Ep. 132: Embedding change management in your digital transformation

In this episode, Peter and Dave discuss the importance of effective organizational change management in digital transformations. They highlight that simply implementing new processes and systems is not enough - organizations must also carefully manage the human aspect of change. This includes understanding the intangible factors and behaviors that can derail well-designed transformations. They emphasize the need to get close to the actual end-users, observe their behaviors, and adapt accordingly instead of relying solely on high-level communications.

This week's takeaways:

• Organizational change management is essential, not optional, for successful digital transformation.
• Go beyond just communications - understand real end-user behaviors and intangible adoption factors.
• Build capabilities to collect user feedback/telemetry, learn from it, and adapt the change process accordingly.

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Chapters

• 0:04 Organizational Change and Digital Transformation
• 7:09 Importance of Change Management in Transformation

Transcript

Peter: 0:04

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello, dave, how are you today? I'm very well, peter.

Dave: 0:16

Good to see you. Yeah, good to see you too. How are you feeling? Everything's been a little bit rocky in the last week or so, right, yeah? I've had a bit of a head cold, so if I sound gravelly on this recording, that'll be why Just play the recording 3am in the morning and it'll sound just perfect that mellow late night voice that you've got now. Yeah, late night DJ.

Peter: 0:38

Okay, so what are we going to talk about today?

Dave: 0:40

You raised a great topic, as we were just kind of catching up around change management, organizational change management and digital transformations, and it just happens to be a salient topic. It's something that we're discussing with a number of clients. We're seeing some of the consequences of it. I also think it's so important, especially in the kind of current climate where organizations are accelerating their change efforts. Climate where organizations are accelerating their change efforts. We've talked about this many times, but resources, time of key individuals is tight, which means the one thing they won't necessarily focus on or get onto the table and complete is that organizational change piece. How do you land the change?

Peter: 1:19

Yeah, and thinking about it as an afterthought rather than thinking about it as something that needs to be embedded as you bring these new things into play. So, if I've changed my business processes, I'm moving to a digital interface with my clients, whereas I had a sort of advisor-led interface before, where it was like a human talking to a human. Now I've got a digital interface and my sales, my interactions, come through that. But what's sitting behind that and how that gets implemented and how do I ensure that the people understand and have properly managed that and that there's an understanding of how this differs from the other interactions and all of the pieces that need to go into that to support it on an ongoing basis so that it's successful?

Dave: 2:07

Well, as you're describing that, Peter, I'm just thinking that so many of these is we're often missing the intangibles that those human interactions are managing. So in fact, I mean human interactions when we go into a branch.

Dave: 2:21

When we go and talk to somebody individually and we have a conversation, there's a lot more than the words being spoken being communicated backwards and forwards. So if we automate that, we lose all of that intangible piece. And I think that's what the organizational change is all about is how do we make sure that the experience that me as a customer, as an individual user of the system, is getting is better than, or at least as good as, the one I was getting before? And there's a bunch of intangibles in there.

Peter: 2:51

You cannot put a process diagram together that will capture those intangibles, so you need to spend time helping, really understanding that process to make sure that it is a better experience, because otherwise we'll automate everything, we'll tick, tick the box, we think we've got it made, but then people stop using it, they move on somewhere else and we've lost connection there yeah, and if and I think where this ties into the organizational change management is that if you, what you've done is create the transformation digital transformation center, you built all tooling, you put all the software into place and you've implemented it as that one-off thing that got happened, now it's done versus you've put the change, organizational change management into place so that the people who are supporting that system are actively understanding that they're going to need to look at the feedback that they get from these systems and they're going to need to experiment.

Peter: 3:43

And they're going to need to experiment and they're going to need to learn and they're going to need to change it because and they've got to keep it fresh and it's going to be a very different interaction mode than the traditional sales that the organization might have been doing I'm?

Dave: 3:56

I'm just as you're saying, I'm just thinking like I had a conversation this week and what often happens is when we're kind of helping, you know, design a process and move everything to some sort of new digital way of working, whatever it might be we can all get caught up in the nice clean, step-by-step-by-step process and the exposure it brings and all of these useful things.

Dave: 4:18

And I was in a conversation this week where we went through all of that. We're feeling pretty good about the changes that are coming through, and somebody said, yeah, that's all well and good, but you do know we're not going to change and it's or you know that particular conversation you're you're trying to lead to is never going to happen. And I think this is so true. It's these intangibles that just because there's a process does not mean the behavior we are expecting to see is actually the behavior that will happen. Because, again, behavioral economics right, we all know people behave not in this sort of rational kind of clear follow the steps way. People behave in a way that is driven by many, many things from biases and emotions and lots and lots of different contextual things to do what they think is the right thing, which is often not a simple.

Peter: 5:07

Follow the steps to get to where I need to go, and quite often as well, not necessarily even what they will tell you if you ask them. Absolutely, yes, yes. So so this, I mean, I was actually right. What's cool? We were talking about this in some training we were putting together for for a client in round, helping them understand this that they, you can go and ask your client what it is that, uh, they want, and they will tell you adamantly, absolutely convinced that that is the, that is how they want it to be. It's like, uh, it's like I want it to be yellow. And then, when and when they and then you actually see them take action and they go, and the thing that they go and buy, they buy a black one. And it's like, and you go and ask, well, why did you buy a black one? You said you wanted yellow, why did you buy black? Yeah, but it won't look good with my outfit.

Dave: 5:52

it's like or or I had an experience at school and I never buy anything yellow because it makes me feel uncomfortable. So it's not know, the rationality that we think of is just not always there, and this was a long way of circling around to say I think we saw a headline that kind of kicked this conversation off around. What is the one thing that's missing from digital transformations and change?

