Deploying new technology to support your business feels like it gets stranger and more complex with every passing year. But change management has always been a critical and necessary (and many times, overlooked) aspect of any adoption of new technologies or process improvement.
For instance, surely deploying a typewriter to replace ink and parchment was an easy decision to make, with clear gains for all involved. But imagine actually being the floor manager for a team deploying shiny new typewriters. Who maintains the machines? What if the tiny individual typebars break? Who stores and replaces the ink ribbon? What happens to office culture when suddenly quiet spaces become dominated by the clicks and rings of typewriters operating at pace and scale?
All of those seem easy enough to figure out with a little thought. But what did I leave out of that list? Maybe it was clear to you instantly, a little voice screaming in your head: what about the people who have never even conceived of a keyboard, handwriting perfected over a lifetime, suddenly asked to navigate keystrokes to complete their work?
Everyone, even those wholly devoted to the change, has to accept that productivity may suffer before it improves. Everyone has to slow down and learn a new skill in order to speed up. That tradeoff feels obvious in hindsight, but it can feel very tough on the person whose performance is being measured while they're scrambling to climb the learning curve.
And it doesn't take a time machine to understand how difficult that sell can be to end users accountable for productivity. Because this isn't a new problem! You're not alone! In fact, you've almost certainly lived this story before already! And the good news is, the solutions and necessary actions are still the same as they were well over 100 years ago. Before implementing a new resource or technology, you absolutely must deliberately:
Understand thoroughly and deeply how operations run currently
Map out what changes mechanically with this deployment
Determine how operations must then change to adjust to the new mechanics
And then the fun part:
Question all aspects of the old method, new technology means the way you did things before may no longer have the same old dependencies!
Cut any motion that doesn’t deliver the outcome required by the business.
Write new processes that can now fundamentally take advantage of the new technology.
Note that some steps in a process naturally exist not because the business needs them, but because the old technology did. If you eliminate the limitation, the processes built around it needs to be challenged as well.
And then arguably the most important part:
Put the new process in front of the operational team.
Solicit input from the day-to-day experts who will have to execute it.
Incorporate as much user feedback as possible into the published process to show their voices were heard.
Be ready to explain the finished vision, how it impacts the company positively, and how it will benefit them individually either financially, operationally or even emotionally.
Humans are not just creatures of habit; we are natural problem solvers and deeply emotional. That is a stunningly powerful combination when emotion drives us to bring solutions that align with organizational objectives. Unfortunately, it’s an equally powerful combination when brought to bear to find a way around organizational mandates that feel threatening, or even just difficult to understand.
Failing to bring the desk level along is where most implementations, with the best of intentions, fall flat at the critical moment. Just when you should be seeing the returns of the deployment at scale you instead run into a plateau, or even that dreaded brick wall. Truly caring about the success of a deployment means understanding how the change reaches all the way down to the desk level across every part of the organization it touches. Each team needs to understand not only what is changing, but how their work fits into the new operating model and why that change matters. When people can see their role in the finished vision and believe the organization has considered the realities of how they actually work, you have a far better chance of creating a unified workforce capable of delivering the results the technology was intended to unlock.
The technology enables the change you envision. The people doing the work ultimately put it into practice. Successful change management requires a strategy built for both.
Written by David Peckman, Chief Revenue Officer at MySavant.ai.