Organizational Change Management Training: Everything You Need to Know About Change Management

topic is focused on something pertaining to digital transformation so whether it be you know cloud-specific erp systems that we recommend or a deep dive into cyber security different concepts around digital transformation we bring in experts from our team who have been in the industry for years to share insights share best practices but we're also creating a platform for you to jump in and ask questions from those experts you have a clear line to the people who are going to be speaking today to ask any questions about what you're going through with your organization what your experiences are or even if you have ideas that complement or you know kind of play devil's advocate to our speakers we'd love to hear from you so don't be hesitant jump in get involved and we'll talk about organizational change management now today like i said it's everything you know need to know about ocm so you know it's spring changes in the air so what better timing and for me honestly organizational change management is probably one of my favorite topics that we discussed just because it's so important and the roi is is there if you have a successful ocm strategy i mean if you think about it thousands of companies are implementing the same technologies right but what is the main differentiator it's the people it's the people on the front line it's the people who are implementing all across the board it's the human factor it's not necessarily the technology so what are the different ways that you can you know deliver change to your team in a successful manner and really drive those results that you're looking for so that's what we're going to be talking about here today and we have our global third stage team here that's going to walk us through three different sessions so just a little breakdown of how it's going to work we're going to have three 50-minute or so sessions and in between we're going to have a 10-minute break so throughout those sessions even on the break jump in with the questions like i said jump in with the comments we want to hear from you um and we'll we'll make it more of a conversation if you will so with that let's go ahead and kick off our first topic so eric is here with me on the stage this is eric kimberling he's the founder and ceo of third stage consulting and many of you have probably seen his work thus far from his videos to the podcast to the various blogs the white papers the reports he is constantly putting out new content um and has become a thought leader in all things digital transformation and specifically in organizational change management now his tenor arranges 25 years not to date you eric but he i know i know i'm sorry but he has a lot of experience in what we're about to talk about today and he's going to be talking about to kick us off uh really just an overview of what is organizational change management and why is it important so with that eric i'm going to go ahead and pass it to you all right great thanks parisa and thanks for everyone joining today um i have to apologize in advance there's a high likelihood that my video is going to be glitchy today at least the video of me talking because i'm on a hot spot due to a technical issue in the office i'm at today while traveling so hopefully the audio comes through okay if you have trouble hearing me at any point along the way um maybe just pop it in the chat and preset and the team will keep an eye on that we have with plan b's and backup plans in place in case uh i lose audio or video for some reason but hopefully that won't be a problem but again thank you for being here to talk about is probably my favorite topic to talk about uh if that i started my career as a change management consultant so that's really the way i see the world and the way i grew up in the world of consulting with things through a people and organizational change lens and even after 20 to 25 years of doing this and getting involved in other parts of digital transformation business transformation i always seem to come back to change management is where the core of of uh key success factor and that's the other point the other reason why i love talking about this is because i think it's a completely underrated discipline and i think it's the most critical part of any sort of transformation a lot of people won't say that or admit that if you're outside the world of change management but that has been my finding or my experience is that that is the most important thing the other uh part of this is that um that i want to chat about here today is uh i actually have a deck i'm gonna share with you um and that will hopefully give us some uh some good discussion points here so bear with me while i try to make sure i can pull up my screen it looks like i can alright so uh if you do not see my screen please chat or if you could just chat and let me know if you do see it that that's even more helpful just to make sure that um make sure that it's coming through okay so uh what i want to talk about today is is really change management strategy versus reality and how we connect the dots between these two uh these two aspects of change management between the strategy of it and the reality of it and what we're going to do today by the way is i'm going to spend the first block of this workshop today the first uh 50 minutes or so talking about an overview of change management the second hour we're going to get into a q a discussion with three other team or two other team members from our or three other team members from our global team as well as myself and then in the third segment which i'm really excited for we're going to have two of our change management consultants talk through more detail around methodology so i'm going to give sort of a flyover change management we'll get into some q a and a panel discussion next and then during the third hour of today's workshop in about two hours from now a little less than two hours from now we'll dive into the uh some of the methodology in more detail around how to execute on a change management plan but in the meantime just to give you a quick introduction i've been in the space as paris i said for over 20 years i started off as a change consultant at pricewaterhouse doing big massive bloated sap implementation so for better for worse that's where i learned about change management and the benefits of doing change management as well as some of the challenges of what happens when you don't address change management well so i'm excited for today's discussion again so just real quickly i guess to start i would love to hear some comments here about your experience with current and past transformations and just as a context setting here we're streaming in a few different locations here today we're streaming on linkedin which i have open right next to me so if you see me keep looking over to my right it's because my right your left it's because i'm watching the chat on linkedin we're on crowdcast obviously which is right in front of me and we're also streaming live on youtube so and i'm watching all three of those platforms as is the rest of our team so if you have any questions or comments i'd love to see your comments in whichever stream you're watching and the first question i have is if you could summarize your your experience with current past transformations maybe just chat it in the in the box here and i know it's probably difficult to summarize in a single you know text chat type of thing but if you have any sort of experience like change has been difficult or we didn't address change or you know you wish people would think more about management within your organization or you know you don't know what change management is i would just love to get a real quick summary sort of headline view of what your experience with change has been um or if you're a consultant maybe talk about that you know your consultant that does change or whatever the case may be i'd love to just hear some comments around what your backgrounds are and get some context for for who you are so let's start there and i'd love to and i'll read through some of these chats as were as we're going through the discussion here as they start to come in so to start i'm going to come back to that question here in a second i'll go through some of the responses we get but just to summarize what change management is in the meantime essentially what change management is in the simplest term is to is is anything that prepares people for the transformation that you're about to go through whether it's a digital transformation a business transformation whatever the transformation may be and it's also anything that drives transformational performance so i think the operative terms here are people and performance so and i think that's a very important uh differentiator thing to to comment on or to hone in on here is that change management is not just a nice to have or a um you know something you do to make people feel good although those are secondary benefits for sure but really this is about the transformational performance and if you're you know for doing change management in a way that doesn't directly impact performance then we're probably doing it wrong we're probably focused on the wrong things so if we had to summarize for someone why is change management important yes it's about people and i think most people genuinely understand that but i think where a lot of people especially executives and project leaders and that sort of thing and i don't want to stereotype even though i am stereotyping i don't need to generalize too much but a lot of times executives and project leaders don't fully understand what change management is and they think it's just about people but the key differentiator in the way we view it is also about performance if you address the people side in the way that changes behavior and translates into operational results you're going to get performance so that's the the big selling point i would say for change management i think often gets lost in the translation or lost in in the in the mix along the way um so while we're uh before we dive into the next segment where we unpack this comment or this whole what is organizational change concept a little bit more i want to read some of the comments that i'm seeing so far on the different live streams we have going here um karen over on crowdcast says that sis often do not embrace and value change management over installation that's a hugely important point that i could not agree more with system integrators are there to help you design build and deploy technology they may do what they call change management which is typically training maybe some light communication but they don't really do change management is a broad generalization they're there to help figure out how to get people to use the system and that's very different than organizational change management for broader transformation and for most organizations that are deploying technology they typically aren't deploying technology just for technology's sake typically they're also trying to drive some broader transformation um so great great comment there and i agree with your point there another uh comment here on crowdcast from liam boyd is we don't have time for process change creation documentation we need the technology implemented now