go there together.

Brian (11:57)
I love the idea of backtracking a little bit and finding that common ground and going from that space. I think that's a great approach. I know I've had success with that in my career too, of being able to find, well, we agree on this, right? And if we agree on this, now we're just talking about the best way of getting from where we are to there. And then it's less personal, then it's less about the person, it's more about the best strategy. And we're a little bit less... personally invested that we think it's a you know a personal affront or challenge if it's if it's more about the idea So I agree. I think that's a that's a great kind of approach to doing that How about the differences in just the the context of this if I'm a change I know you know I've been in some small organizations. I've been in some medium large-sized organizations and You know I think anyone who's been in large organizations would say Well, yeah, that's nice and easy when it's in a startup, right? If I'm in a startup, then yeah, everyone's wearing a lot of different hats and it's really easy to make change, but you know, the institutional kind of inertia that can take place in larger organizations, how do you overcome that as a change agent?

April K. Mills (13:00)
Yeah, well, I can speak to that from deep experience because my background started as a civilian nuclear engineer for the US Navy in a hundred year old shipyard. And I started six weeks before September 11th. So I came into a nuclear shipyard, a hundred years old, very staid in the way they did things, optimized for the shipyard and the world changed.

Brian (13:03)
Ha ha ha ha.

April K. Mills (13:25)
And I watched as that organization struggled to deal with the rate of change that was being imposed upon them. And a lot of the things that I talk about in everyone is a change agent came out of that experience of understanding what tactics worked, what didn't, what philosophy worked, what didn't to be able to empower people to make changes happen. And we made amazing changes happen in the shipyard. And then I went on and did 10 years with Intel Corporation, right? The chip maker and taught these things globally and saw people do amazing things within the company. Now it's true, if you don't get the main rudder of the company, you're not gonna steer it. But there's a lot of change you can make in an organization from where you're at. And I think that's the powerful, powerful thing. And so these tactics work at scale. They work for an individual, right? If you stop talking to yourself like, you know what you need to do? You have to do this or so and so is gonna get mad at you and you instead say, What's our obstacle for getting up early and going to the gym? And how can I clear that? And how can I choose to do that every day all the way up to a team, all the way up to an organization? I've seen these things work all the way through that scale. So I've used it in community projects to deliver an accessible playground in three and a half years when everybody said it would take five or 10. And these tactics have also been proven, although they weren't listed this way, in historical successes. If you think about when Admiral Rickover founded the nuclear Navy back in 1950, they went from approval to use nuclear power to USS Nautilus underway in five years. We can't deliver anything in five years anymore because we constantly are looking for who's going to make people, how are we going to force them? Can we keep them forced to do it? And with employee turnover, with system turnover, with the rate of change, I would argue this era of driving people has to end because it wasn't ever really effective, but it's getting less and less effective. And that's the name of my second book, which is Change Tactics, which is both you should change tactics and here are some change tactics to help people accelerate their results.

Brian (15:36)
That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, it gets really deep really quickly here too, because you start to think about even the way we manage our projects and the fact that a lot of more traditional project management is sort of, when we talk about this change agent approach, is sort of managing the people and trying to push and drive the people towards deadlines, some, not even an outcome, but a timeline. versus trying to affect the outcomes that we're trying to achieve as an end result instead. So it really is interconnected, isn't it, through even the way we set up our projects?

April K. Mills (16:13)
Yes, it totally is. And I have that in the book and in the classes I teach is where is the force? So I'm an engineer by training, right? So I'm constantly looking and thinking about where's the force in the system if it was a pump or a reactor plant or whatever. And you can see it to your point with the program management is your, are you spending most of your time trying to push people to do something? Or are you moving the form, fit and function of whatever the product is? If that's delivering code and integrating code, if that's a physical product, are you clearing the obstacle so that product moves forward faster? And you hear this and see this in stories of what's going on at SpaceX, right? When they're confronting something about, can't get a part for six months or I can't get a part for a year and it's gonna cost me $50,000, they're saying. Isn't it just sheet metal? How could we make that in two weeks with what we've got? Because they're not talking about you should be able to shrink that timeline. What are you doing? Why aren't you talking to the vendor enough? aren't you pushing on the vendor hard enough? They're saying, what is the physical thing we need and how fast can we get it? And it's allowing them to shrink product costs. It's allowing them to shrink durations. It's what Rickover did in the 50s. It's what Andy Grove did with Intel back when it was Intel delivers in the 80s and 90s. Focus on the product, focus on the physics, focus on the engineering, the mechanics to support the engineering, the operations to support the mechanics, and you'll deliver products faster. And at the heart of all of that is change agents because they're not trying to get somebody to obey. They want to get something amazing done.

