These days, in relative terms the control tower from which we launch new things stands atop the shoulders of generations of giants…and they’re all carrying really big fat nuclear sticks.
A few lines of code can change an entire banking system. One bad patch issue can take down an entire mobile network. We’ve seen it.
In other words, the term ‘viral’ has real meaning today. It means not just a hyperbolic effect/adoption curve, but more precisely it refers hyperbolic effects stemming from apparently puny origins.
But ‘apparently’ is an important qualifier here. I think the real fact is that the platform from which most changes originate–certainly technological ones–is so tall that many origins are only apparently puny. We have real power. Adult supervision is increasingly important.
More generally, I’ve thought for a long time that one of the most vexing truths of modern existence lies in the fact that our ability to change things generally far outstrips our own readiness for change.
Entire libraries of pop-business advice exist which offer tips on dealing with change. Cartoon characters (“Mordac the Preventer”) have been created to personify the situation. It gets personal too: hold onto your habits too dearly and you’re likely to be branded “change adverse” by faster moving peers.
Though a lot of what’s out there seems to focus on how we as individuals cope with change, the larger truth is what I began with above: we’re better at changing things than we are at changing. While the “just do it” or “just get used to it” approach to change has a place, it’s nowhere near a panacea. Pretending that it is or that it can be leads to a lot of organizational dysfunctionality and underperformance.
When it comes to tackling large scale change in particular, organized transition management offers a much more powerful tool than individual attitude adjustments or pep talks. Transition management is an admittedly imprecise term, but generally speaking it amounts to a structured, stakeholder-focused, managed effort to ensure that an organization is ready to make good use of the change it’s about to receive.
In another way of saying it, there’s the change itself and then there’s the socket for the change. Transition management is mostly about developing the latter.
Though it should be obvious, the penalty organizations pay for simply assuming they’re ready for change is low return on investment if not outright damage from the change.
By themselves, changes only create confusion and cost money to implement. The bigger the change, the more potential for chaos and the greater the cost of implementation. The only time changes result in benefit is when they reach production. Translated, “reaching production” means that the organization has successfully integrated the change into its business practices. That means the “socket” is working.
Most of the change projects I’m involved with have some technical component to them. In those projects, the overwhelming tendency is to assume that prepping the technology (the change itself) is enough to be successful. It’s the oldest (and most predictable) mistake in the book. Technologists far to easily assume it’s all about the technology. It’s the “If you build it, they will come” approach in a way.
Certainly the huge ascendancy of ‘pull technologies’ (e.g. opt-in technologies) over older ‘push technologies’ (e.g. use it and get used to it technologies), superficially supports the illusion that ‘if you build it, they will come’. The fact is that every successful opt-in based revolution from Google to Facebook succeeded because their authors understood and made a science of market receptivity, e.g. the socket. We think of the Brin’s and Zuckerberg’s as geeks, but what they really got right was understanding what we were ready for before the rest of us even knew it. Then they wrote the code.
Moreover, the ‘opt-in’ approach enjoys fullest play in the open marketplace. By contrast, most organizations still prey on semi-captive audiences internally. The cultural habits and behaviors (while similar in some respects and while generally converging) remain very different. In the open market, customers seek change. Inside an organization they mostly resist and resent it, probably because they just got used to being in the current place they don’t like very much.
As a consequence, while you may be able to identify a market (receptivity) and build for it externally, inside the walls of an organization you’d better be prepared to manufacture some consent.
That’s where transition management comes into play. Engineering and creation of the ‘socket’ for change is usually a project whose complexity equals or exceeds that of the change itself. And, it’s worth it. Remember, the change doesn’t yield you a dime until people use it and accept it.
Creating the socket means a few basic things:
- Understanding what will change
- Identifying stakeholders and influencers
- Understanding their relationship to the change
- Clarifying and setting stakeholder expectations
- Prepping stakeholders and shaping expectations
- Targeting change delivery specifically to optimize against expectations
In the best of worlds, transition management sits at the coordinating center of a concert of processes all geared to deliver on some aspect of a successful change project: change management, release management, risk management, deployment management, testing, evaluation, etc. The specific coordination and focus it provides is that which sets all sights on stakeholder readiness and fulfillment.
Does it have to be big? Not really. It just has to stubbornly advocate for the readiness/receptivity aspect of change. Though, in my experience, we do tend more often to underestimate what’s needed by way of transition management than the other way around.
So, the next time you’re about to embark on some grand undertaking or another, ask not what you can do only to make the change happen, but what you can do to make sure you’re ready to make good on it.