to give us the space and resource for that change i mean he put that all in quotes by the way so i think that's something i think what he's suggesting is that something he hears from others within his organization so um and that's a great point too the focus of his comment is on process change creation documentation and that's ultimately what we're trying to change typically we're trying to change business processes that people execute so if we don't have time to define what or clearly define what the business processes are we're probably not going to do a very good job of change management no matter how good we are at change management so that operational business process piece is definitely a prerequisite to addressing change management well um i have there's a bunch of comments here over on linkedin so i'm gonna get to a few of these here and i apologize i probably won't be able to get to all of them and i appreciate all these great comments i didn't expect uh this many people to join and all at the start with all these great feedback so this is a good problem to have um comment here is uh most challenging for me and this is from vadim over on linkedin he says the most challenging uh for me is to save a mature generation and team and implement rapid changes they simply don't accept it all so it sounds like it's a 50 to 60 year old company so the most challenging for me is it's a mature organization with this team and how do you implement rapid changes when you've been around for 50 or 60 years as an organization uh they simply don't accept it at all so that's a very real headwind that we see especially with uh older more established organizations that that's definitely a big challenge a lot of times you know startups and younger companies have an easier time changing simply because they're moving so fast and they don't have the history and the organizational baggage for lack of a better word that they have to overcome they can start with more of a clean slate so if you're a within an organization that is more established more mature that's all good stuff but when it comes to changing quickly that makes it more difficult um so we have a couple people here they're saying they're brand new and change management they're here to learn about change management um another comment here is from brett ganaway over on linkedin he says in my opinion the most difficult part is turning non-techie people into people that embrace cloud technology and that's a really good point with cloud technology you're sort of shifting from more of an i.t behind the scenes type of function to more of the now the business users are the ones describing a lot of the traditionally technical aspects of a deployment and certainly the maintenance and the continued improvement of that software so um that's a that's a great point as well and then i'll i'll just pick uh another comment here um over here on linkedin um this is uh from reaven naidu over on linkedin he says the people side is my favorite most challenging platform working to bring about change within people but expanding their heart and alignment of personal and business values and that was that's very well put and i think you know alignment and values are two big part managements that are um that are important and we want to make sure we we address and we'll talk about that here as we go through the presentation so um thank you for those comments really appreciate um and then i'll get one more comment just over on youtube just to make sure i'm hitting all the live streams here um one of the comments over on youtube is that uh uh dumbia so that underestimating people underestimating people resistance to change is one of these challenges that he faces so uh thank you for all those comments so um very well stated and uh where where you all are with your with your transformation journeys right now yeah and hey eric it's kyler here just with a um a logistical note if you are on a live stream go ahead and pop questions in the comment section and we'll go ahead and put them in the question section on crowdcast so we'll be able to address them throughout the event so don't worry about getting missed great stuff thanks so much yeah thanks tyler and i'll we'll all keep an eye on all these live streams just to make sure we're we're in involving everyone regardless of where you're watching here today um so the the next uh comment or thread i wanted to talk about is how change is difficult and personal uh one of the most common things that we hear from clients and it seems like i don't know i don't have any science or data to back this other than qualitative observations but in our experience in recent years it seems like this is becoming more of a phenomenon that i don't fully understand why this is but it seems as though more and more organizations are shifting into this flawed mentality that our people are ready for change they don't like the way things are today they're tired of the old system they really want a cloud solution something user friendly and so therefore change management surely can't be difficult and that's a really big blind spot or pitfall that a lot of organizations put into and it's hard to it's hard to communicate and to educate organizations of how flawed that assumption is without letting them just step into the landmine or step into the pitfall and and the reason for that is that because change is is difficult and personal um that is a a big challenge and what we often see in fact i was uh today i'm traveling at a client uh here in the united states and it reminded me of this presentation i was about to give because we were dealing with someone who's very high up in the organization at this particular client who has been around at the organization for over 20 years and has been very successful at this organization but the way that she's been successful has been by being a hero i mean she's holding that a lot of that organization together just based on pure heroics and brute force and and and will you know she's she's doing a lot of work that she really shouldn't have to do but she's doing it because there's limitations to processes and people and so there are processes in technology i should say so on the surface you may think well great it's great to have someone like that surely she's going to want the change because her job is so difficult and it doesn't need to be that difficult but she takes a lot of pride in the fact that she is holding that together so that's something that's worth noting we see this a lot where sometimes your best people the people that are most instrumental and crucial to your operations today are going to be the ones that are going to have the most trouble the change in the future and the reason for that is because people are comfortable with what they know anytime something's forced on them they start to question things and people change or don't change or resist change for their own reasons either because they understand and believe in the new direction or because they don't um in which case they'll resist it or they follow orders from leaders if it's a you know the type of subordinate or employee who will just follow what their leaders tell them in that case then change management might be a little bit more difficult but most organizations don't have people that are just blindly following they'll ask questions they'll they'll want to understand before fully embracing and buying into the change they trust peers that are who are on board they're excited to learn something new that could be a good initiative or a good incentive for people to want to learn um changing enables them to keep their jobs and then finally in some cases people are rewarded for for changing and supporting the change so we have to think about how do we how do we recognize how different people tick and how can we motivate them and incent them in different ways and in every person every work group every business unit every department within your organization is going to have different nuances that you have to be able to navigate so there's no cookie cutter one-size-fits-all approach you have to really sort of do more of a surgical focus on what is gonna drive people what's gonna make them tick so another concept to build on that is is that there's a number of common people challenges and when when we think about change oftentimes or when we think about resistance to change i should say we oftentimes think about the person that just flat out refuses to change and they they're not on board they they're very vocal about the fact that they don't like this project or they don't think that we should be going through this transformation those people are pretty rare in most organizations that we work with you don't see a lot of that you don't see a lot of people that are just flat out on the surface resisting change most people for the most part i think deep down want to change or they see the vision for the organization and they want to support the direction of the organization and i think you know in general people want or people mean well and the challenge is is not so much that that intentional resistance or even sabotage of a project although to be honest at least with sabotaging and that intentional resistance it's very clear where the resistance is it's very easy to spot and detect so that's the good news about it but it's but it's very rare the bigger problem is almost like a it's almost like a iceberg tip of the iceberg yes are those are those very few people who flat-out resist the change but underneath the iceberg that's where resistance really happens and that's typically coming from places that are unintentional so people typically don't resist change because they intentionally want to resist change or they intentionally want to sabotage a transformation or they don't want to support the organization typically it comes from unintentional places of misunderstanding so you have things like you know we there there's a perceived loss for example so in the client example i gave you just a second ago with the the female executive that had been with the company for a long time and it was that is really holding together a lot of that organization she inevitably is going to have a fear of loss and she has not articulated this to us but we've seen it enough times to know that we the change and the change management is going to be a threat to her because suddenly she's she may question her value she's not going to know what to do with her time or where her value is going to come from if it's not fixing problems or figuring out ways to tie together this hodgepodge of systems they have now so that's the type of thing we have to think about it's not that she's going to intentionally sabotage the project but she will be scared in some way at some degree so we have to figure out how do we ensure that we we overcome that unintentional resistance and then there's also misunderstanding a lot of times people just don't understand what the purpose of the transformation is a lot of times the project team and the executive team don't understand either which makes it even more confusing for the organization so we have to have clarity and understanding starting at the top starting with executives and then working our way down to the project team and then finally misalignment is a common reason that people will unintentionally resist change so whenever an organization