Dave: 6:14

management and I think so many times when we look at change management, which is important for transformations, we need to coordinate that change and help that process go through. But so many times that change management is seen as some sort of communication layer that sits over the top. And what I see is missing in so many cases is getting close to the individuals who are using the systems which are going through change to understand that CX bit, the customer experience or the user experience what is? Are we capturing? Are we delivering the benefit that they're expecting and are they? Is it clear to customers and users what those steps are so that they can go through and they can actually realize the benefit?

Peter: 6:58

Yeah, I mean another way that this is it's like communication, communication, communication. It's just, it's not just a thin layer across. They can actually realize the benefit. Yeah, and the. I mean another way that this is like communication, communication, communication. It's just, it's not just a thin layer across, it's always like continual, it's building it into the system. And we were talking about this recently on a podcast. We were talking about, uh, the, the, the importance of building the system, not just setting the goal. It's the. If we go, if we just build that goal and it's a one-off thing that we do, versus building the system that's going to continually support this then eventually the wheels will come off the car when we hit some trouble. The system won't save us.

Dave: 7:33

So we've got to get that system into place to support the ongoing development and the ongoing change that will be encompassed by the digital pieces that we're bringing to play, and I think so, if I kind of go back to that original question again, what is the key aspect of change management from a transformation, you know, that supports a transformation?

Dave: 7:54

I think it's really easy for us to focus on the process, on the communication, on this sort of these high level things.

Dave: 8:01

The first response I always think of when I'm thinking of change management that is missed is people. We're not spending enough time understanding the people, and I think this conversation is I drill that down to even say is the intangibles, and I almost feel like we should be finding the intangibles and having those stories through a change process where we go, but we never we had no idea that this was happening or that was happening. And so many times I talk to change teams, like change management professionals that are going through and they're not talking about those interactions. They're talking about the communications, they're talking about the lunch and learns they've had or these presentations and how frequently they've told people what's going on, but they're not sharing those peculiar stories of realization that the behavior that they thought was going to happen wasn't the behavior that actually happened and they had to tweak things as a result of that to try and get things kind of lining up and get that change successfully delivered.

Peter: 8:59

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? There's that disconnect between well, it's really an output versus the outcome, kind of thing. Right, that's where we're looking at the what. What are the, the activities that happened, versus the actual um, the, the learning that came out of that, and how do we get to apply that um so? So how would you go about summing this up? I mean, we've covered quite a lot of ground, I think, actually, in there, as we've been going through it.

Dave: 9:26

So I think I think it's the sort of grubby, dirty side of change management, in the sense that it is not. It is not sort of. I mean, we've been talking many times about kind of moving up into leadership and doing these things at a leadership level and I think you know, if you look at the question as to what the you know is, is change management valuable? Absolutely, in fact, I wouldn't say it's valuable. It's essential for these big digital transformations. You're doing system and process changes but you're not following it through with some sort of change management conversation. And where that goes I think that's the first thing to recognize is system and process changes without a commensurate focus on the change management and the people changes is important.

Dave: 10:10

The second point is that it isn't away from where those systems and the transformation is actually happening. It's actually much closer. So it's almost like that customer experience, user experience. You're in the weeds because you're seeing, you're trying to find out what those intangibles are that we don't know about, that nobody's telling you about, but their behaviors are changing and you can't do that through presentations at the board level. You can't do that through communications to leadership. You do it by observing users and customers and seeing what they're doing and seeing where they stumble and helping them, you know, putting guidelines in place so that that transition is as smooth as possible.

Peter: 10:50

Yes, yeah, and building. One of the pieces I see, too, that there's a technical element to that that sometimes gets missed is that you've got to put the effort into building the capability to collect that information and that learning so that you can have that feedback to even have the conversation. So this is, if we're pushing out expense, I need a way of being able to do that. I need to be able to have hey, I want to be able to direct 5% of my customers to this version of it, and I need to be able to read the telemetry for how that 5% behaves versus the other 95%, so I can compare the two things. And that's you've got to build those capabilities and make that visible to the right people to ensure that that, that those capabilities there, and that's got to be included as a part of your overall change management efforts the ability to do things like that.

Dave: 11:41

Yeah, and I and I think the final piece that I'd pick up there and I really liked what you're saying on this one, because the consequence of putting that telemetry and the consequence of being thoughtful about what you expect to see change and whether it's changing or not, is you end up with those stories coming through and I think, if I'm thinking back to the sort of transformations which have been meaningful and have had a significant impact to whatever the bottom line was, the goal was to kind of change. What comes out of it is there are stories coming out from those teams that have been involved because they really did get to see these weird, intangible moments where something odd is happening. And I'm just thinking this is going years back. But to situations where you know the little widget that you put in the corner, you think is nice but nobody's going to use, becomes the primary. You know the primary reason that people visit that particular area in your HR finance system, whatever it is, because it's very, very useful and all of a sudden people know where to find it. They use it all the time.

Dave: 12:46

And these little stories that come out of weird behaviors that nobody was expecting but suddenly became very talked about and very valuable and a clear indication of oh, we missed something there, but it actually came out to the good. That's what's often missing in this sort of more formal. We've hit this timeline, we've got these changes out. The people you know, customers have moved from system X to system.

Peter: 13:11

Y and so on, but you're not hearing those stories. Yes, so you've got to have the bits to collect, I think. With that I'd like to wrap up, and if you want to hear more of us rambling on about things, then you can get all of us at feedback@d efinitelymaybeagile. com, and don't forget to hit subscribe. Thanks again, Peter. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast, where your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.