We need to go faster

I've spent my entire professional career in the world of change.

Technology change, systems change, customer change, market change, business model change—navigating, enabling, motivating, and ultimately transforming groups, teams, and businesses from one set of norms to another. I've had huge wins and painful failures. I've had emotional breakdowns many times—sometimes from fear and other times from relief. Until recently, I had a pretty traditional point of view about the inputs, outputs, success criteria, and the time required to manage change.

Today, I am going back to first principles and rethinking my assumptions.

It's not that I don't still believe in the importance of buy-in, executive sponsorship, pilots, communication strategies, and scorecards—some of the many tools we employ to build success for transformational programs. These are all still important, but I don't think our existing models are going to serve us in the future. I think we are ready to move much (much) faster.

In 2020, many of us joked that COVID accelerated digital transformation from decades to months. Lost in the trauma of the lockdown was the reality that we changed our work norms overnight—and somehow got on with it.

One of the many joys of my sabbatical was my trip to India last year.

I have been to India several times since my first visit in 2001, and with every visit, I recognize signs of modernization and progress. (My early hopes were for personal safety improvements like bike helmets and baby car seats. I am delighted when I see both in use today.) But my trip last year made me realize my own lack of imagination about the art of the possible (although I'm still hoping to manifest sidewalks and zebra crossings 😎).

The digital transformation of daily life I saw on this trip was mind-blowing to this Bay Area native (the land of Waymo self-driving cars). All the things I thought were impossible in a place like India have not only happened but have occurred at a pace and scale that I find hard to fully grasp: the removal of small banknotes, the adoption of digital payments, the uptake of Aadhaar, and last-mile eCommerce delivery. India, like China, is living in a technology-enabled, consumer-focused future today. The speed of this transition is impressive by any measure. So inspiring. It made me realize that I need to think bigger about what is possible when you have the right motivation and resolve.

Even my parents have managed to [relatively successfully] master group texts, Facetime, Netflix and Wordle tools that while not in the strictest sense necessary, are generally expected skills today.

Taking a different thought experiment—how many of us have shifted our process of backing up a car from what we were taught in driver's training (for the kids: put your arm on the back of the passenger headrest and turn your body around to look behind the car while backing up) to using backup cameras? Or transitioned from opening a car door with a physical key to using a key fob? I could go on and on.

We are actually quite good at learning and change. We may find it a hassle, but we adapt when we have to—or if there is a compelling benefit for us to change. I have come to realize that organizational change has a lot to learn from consumer behavior change.

My sense is that we can learn from these successful examples to improve organizational change agility and achieve transformational outcomes. The key is to recognize the critical paths to de-risking change programs and to evolve our own beliefs about what constitutes a reasonable pace of change.

One of the things that makes change today different from before is our investment in design. Another major shift is our growing ability to quantify the arc of change management. In the early days of Facebook, there were frequent UX change roll outs. It was interesting to observe the lifecycle of those changes: from the announcement through the first week, there would be a huge spike in people complaining about the change. Then, by the middle of the second week, most had gotten the complaining out of their system and moved on.

Design teams became better at distinguishing between transitional feedback and real feedback—and began factoring that insight into their process. I believe we should build these learnings into our organizational change programs.

Specifically:

1. Invest in user experience—think through the lived experience of the person whose way of working will change. Stop assuming that success is just achieving a functional requirement. Driving adoption to achieve the business outcome must be the design criterion for any program. To do this well you must understand both the user and the work.

   
   

   Going back to digital payments in India—without investments low-cost smartphones, and digital payment infrastructure scaled not only to mid-sized businesses but also to the smallest of ventures (e.g., street food vendors) the results would have been very different.

   
   

2. Go faster. We tend to think that patience and giving people time to adjust is the better approach, but I’ve changed my point of view on this —I believe that going slow introduces more risk than it manages. Organizations naturally push back on change, and programs expand to the time they are given. In my experience, being good at offering extended care during a transition works better than being slow in adoption. Momentum can only build once you get moving.

   1. If change is especially difficult in your culture, it’s better to run a smaller pilot group quickly and then manage accelerated rollout waves, rather than build complex, fail-safe plans.

Don’t get me wrong, if your business can afford to go slow, then more power to you. Do what works for you. But if you need to do big things and build muscle for change, then investing in outstanding user experience, having a strong communication strategy, and building a very ambitious execution plan that pushes you outside your comfort zone will ultimately create the kind of organizational agility and culture that will serve you well beyond the specific program you’re rolling out.

Does my approach carry a risk of mistakes and failures? Absolutely. But you will learn from those mistakes and use them to build better experiences and even more ambitious adoption plans. If you get the measurements right, it will also give you real data to understand where improvements are needed—rather than trying to intuit where the soft spots exist.

We all have a lot of change heading our way, getting good at change will be a critical organizational capability. We need more change agents. Let's unlearn some of our internet era behaviors to unlock the value of the AI era.

Of course, I could be wrong, but what if I'm not.