is misaligned it is not rowing in the same direction again it's not that people are trying to sabotage a project or sabotage the organization but the problem is they're not aligned when they're not aligned they can't fully embrace and support a change because they're not going in the same direction so we have to ensure that we have a lot alignment throughout the organization in addition to misunderstanding overcoming misunderstanding and overcoming other sources of of unintentional resistance so we have to look beyond the obvious change management issues and look below the tip of the iceberg to fully understand where those challenges may come from and you can see on the right side of the screen here there are a lot of symptoms to some of these people challenges people will oftentimes refuse to accept the changes they'll continue to work around the system or work around the the future state operating model and revert back to the way things work they'll all often times manifest resistance to change in the form of customization requests if it's a technology deployment so in other words they'll rather than adapting to the new software they will try to find a way to change the software to fit the way things are today um and that ends up leading to paving the cow paths or just simply doing things the way you always have but now with new technology and then finally another symptom that oftentimes will get executives attention more than any of the other things we've talked about so far is the operational disruption it causes when you don't adequately address some of these common people challenges and you could argue there's your business case for change right there if you want to avoid disruption and when i talk about disruption it's not just hey things are a little more difficult they're a little bit harder to get used to it's more material operational disruptions like we can't ship product or we can't close the books those are two common examples of material operational disruption that's very common especially when you don't address the people side of change so again any any questions along the way i'd love to hear your comments here um in fact i might just uh pull a couple here because there i see them streaming in as i'm speaking here um one of the comments here from from vangee over on crowdcast is a low adoption under undermines the expected benefits to be realized from the transformation initiative and that's absolutely true so you in addition to thinking about the operational disruption that i just mentioned you know that's just basic let's avoid a disaster type thinking you know let's avoid operational disruption that that alone can build a business case for change but if we want to think even more strategically and look beyond the concept of just avoiding chaos or avoiding a disaster we then need to think about well how do we maximize our roi on this how do we optimize our operations going forward and get a true roi on this project and if we're going to do that we need high adoption in order to realize those business benefits so that's a great a great point um another question is from he says can we say business analysis is part of change management and i would say yes i i tend to view the way i view change management and i tend to like to hire people on our team that think the same way and that's part of why we have the team we have here today speaking uh to support this this workshop uh later today is that they don't think about ocm typically in a in a uh in isolation or in its own silo they think about change management being integrated into the operational improvements and the overall project management to even the technology design and rollout so all those things are are important it should be integrated and the last thing we want to do is treat ocm as sort of a stand-alone siloed work stream because well for first of all what's likely to happen is change management will end up getting cut at some point when people realize there's so much work to do and we're going to go over budget and this is going to take more time and effort than we thought change management becomes even more of a risk of getting cut when when that happens so if we can embed management throughout the project and integrated that that makes things a lot a lot better um a couple other comments here i'll get to and and keep the comments coming these are great discussion points um usually here's a question that i'll address here uh that just came in over on and that is why are people resistant to change commonly due to leadership being distant from the ground level change comes across by hand holding and leading on the front line change comes from res residents who from those who lead the chain so this is a really good point change management even though at times when we talk about alignment we talk about a change management or we talk about a top-down sort of approach to change management when we talk about alignment because that does start at the executive level you need buy-in at the executive level and then that ultimately needs to work its way down the organization but beyond that when you start talking about the real change the in the um you know in the battlefield or in the trenches of change you do have to get down on the front lines and fully understand how the operations are working today and how they're going to operate in the future one of the things that i don't like about change management and one of the things that has frustrated me as a change management consultant over the years has been the sort of thinking that one we operate in a silo which i already mentioned but the second thing that frustrates me is when change management becomes a super theoretical academic sort of exercise because none of that stuff really matters if we can't get people in the trenches to actually change their behavior and we're not going to do it by doing sort of the flyover change management where we send out some emails put together a real nice communications plan and fire off you know project newsletters and whatnot or maybe even have a you know a couple messages coming from the ceo that's all great stuff that's good what i call the flyover the air game of change management but for change management to really succeed you've got to get down on the ground and you've got to have really good ground game to support that air cover you're getting at the you know sort of the top down level so that's even another reason why that integration to operations and technology is so important and just to give you a real quick um data point or experience point with my background when i first started at pricewaterhouse forced me to go get certified in sap and i did not want to get certified the last thing i wanted to do was learn how technology works and the word erp just did not appeal to me at all which is strange saying today because i built a whole career i'm just focusing on erp transformation but at that time being young and naive in my you know early to mid 20s i did not want to do erp or anything technology related i was a change consultant i was all about strategy and stuff like that what i've learned over the years is that you have to have you have to have a good understanding to be a good change consultant you have to have a good understanding of operations and how supply chains work how technology works you can't be an expert in everything but you need to be able to speak the language and you need to be able to help guide people through the change by speaking their language they don't speak the language of change they speak their language and you have to adapt to them so i think that's a key part of being a good change practitioner whether you're internal or whether you're a consultant i think that's equally important so great point there around why people resist change and how the the executive and the front line of support is so important okay the great questions i'm going to make sure we leave at the end here uh to get to some of these because they keep coming in on all the all the platforms here so just some common change management myths that are worth noting or worth debunking i should say is that change management equals training and communications that's probably the most common thing we hear especially from system integrators and software vendors or anyone that just doesn't really understand change management if they if they think of change management and they're thinking training and communications that's because they're thinking about it from a technology first perspective how do i get people to adapt to new technology and training communications and technology adoption those are all important parts of change management that is a small part of change management there's a lot more to it well beyond that so and we're going to get to what that means and how broad that is both at a high level in this conversation but certainly in the uh the third segment today's workshop as well the other common myth is that new technology equals transformation or in other words technology will drive the change for us and technology really isn't going to do anything for organization to be honest i mean certainly it provides a few enablers here and there it provides the possibility of being able to be more efficient and to have better visibility and to be more effective and provide better customer experience better employee experience all that stuff yes technology can enable that but if all you do is deploy technology and even if you get people to use the technology that was built to be used that isn't going to drive the technology that is not going to drive the transformation i should say instead we need to focus on the people side and also the operational side and some other areas but the people side is really in my opinion the heart of it all really enabling that transformation and connecting the dots between the possibilities of technology the business processes that they enable and ultimately it's the people that sort of lights the fuse or fights the spark that makes it possible and then the third common myth is that consultants will use the actual change and as much as i'd love to say that if you just hire all of us here on the workshop and uh others on the third stage team we will manage this change for you and everything's gonna be great that's simply not true we will help you we'll guide you we'll provide a framework we'll guide you through the process we'll even behind the scenes do a lot of the heavy lifting but ultimately you or the organization going through the transformation has to be the face of change they have to be the ones to execute to be in the be in the front lines you can't outsource change management to a bunch of consultants and assume that they're going to handle it for you you need to be heavily involved in it as well and quite frankly get your hands dirty in the in the change process so watch out for those three common myths i'd be curious to hear in the chat if any if any of these resonate with you if you're seeing any of these three myths in either transformation you're involved with now or perhaps have been in the past so just a few other comments here around some of the change management principles first is you want to involve all employees and all people on your team to create organization ownership i need to update this slide by the way because i i despise the word personnel it sounds very dated