Brian (17:50)
One of the things I found kind of in when I've worked with organizations and talked with organizations about kind of moving from point A to point B is the fact that you kind of need help. kind of need, know, a lot of times people will try to make these changes all on their own and they sort of take the weight of the world on their shoulders. I can't figure out why it's not working. How do you kind of co-opt others into your strategy?

April K. Mills (18:14)
Yeah, well, the best way is to share with them what you've learned about being a change agent. I've had countless folks who, know, one person will read my book or come to a class and they'll go back and try it and people will get curious because you show up differently. So a simple example that I give in the book is rather than sending a mandatory meeting, which we're all guilty of, right, we get an assignment. and we go into the global outlook calendar and we pick people and we make them mandatory and we order them to come to our meeting. We say, Brian gave me this assignment. You have to come. Brian said this is really important. Come to my meeting or else. And we do that. That's the default. And I encourage folks from a driving change perspective to instead, maybe Brian, you gave me that assignment, but my meeting notice would say, I've been asked by Brian to lead this. I'm excited to do that. Here's why I've chosen this as the thing I'm going to focus on. I've marked you all optional. I think you have the skills and capabilities that would be amazing on this team. And if you're as passionate as I am, I'd love you to partner with me. We're going to start meeting on Tuesday. If you're not the right one, feel free to tell me. But I'm moving forward on Tuesday with whoever's there. And I'm really grateful that I get to work in an organization with you. Now. Who's gonna come to, which meeting are you gonna come to? The April says Brian's gonna be mad at you if you don't, or the one where April's gonna go off and do something amazing, I don't wanna miss out. And anybody can do that because everybody send in meeting notices out to people. So the simplest actions have the most powerful results.

Brian (19:31)
Ha It really is a cultural change too, right? mean, that's a very different cultural kind of approach to it to say, hey, it's optional, but, you know, get on board with this idea. If this is something that you're excited about, I want you to be a part of this versus, hey, you've got to, that's your job. you know, I've been given the authority to, to demand that you be here and, and, and, you know, really want. So, so how do you. You know culture changes is obviously one of the hardest things to do in an organization. How do you start to if you're a change agent? How do you start to? Change the culture in the organization to be more in line with that

April K. Mills (20:25)
So my focus is always on the culture starts with one. So people will treat you the way you show up. And so show up as a change agent and the world will bend around you in reaction to it. Now I do have a chapter in the book where I talk about my son who's got special needs and he took a long time for him to walk. He had to walk with forearm crutches. And the first time we were really out in public, he was walking with his forearm crutches. And you could tell that people were really confused and concerned, right? It's different. He's a small child. He looks very fragile. And you had all these reactions from people about, well, you know, where's his mother? Cause I was watching him from a little ways away. I always joke, no one ever asked where's his father if a child is wandering off. But you know, they're watching him and you could tell there were people that wanted to either pick him up and do it for him. Take him someplace because he looks so fragile, let me help you. Or they were mad that he was off on his own and I wasn't hovering. And I use that story for the same thing here. Because when you go off and you say, let's make this optional, I'm passionate about it, I'm committed, and even if I'm alone in this room, I'm going to move this forward, people are going to look at you funny. Like my son with his forearm crutches because they're used to somebody walking off strong, demanding, creating space. But it doesn't mean that that's necessarily the best way to do it. And so you have to be comfortable being different. And I use the concept of change buffers to help people with that. A personal buffer might be like Richard Feynman, the noted physicist. I don't care what other people think. I'm going to be me, their concerns to the wind. A friendship buffer. I'm going to go off and do this. when somebody goes, April's crazy. I call my friend Brian and you go, you're not crazy. You're doing the right thing. Keep it up. Let's go for coffee, let's go for the beer, whatever. A leadership buffer, maybe you're my boss and you believe in this, you've seen it. I go off and do it, people give me a hard time. I go, hey, take it up with Brian, my boss. We do things this way in his group. Or back to that policy buffer. In my group, we drive change, not people. So when somebody shows up differently, folks go, you know, why are you doing that? it's just the way we work. And that's what I've built in organizations over the years. The people that were in The groups with me that were doing this, depending on how comfortable and how strong they felt, could either say, I'm different, live with it. Or they could say, we're different. Or the policy is different. Whatever they needed to feel strong enough to show up differently. Because when you show up differently, you get amazing results.