to me or it sounds like something from the 70s or 80s but think of it as team members that everyone on your team needs to be involved in creating that organization as i mentioned before you want to drive change from the top down and the bottom up so it gets back to the point that um we're even arriving i apologize for whichever way i've mispronounced your name um you talked about how you want to start uh you want to get down in the trenches or you know work at the online level as well as at the executive level gets back to that that point there too um you want to customize change plan there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all answer i think one of the shortcomings of of some change consultants and change practitioners is that they you know they go learn a tool set whether it's pro size certification or any sort of change management framework and they try to apply that universally across different situations and what you have to do is think of it as a tool set you've got a toolbox and you've got to pull out the right change management tools and apply them with differing amounts of focus and discipline based on what the lay of the land is and what it is you're trying to accomplish so that's a common challenge to uh that you want to make sure you watch for is you want to treat change management as a as a custom sort of approach that can certainly use proven tactics but not all tactics are created equally in different situations you want to measure effectiveness effectiveness throughout for real-time adjustments um and the more you can be quantitative and measure things the better so we often times with our clients we'll do a series of organizational assessments throughout a transformation to gauge how the needle's moving and also gauge and identify those organizational issues that are percolating and starting to pop up that we didn't anticipate and as much as i'd like to say that if you implement a solid change strategy and plan upfront you're you're going to address everything and everything should be predictable from a change perspective this is probably the most unpredictable unpredictable part of change management is the people side because we're dealing with humans and because we can't humans do or won't do so we need to make sure that we're measuring organizational readiness throughout and that we're adjusting our change strategy and plan as we go and then we want to accentuate change related data specific to those that are affected so that's why doing change impact analyses for example is so important which we'll get to that later in the workshop and identifying how specific work groups departments and individuals within an organization are going to be affected differently and speaking that language and tailoring the change to that reality that they're dealing with driving buying through proper documentation of need and benefits new environments change how things get done which requires new skills and then finally always keeping people in the loop with what is happening and why and i think where a lot of people do is they they sort of jump down to number eight on this guiding principle list they they think of change management as hey we're just gonna keep people in the loop we'll send out some newsletters some emails we'll have our ceo you know pop a slide or two into his all employee his or her all-employee presentation and we'll keep people in the loop and that's our change management plan and by the way we'll help them you know with training when we get to that point so back to that slide about what training or what change management is not because it's not just training and communications it's all these other things too so we can't forget steps one through seven along the way as well so i want to get into it at a high level uh into the change management tool set but real quickly i want to pull a couple other questions because there's so many cool questions coming in here that i enjoy i enjoy hearing um so another uh question here i noticed teresa popped in a youtube video that that will be a good supplementary or a good supplement to this discussion um liz way on crowdcast says i like the distinction between intentional unintentional resistance which which requires different similar solutions um thank you appreciate that um liam boyd over on crowdcast asks have you ever yourself been caught in one of these challenging mindsets if so did you realize it at the time or was it in hindsight um and i would say uh and i think liam's referring to the slide i talked about the three uh the three common myths and i'd say all three of those are ones that i was guilty of early in my career and that's in some ways or in some teams i worked on as a change consultant that's the approach we took were sort of those misguided myths and so you know we ended up focusing a lot on uh training we focused a lot on communications we treated it as simply a top-down sort of as far into the uh the front lines and identifying change impacts and you know translating our our messaging to those people and quite frankly some of those early mistakes or some of those early opportunities for improvement in my career are what inform how you know we view change management now third stage and it has certainly informed my personal philosophy about change management over the years as well and even you know the partner that made me get the six or the uh sap training was uh also informative i also had a mentor that encouraged me to go get lean six sigma certified as a change consultant which i did and that was super helpful and i highly value change consults that can speak that language as well um so i i guess i'd say yes i've fallen prey or fallen victim to all three of those mindsets uh especially earlier in my career um and then uh another comment here uh over on linkedin from uh maxime or it's either mex mexican i apologize again for the mispronunciation i'd say one of the myths is that transformation is not always one big thing it can be the result of many small optimizations which can also make it easier to get adopted and that's very well put it doesn't necessarily need to be this big massive change that happens all at once in fact if you can use the change management program to pull forward some of those changes so that you're doing more of an incremental steady drip of change into the orchid organization that's typically going to be more effective for a lot of organizations because it's primarily because it's so hard to take in change all at once and that's just a lot to absorb when you spring it all on people in a training session for example and that's a dynamic we see very commonly when people have not invested in change management is you get to end user training and everything just seems to be going great but then people start to freak out when you get to end user training you know 30 or 60 days before go live and that's a problem because you don't want people freaking out right as you're getting ready to go live you want them freaking out a year before you go live or whenever it is so the more you can start to clearly define those changes upfront and then start to introduce changes to the organization as you can you don't need to wait and plan for this big massive go live event you can start changing operating procedures you can start changing behavior you can start changing workflows even though the technology might further enable it make it easier to deploy those changes you can at least start getting the mindsets in place um you know as an example we had a client this was a long time probably you know 15 years ago so the technology we're working with is dated at this point but the approach is very relevant today and that is we we were working with a company that was on an old mainframe system and they were moving over to sap and rather than just wait until we were going to go live with sap you know two years out or whatever it was we decided that there's a lot of these process changes that that are just simple problems or type stuff that we can start rolling out now and yes they're gonna have to use lotus notes or spreadsheets or emails or whatever to manage it's not ideal but we're at least getting people in the mode of thinking about for example how to how to approve a purchase order you know we're going to put a new process in place for purchase order requisitions and approvals let's put that in place now even before the new system is rolled out we can do that via email or you know on paper if we had to but at least we're getting people in the mindset of getting approval and going through the proper channels um and then when the technology comes into place it's not that big of a change now we're just learning how to do it the same process in the technology so anything we could do to move that forward is very very good so i i appreciate those those comments that's very helpful and i'll keep coming back to these lists on all all the all the streams here i mean then one other question that's just an easy one so i'll knock it out over on youtube uh irfan asks how can we get this presentation uh just email us or i'll ask paris or kyler to put in the chat over on youtube and all the live streams here of where to get the presentation but you can email us we'll we'll get you a copy of this and presentations as well be happy to happy to share with you all right so go back to the deck here so change management tool set there's a there's a number of things that go to go into place and this is an example that we use for some clients and some clients you know it's a slightly different tool set and actually i'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because uh i want when when julie and teresa who you'll meet here uh later in a little bit they're going to go into methodology in a bit more detail so i'm not going to talk a lot about this here but what i will say at a high level is that you'll see the obvious stuff here on the slide like the um the communications you certainly have training as part of your change strategy but you'll see some other things on here that maybe you haven't thought about yet like leadership alignment leadership alignment is not just hey the leadership team approved the project and they're signing the checks okay that's great but that's just a minimum ante to be able to do the transformation now you need them to really be aligned and that that is where a lot of companies get stuck because they have different visions for what this project means or what this transformation means to the future of the organization or even more fundamentally a lot of times executives are not aligned on what they want to be when they grow up and if they don't know what they want to be when they grow up it's nearly impossible for them to know how this transformation should look and how it's going to support the future state of the organization they might have some high level goals and and strategies in mind like you know realize 20 growth year over year or enter these new markets or integrate our new acquisition into our core operations and those are all great starting points we need to go a level deeper in defining alignment and what we want to be when we grow up and we've had i have a whole presentation just on strategic alignment that i highly encourage you to check out i think it's on my i think it's on my youtube channel but uh kyler or parisa if you happen to know where that is maybe you could direct people to it i unfortunately don't know where where it is exactly but if you on my youtube channel if you just look up alignment you'll probably find it there and if not we can uh send you a link so some of the objectives though that we want to accomplish as well and i'm not going to go through all of these don't worry that would take forever but i'll let you read through these here as we're talking but generally you know the objectives of what we want to accomplish in the tools we use cover the whole gamut the whole spectrum of change everything from that high level alignment to the training communications business process improvements deploying organizational changes which by the way that's another key part of change management that people often overlook is defining what the organization is going to look like you know forget about processes and technologies and user enablement now let's talk about just in general what is the organization going to look like are there different reporting relationships our roles and responsibilities going to change which in most cases they do change it's just a matter of how clearly you define them or not so we want to make sure we clearly define the organization in its future state just as clearly as we define the technology future state we oftentimes spend so much time you know way too much time investing just in the technology and getting that to work and clearly defining the way the technology is going to work but we don't spend nearly enough time defining how our processes are going to work and even more importantly how our organization is going to look and how roles and responsibilities and jobs are going to look at the future and if we treat that as an afterthought or something we'll just figure out later it's going to be pure chaos at the time of your transformation so that's another area to look at it optimizing business benefits and post implementation results those last two boxes in the bottom right i think those are really important and worth noting again back to that mindset of not treating change management is just a pure people for people's sake perspective or treating it as a nice to have or a feel-good type of work stream it should actually deliver tangible business benefits and all of our change efforts should be focused on how do we improve performance improve people but in a way that doesn't just make us feel good but actually delivers business results and that sounds like a subtle shift but it's a very important uh very significant shift in mindset compared to many change programs and i mentioned before that one of the things that we do is a organizational change readiness assessment and generally we'll do these sorts of assessments early before a transformation ever begins but then we'll also do it throughout the transformation to see how the needle's moving and to also identify additional change of risks which inevitably there are going to be change risks and change problems that we hadn't uh anticipated um i don't know if any of you are old enough uh to remember this i know paris is not she's already made it clear that i'm old compared to her but uh just kidding but um but if you any of you remember the whack-a-mole game i think it might still be around where you you had you have the big foam hammer and you have to hit the moles and they a new one pops up everywhere change management kind of reminds me of whack-a-mole because you think you've whacked all the moles and then more of them pop up and you didn't see it coming you thought something might happen but you didn't know when or where how many of them are going to pop up so that's sort of how you have to think about change management and these uh these change assessments are critical to identifying and anticipating where those whack-a-moles are going to pop up organizationally and the other reason these assessments are so important is because we're getting below the surface underneath the tip of the iceberg to get to the root cause of change and identifying what the problems are and what we need to do to fix it again we're not waiting we're not just simply asking people are you ready for change do you want to change do you support the change if you ask those questions you're always going to get yes yes yes and of course everything's fine let's move on but what we're trying to understand is what are those things that we know from experience are going to cause resistance later on unintentionally potentially and for example when we deal with clients that have a very siloed organization where they just don't communicate well across departments that's a common problem and they've done fine with it they do okay as an organization with it it's not ideal but it works but when you go to change and when you start to think about how we're going to drive transformation we know that's going to create a problem because now all of a sudden you're asking people if we're implementing enterprise-wide technology or enterprise-wide indent processes now all of a sudden you're asking people to think outside their box of their reality of their silo and that's a big shift for people and that's going to create resistance not because they don't want to do it but just because they don't understand it and it's scary and it's different so if we know that about an organization we can anticipate that there'll probably be some change resistance that is the result of the fact that it's a siloed organization that doesn't communicate well across departments and so that's why it's so important for us to understand is consultants delay of the land and the culture of the organization the good the bad the ugly so that we can anticipate where those challenges might be and start to craft a change strategy and plan that's focused on those specific challenges so those are organizational change assessments which by the way are a combination of anonymous quantitative surveys to employees as well as qualitative focus groups with subsets or focus groups of smaller groups of employees we combine that data to get an assessment or a snapshot of where the organization is if we can compare compare that over time communication plan i'm gonna i'm gonna save some of these slides here because i don't want to steal the thunder of julie and teresa later today but hopefully this gives you a flavor some of the things to be thinking about and then we'll dive into a little bit more detail later on but communications organizational design is a critical part of this as i mentioned before defining what the organization is going to look like this is especially true if you're a um a global organization for example that's moving to a shared services model you want to centralize accounting and want to move to a common business process operating model organization was important but it's really important if you're in that situation where you're a global organization and or you're moving to some significant organizational changes or you want to move to some significant organizational changes that again go well beyond technology we're not talking about how the software works we're talking about fundamental changes to the way the business operates benefits realization the quantitative aspect of how do we get people to achieve the benefits that we outlined in the business case hopefully early in the project and if we haven't done a business case i in some ways put that on the change team to say well we need to build a business case even if it's already been approved and executives are telling you hey we don't need a business case we just have to replace our old technology because the vendor told us we had to by the way so we have no choice we're going to go through this transformation whether we like it or not that's a terrible excuse i mean it's a good excuse but it's a terrible excuse if that's your only reason for wanting to do it you want to make sure you have a clear vision for what what sorts of business benefits you you expect to get out of it and then i can simplify this section uh when change management occurs during a transformation i don't need to spend a lot on that i'd be curious to see what you all think of when you think uh change should happen but to simplify i won't even make you read the slide i'll tell you it should happen now if you're in the midst of a transformation and you haven't started it yet even if you're just planning for a transformation you haven't started it early enough and that's the unfortunate part of changing management is you never have quite enough time to do what you need to do from a change perspective and you think about the the organizational design the cultural shifts the behavioral shifts all the things you're trying to change especially if you're an organization like one of the viewers on linkedin mentioned the 50 to 60 year old organization the more the longer you've been around the longer it's going to take your people to change whether they tell you otherwise or not it's just going to take longer so change management is on the critical path for transformation and how well we handle change will directly impact how well the transformation goes and i've yet to meet a client that wishes they would have waited a little longer to start change management or wishes they would have invested a little bit less in change management they spent too much time and money on change management i i've yet to meet that person or that client even when they hire us um you know if we start on day one when they're first talking about transformation it's still not quite enough time it's it's definitely better than doing nothing and you're definitely moving the needle but there's always opportunity to further move that needle and further improve the organizational piece of it so this is a this slide here is really just where we typically would start change management for most clients when we're in that digital strategy phase of kind of laying out the strategy and roadmap helping evaluate and select technological their service offering that we provide our clients in addition to change management um you know at the time we're defining the solution the architecture uh the business intelligence and what we hope to get out of any sort of transformation that's when we typically would start organizational change management as well and also when we get into implementation readiness after we've selected technology we know what technology we're deploying we have a plan at a high level now we put together a more detailed implementation readiness plan to help us get ready for the deployment get the people ready the operations ready get a clear business and organizational blueprint for what we want to be and how this transformation is going to unfold so that by the time the system integrator gets involved and the vendor gets involved we have a very clear mission or narrative that we're going to we're going to manage to and then one other thing i'll notice when we talk about business process management process improvement change management should really be embedded within this and also your business process improvement efforts should feed into your change strategy and plan so back to the question i think it was on linkedin someone made the comment about um about how you know about business analysis and business process improvement and how that's a prerequisite for change management i totally agree if you don't