Brian (22:58)
Yeah. That's so, that's so awesome. I completely agree. What if people are listening to this and hearing all this and getting excited about it and thinking, yeah, this is, this sounds like something I want to participate in. is, it sounds like something I want to start to do. if someone feels inspired by this conversation and wants to be, become more of a change agent, uh, but they really just don't know where to start. What are some practical things that you would give them to say, here's, here's a good way to start to, to move down this path.

April K. Mills (23:27)
Yeah, well, the simplest one is that's why you write books, right? So my book is available. I self-published it on purpose to make it very affordable. So it's, think, $9.99. Everyone is a change agent. It's $14.99 for change tactics because I accidentally wrote a longer book than I intended. sorry. When I got the first copy, I'm like, oh, that's more than I thought it was. OK. But so both of those. So for, you know, the price of a meal.

Brian (23:44)
You

April K. Mills (23:54)
for one person these days with inflation, right? You can get two books that help you not only have the basis, but have some just simple tactics, almost like a recipe book you can use. And then later this spring, I'm rolling out with my Engine for Change Company, this Change Agent Essentials class, which is based on that content. I've been teaching it now for 10 years in corporations. As we were talking before we started, right, I'm a recovering hider in corporations, I guess. Now I'm coming out into the world. And so it's going to be available for folks if they want to take the class to get that more immersive experience. So I'm really excited to bring it to the world because it works. And I'm especially passionate about agile people using it because there's too much conversation around agile dying and we need better products delivered faster that customers love at the lowest possible costs. And I don't know a better way to get there. So we got to reclaim agile from the driving people.

Brian (24:47)
Yeah, I completely agree. you know, anyone who's been involved in Agile in any significant, you know, way I'm sure would probably agree that it's not that the core concepts in any way are, are less, valid or, or, or no longer practical or anything like that. It's just people have seen so much bad versions of things that now that that definition has been marred a little bit, I would say. And so now we, we, we have to kind of take Like you said, take back control of that a little bit and say, now here's what it really is, and here's why we do things this way. And I like your approach there. Find the common ground and say, here's, you know, we both believe in this. Well, what's the best way of doing that? You know, here's what we think.

April K. Mills (25:28)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's going to be a really exciting time as we go into 2025. There's so much change happening, but so much of it is at that default of driving people. So there's a huge opportunity to show up differently, to create a ripple. That one person can create that ripple. You three people can support each other while they try these new things. By the time you get to five, you almost have critical mass, right? At least two of you will always be online at any one time to support each other. And you can grow it from there. And I've seen great, great things happen. And it really is an unleashing of energy. If people can remember the first feeling they had when they found Agile and it was like, yeah, that feels more like what a professional does. And that excitement and that energy, you can get back to that and you can get back to that by driving change.

Brian (26:24)
Love it, love it, this is awesome. Well, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you coming on. We're gonna put links to everything in our show notes for everyone so you can get to April's company and find out more about her classes and also find out more about her books there as well. So April, thank you so much for coming on.

April K. Mills (26:40)
Thanks for having me. It was an honor to be recommended.

Brian (26:43)
Well, and our honor to have you on as well. So thank you for our listeners and recommending people and thank you April for making the time for us.