do that business process piece of a well it it becomes very difficult to do change management and you end up starting off your change management initiative on shaky ground so we have some change case studies that i don't have time to get to and i didn't think we would but it's here for your reference if you'd like these slides we can uh email them to you upon request so just uh uh kyler or you said already we'll drop an email address in the the chat boxes here in the various live streams but in the meantime i want to get to a few questions and then maybe i'll spend just five minutes on this we'll take a quick break and we'll come back and do the more formal uh q a discussion any questions we don't get to here right now we'll obviously keep the stream going the streams are going to be going for a couple more hours and we can refer back to these especially in the q a a panel discussion that we're going to have here right after this this segment in a quick break um but let me pick a couple questions just to close it out here and before we we shift to more of a formalized panel discussion if you will along with q a from all of you um one of the comments over on linkedin is one problem can be staff movement hiring and firing culture talent change um that's a good point if you know you have to look at the culture of the organization and the uh challenges of of either attrition if you have a lot of turnover or if you're growing quickly and you're hiring a lot of new people or if you're an established organization a mature organization with highly tenured people those are very different scenarios that require different approaches to change management so i agree that you have to look at the talent and the stability of the talent the maturity of the talent the you know how long they've been around all that good stuff and then let me just pick off one other question and then we'll save save some of these for for later as well um here's a good question from uh from uh these ways do you attack and this is on crowdcast um do you adapt your change management approach independent on a project if so what determines consistency in your approach so that's a great question um is your change management approach dependent on a project if so how do you maintain that consistency so if i could paraphrase a question how do you balance consistency methodology tool sets with uniqueness and uh differing situations and really i would go back to for that answer i would go back to this slide um right here which which sort of summarizes the objectives of change management but it also summarizes the the different tool sets or buckets of tools that we have and the way i look at this is almost look at this as a dial you know you might there might be things on here we're gonna we're gonna spend a lot we're gonna turn it up because we need we know a lot of you know a b or c there might be other areas or sort of sort of a focus and there might be other areas that just aren't as important i would argue that all these areas are important but relatively speaking if we have to prioritize which most projects do and we have to prioritize resources and focus with limited uh resources and focus so um that that's the way to view it is it's not necessarily that your approach is totally going to change it's just that the level of intensity for all these different areas are going to vary uh client by client and then certainly some of the nuances and specific strategies and tactics within each of these buckets are going to vary just depending on the type of organization it is but whenever we're deploying those differing approaches we're using a common methodology and framework that is is customizable for lack of a better word for four different organizations all right so thank you for those great questions i'm a little over my time that that was allocated but uh hopefully that was helpful i appreciate your time today and i'll turn it back to you parisa to transition and discuss uh get us into the next session here that sounds great i appreciate it eric and i do want to say i do know what that game is i swear you are old enough okay did your parents tell you about it or do you actually know her firsthand experience i played it i played it growing up guacamole is that chuck e cheese right okay anyways yeah i think it's still around the market's plated too it's gotta be it's a classic right yeah it's like pac-man it is like pac-man i love it now okay you guys we're going to take a five-minute break and when we come back we're going to dive into the panel discussion that er eric was talking about now the biggest thing about this and eric keep me honest but i mean all of these this whole subject all these best practices it's applicable yes obviously to software implementations but really any kind of change that an organization is going through whether it be like a merger an acquisition or if you're going through a reorg if there's some type of change that your team is going to endure this is applicable so keep that in mind too i mean think big picture think how is change affecting your team just in the day-to-day and how can you pull these best practices into how you're operating so with that said i'm gonna put a timer for five minutes you guys can do whatever you need to do and we will meet back here in five to go over our next topic all right welcome back everybody let's go ahead and dive into the next session um i am excited for this one because q and a's are really where you get to get the unfiltered answer you know it's not scripted not that any of this is but it's really just a impulse answer on on something that you are asking so like we have been doing this whole time you guys have been doing an amazing job at dropping your comments dropping your questions but we encourage you to continue doing that um whether you are on crowdcast whether you're on youtube if you're on linkedin we are pulling all of your questions all of your comments and we're going to run through them in this session and if we don't get to them in this session then we will definitely get to them before the end of the workshop today so with that said let's go ahead and dive into this panel discussion um i have eric joining us again as you can see but we also have julia theresa and nate joining us as well so give you a little background julia joyce is with us and she's one of our go-to consultants when it comes to change management she's qualified apmg change management practitioner and she is actually based out of the uk and really her experience and her tenor ranges across multiple industries so higher education financial services automotive and civil aviation that sounds pretty fun um all of these industries she was focused on change so she has a well-versed background in what it takes to deliver a successful change management strategy regardless of the industry that you're in and i can't forget to mention she also loves to cycle and she does digital illustrations i would love to see one of those illustrations julia that sounds awesome and then we also have theresa richardson so she is with us as well and she is uh lean sixes si okay let me try that again lean six sigma black belt and she also has her mba so she's very um educated experienced in her field and she's also a certified coach and i'm gonna possibly butcher this but a prosci is that how you say that process change management yeah for a change man she's a she's also a change management practitioner and she's certified through process so um very very well versed in organizational change management also across various industries ranging from manufacturing health care i.t logistics um financials and wealth management so with that experience in both the public and private sector she's able to speak to you know again whatever industry you are in she's able to answer those questions um and in her free time she loves to travel and she loves her fur babies who doesn't right we love those people awesome i love it and then we also have nathan strower am i saying your last name correctly he said but i got a head nod so i'm gonna think that's a yes i'm saying it right so nate oversees the whole ocm side um at third stage and he's our director of transformation and strategy so he is actually going to be moderating our q a this afternoon um and eric is also obviously joining us on the panel so you'll have eric julia and teresa answering all of your questions and nate is going to be facilitating you guys know eric you just heard him drop some knowledge on you guys about osm as well so again drop your questions drop your comments um and nate i'm gonna pass it over to you if you hover over um your video there should be a mic button to unmute yourself so i just muted him thinking he could um mute himself and now i can't immediately either he might have to drop off and come back in um i could let's try it if you want to chat a question i could uh let you do that question in the chat and then i'll start it and then let you come out and come back in does that work how many consultants does it take well we have a question here so i can pose a question for you guys does that work and then while nate drops off gets back on hopefully we'll have the mic going so let's see the first question and forgive me if you already got to this eric but we had a question come in that was can you say that business analysis is part of organizational change management and where does that fit into it yeah so we did we did cover that but i'll maybe cover anyway it's a good segue or a good thing to cover again but uh i'd say yes the business analysis piece of it uh i would agree does fit within change management at the very least they should be very closely aligned i'd be curious to think to hear uh teresa and julia i know theresa you're six sigma certified so i imagine you probably have a strong opinion on this but what are your guys's thoughts on that well absolutely it's definitely something that needs to be done right up front because again as you stated in the last segment if you don't capture that information and you engage in change management activities uh you could come across a situation where you have to take 10 steps back instead of moving forward so having that information up front is very important even with the change management person in the activity itself being able to ask them questions that might not have been asked is very good for developing that process to ensure that we're putting a plan together that really addresses all of the issues with the change yeah i think i think to echo that um i think that the best the best change managers are people who are nosy who are naturally um inquisitive and want to understand the detail behind things so i mean usually on things in the past i've had a business a business analyst to help me with that but you know i haven't always had that luxury um so i think that it's a really good tool to have that um have that ability just to be curious about how the organization works to have that good strong analysis skill absolutely also this just popped in my head sorry but um working on projects that you need certain stakeholders involved right from the start so making sure that the people who touch the process are in the room to help discuss it to really vet it out making sure that all of that occurs because when you get to that change piece and you don't include those people again you might have to take some steps backs which prolongs your effort so having that bonus is very important in my opinion i agree oh this is a good one the soft skills question i'm sorry i was reading the panel that's a good one yeah it looks like nate you're back but you're not unmuted is it not letting you unmute i can't immediately either which usually is a speaker i can so i'm not sure why all right so uh how about i ask this or do you want do you mind facilitating what until they get back in prison i am happy to i am happy to okay let's do that one that you just pointed out theresa so uh liam boyd asks what sort of soft skills do you employ in managing people and clients so for example principled negotiation or conflict resolution etc are there specific sets of skills you would recommend people to read up on and adopt um into their people strategies i have a question i mean i have a statement i gotta answer this one because this to me is really the crust of what we're trying to achieve here so the biggest skill that i've learned to develop over time is listen to understand versus listen to respond so when you listen to understand and it's really not as simple as you would think you're like oh yeah i'll listen not no so when you really take a step back to understand what that person is saying and it's not just the verbal cues it's the non-verbal cues as well um it can it's very very telling to where their mind is going or what their need is or what their pain point is so i mean i think we could have an entire discussion around non-verbal cues verbal cues etc but being able to listen to understand versus respond is huge in my opinion yeah i'd agree with that and you know it gets back to the the point i was talking about in the previous session about how people are saying might be different than what's actually reality you know they they might be saying yeah i'm on board this change this is great i can't wait for this new system or this new process change or whatever it may be but you also have to sort of read between the lines and understand well based on experience i know that people in your position oftentimes will resist it not because they're bad people but because there's something else going on there so it's kind of recognizes the situation but also reading between the lines of what they say versus what the actual situation is yeah and to add to that people change their views along the um along the path so while they might be you know supportive in the beginning something may change um and they you know they may change their view for whatever reason um so again it's about trying to make sure that you you're following that narrative with them through the journey um and tracking um their thoughts views um that resistance um finding out who your supporters are as well so that you can use them to your advantage so it's about keeping listening to to your to your client as well yes absolutely and another soft skill is more it's not it's not really taught but asking the why we call it five wise in lean six sigma but if you ask enough questions and you really listen in my in my experience uh the person who you're speaking with will really bring their guard down because they understand you're listening to them you're asking questions you're taking their information and you use it to develop your plan so those in my opinion are a few soft skills um and just kind of sit back and smile and a little humor never never hurt by the way i'm just saying so that's always a good thing i couldn't agree more and speaking of humor this is change that we are adjusting to as we figure out the mic situation i gotta give credit to kyler for that one she said that on the on the behind the scenes conversation now i think we have nate back are you hot can you hear me now we can hear you okay i'll be back over to you my friend well great well uh thank you and yeah that's it's almost like it was staged that we're trying to to pose a a point or may really raise a point about change management but thank you all for joining us and i i know you've been through the the sessions today and i think really a really good place to start we got together last week to discuss change management and it was really interesting that four people that all worked side by side in the same company really had a different explanation of change management and i think you one of the the challenges of change management and something we all encounter doing the job that we do and with the with the people that we work with is change management always has a different meaning a different connotation to whoever you ask and from whatever angle or whatever experience or industry you come from so i just wanted to start off with a really easy question to all three of you and i think we could just go around the horn here how would you describe or what would you what would what are the words you'd use to describe change management and how would you describe change management in general and how we approach change management at third stage consulting sure so well i'll go ahead go ahead i'll i'll add to what you say uh to me change management is really helping individuals teams and organizations through the change process in a structured uh a structured way with a methodology it's really important to understand where they're needing to go from current to future state and then to develop develop the plan working with stakeholders and change agents to get there so looking at the entire organization as a whole and understanding their culture and where the organization is set up is very important yeah it's about it's it's absolutely about taking people through a change um you know most changes and not all of them now are about implementation of new platforms or new software um and while a new system in a nice new shiny system is excellent um it's only going to go so far if it's not adopted by the people um and you know and eric eric talked about this prior to this um you know people have their own reasons for resistance and they're not always active reasons um so i think it's about trying to understand where people are um and it's trying to get them to the point where they where you want them to be um and that's quite a tricky journey because people can be quite difficult you know we there's a million different types of personalities out there so it's about taking that it's about taking people on that journey and making sure they adopt that new way of working yeah absolutely and also when we talked about this last week it was mentioned that unless your process is like 99.9 automated you have to address the people side of the change you absolutely have to because you know even with a usage and adoption if if you have someone who shakes their head like yep this has changed we're going to do it and all you do is push the button and that's all their ownership is with this process or in trouble so change management will will be great i think i think also when it comes to automation of processes um i think there's sometimes people go well it's been automated it's fine actually automation processes scares people because they say am i going to lose my job what does it mean for me i'm a bit scared um and you know people ha you know and people are resistant to automation um so you have to try and manage that too yeah and there's also you know just building on what you both just said is when you look at something like especially some of these emerging newer technologies like machine learning or artificial intelligence i think when you start to get into those uh newer technologies and the more advanced technologies the harder changes and the more significant change management is going to be because if you think about up to your guys's point about machine learning let's just use that as an example you're going to introduce machine learning into your accounts payable processes and now the sudden you're going to automate 70 of what you're doing manually right now well that's great there's a clear business case for that you've got an roi the technology makes sense but not so great when you're the ap clerk that your job is going to be 70 automated and it's easy to say well yeah don't worry about you're just going to be more strategic or you're going to be more of a manager and you know that sort of thing okay well that's great but i don't believe you unless you told me what exactly my job is going to look like in the future so that's the those are the sort of dots we have to connect as change management practitioners becoming more important and more strained this technological advance is faster yeah and then i say that liam's just posted and said that automation means that someone has to give up control which is scary for people so absolutely if you've you know done your job on a spreadsheet for 15 years and you know how to manage it and it's your baby and then suddenly the organization comes along and says right we're going to automate this you're like but that's my baby that's my cottage industry i don't want to give it up um it's a scary time for people yeah and to that point i think it's really important when you have those changes coming to get ahead of that communication because uh just had a discussion the other day on oh you know we're making these changes and the individuals in the organization heard this and they have this perception now so you really have to get ahead of that and understand what the vision is for the client how are we going to do this and make the communication so it's tailored to the audience so yeah no it's just yeah absolutely and i think that if you don't if you i mean i know people conflate communications and or see them all the time um but you know it is an absolute integral part of it if you don't communicate and you don't tell people what's happening the rumor mill starts and then people then start to get upset because they hear you know things you know things happen um and then then that's how resistance grows that's how it mushrooms so it's absolutely about getting in early and being honest with people as well sometimes you don't know sometimes it's okay to say we don't know and and just as an fyi we we have not rehearsed this and we're not we're not throwing each other segways even though that was a perfect segue from one to the other um yeah i'm losing my value as a moderator because you're just able to transition from one topic to another one what i wanted to um i want to start off with a quick story and i i tell this off we in one of our change management engagements we talked about why the client was so resistant to change and we were all kind of laughing saying boy they shouldn't be you know everything should be fine they should be resistant to change we're all open then about five minutes later we changed our email address and everyone's just just furious like how can we work in these conditions so i think it's really interesting that everyone thinks they're they're immune to resistance to change and yet they really aren't so i wanted to just get a quick idea from the the three of you starting with julia um why do you feel people are so resistant to change and this is this is far outside of technology this is just in general why do you think that there's lots of different reasons um uncertainty you don't know what's going to happen i think custom and practice as well that you know you get you're you have your job you're comfortable with your job um you people people don't really like change they say to your point they say that they do but then they don't because they don't like to not know what's coming next and i think that you know the whole the whole of the love last year with kovid is is a great example of that is that we've all had to adapt but we've done it and we did it and there was a lot of complaining and mourning but we did it because we had to um and i think that people just generally don't like change you know we're like cats we like we like a routine we like to do what we do and i think when that's coupled with uncertainty um people people start to become a little bit uncomfortable you're muted oh here we go again eric what are your thoughts on that um yeah i think it's i i hadn't thought about the cat analogy before i'm i'm more of a dog you're welcome i'll always think about cats when i think of change now but uh you know i think there is some truth to that we're creatures a habit you know we like to do things a certain way and i think um a lot of it comes down to pride too you know if i if i work at a company for 20 years and i pride myself in the fact that you know my heroics have helped further the organization and all this tribal knowledge i have in my head that can't be replaced i feel good about that you know i'm adding a lot of value to the organization and you can't dismiss that i mean it's easy to say oh but that's a risk or oh we can't have it on eric said or anyone said we've got to have it in a system that that may be true but from the individual perspective i take pride in that now you're just telling me you're going to take it away and automate it what does that mean for me and it just creates so much doubt so i think um you know we're creatures that have it we take pride in what we do there's just fear and uncertainty i think that's probably one of the biggest things is just the fear and uncertainty of not knowing what it means to get all that stuff out of my head and automate it sounds good looks good on a business case but for me personally am i gonna have a job or am i just gonna be doing nothing you know it's just uh i think that clearly the more clearly we can define uh some certainty around people's jobs even if they don't like it as much or they don't think they're going to like it as much as the current they at least they know what to expect and yeah and it gives them the chance to decide early up what they want to do about it you know you don't have to accept change um you know you can leave a company or you can do whatever you want to do but certainly for armed is forewarned and with people you know it's good to get them it's good to give them that that choice up front about what what's going on yeah absolutely theresa what are your thoughts on that well they took all my thunder normally sorry no only so i do agree um with the uncertainty of change but i think a lot of it has to do actually with a couple things so fear loss and trust i also believe that a person's disposition sets them up for how they're going to react to change like for me i love change you know i have an old adage you know if change is like the dinosaur if you don't change or die and do you see any dinosaurs run around no because they didn't want to evolve right so i think the the the disposition of uh the person or the organization has a lot to do with it as well and trust is huge if if your leader comes to you and you don't trust them and they give you this you know we're gonna do this this this you're like oh i don't know about that but if you really trust them and and you believe in the vision you believe in what we're doing as a culture and as a company nine times out of ten you'll you'll really embrace that change so that's that's what i said uh yeah absolutely i think that taught anyway eric mentioned this but you know change needs to happen top down um i i really believe that you're only going to get so far with adoption um if you're unless you're you know your your senior managers walk the walk and talk the talk and are open and honest and listen to you you know you people aren't stupid and they can spot in sincerity so i think it's really important that they are given the tools to be armed to ask questions of and to feed back and use them as a sort of broken line between you know what's happening um and also get them to buy in as well because if they're not a button as series absolutely says they're not going to really engender their team to buy into anything absolutely trust is huge absolutely so so we've talked about why are people resisted to change what defines somewhat what is change management um let's let's take a step back and really um kind of dig more into the the nuts and bolts of it and and i want to ask the three of you um teresa this time and go counterclockwise but really how how do you think is or what's your best advice or what's your best strategy for how you get started we'll we'll dig a little bit deeper into the the task and the work streams of change management but really if you had to advise a client if you're on a phone call with a client they say theresa i want to get started where would you advise them how would you advise them on the best way to dig in and get started so the best way i heard this was i believe as eric stated it uh what do you want to be when you grow up what is your vision where do you want to go from your current state to your future state and i think that is a telling conversation especially with the senior leader because if they give you like the high level examples like i want to do 20 of this or blah blah blah versus someone who has actually put intentional time and thought into where they want to go that helps us create a better road map for success the more ambiguity we have the more digging we have to do which is fine that's what we do um not shy at all about it but again if you have a leader who takes the time cares about the organization this is what we this is what i want for us this is where we're going to go that's easier for me to so so having that clear vision and being able to articulate that is huge to me yeah and in building on that too teresa you go on a level a level down in the organization you know you think about specific departments or business units or locations within your organization being able to define for them you know specific to them and their location or their job what that vision is and how it's you know how they're first of all what's going to change how it's going to change and how that contributes to that higher local vision that you're describing teresa i think that helps connect the dots because you have to have that vision that you describe as a prerequisite but then you have to get to that next layer which is what's in it for me or how does it relate to me how am i going to change yeah yeah eric and i think we were with the client earlier this week and i think that's a really great point and and actually something that was brought up almost in those exact words were we we started with our strategic alignment and we said where where do you what do you want to be when you grow up what are your biggest what are your five biggest goals missions visions for the next one three and five years and the ceo read it out i mean it was it was it was a textbook example of like here's where we want to be here's how we're gonna get there here's where we're weak here's where we're strong here's where we need help i mean it was just great and the challenge that she threw to us is she said that being said everyone in this room is very clear on where we're going our biggest challenge is to to filter that down throughout the organization and she said you know this this task a year and a half ago looked like x y and z as far as getting the message out but now we're coming off a global pandemic we have a new staff we still have a ton of uncertainty in the workplace so we really need to not only take what we have here but learn how to to decipher that message for where the where the workforce is now where it'll be three months from now and six months from now so it's it's that i think people often misunder or underestimate the fact that there's one thing to know where you're going and one thing to be able to deliver and have everyone in the organization understand what that vision is as well anything to add to that julia nope well yes no yes um yeah no definitely i agree um vision you need to know where you're going um and i think the second point is that you need to know where you are right now so i think you know you need to have that discovery phase where you understand exactly where you are you know what the delta is between the two and how you're gonna and that that's what your plan is is how you're gonna reach that gap between a and b and i think one of the challenges i always say i think when i know one of one of the challenges that i've experienced is is that people um especially senior management will say well show us what you're doing now give us the benefit now we want to see some comms we want to see you know we want to see things and it's a difficult it's a difficult challenge because lots of things with change it's a lot there's planning there's a lot of things that you need to do up front which is what the reason i will talk about in our next session um and a lot of the benefits are further down the line um and while people want to see comms just so that they're comfortable that they're getting bang for their back actually the most important thing to do is is start from a really strong foundation of where are you now and where do you want to be absolutely so um when in the past when i received that pushback you know okay this is what i want go do it now do it now do it now the question always is okay you know what let's let's talk about this do you want it done right now or do you want it done the right way and look on their faces when i say that is is priceless but there's always two different consequences for each path and i'm telling you nine times out of ten it's let's do it the right way because you put a lot of time a lot of investment um not just financial but resources etc into something you want to make sure that when you're completed well it's really not ever completed but when you're done with the initiative it's successful so so taking that then we'll get to the next step so we no matter what change management looks like it it basically breaks down um into four tasks worse or or what we call work streams and that is strategic alignment so what we talked about earlier what do you want to be when you grow up and is there alignment within the organization org readiness how how ready is your organization for change how hard is this change going to be on your staff is it is it going to be a shift or is it going to be a paradigm shift which is a way overused consulting phrase and i i promise not to use that again and then we talk about the communications piece of it and the education and training so roughly you could call it many different things but it's roughly those four things so i wanted to ask the panel today um from your experience that if you were again advising a new client what do you feel is the most important task and and i can i can ask that in a different way as well what tasks do you feel that is often if not completed successfully kind of dooms the change management effort for failure and why don't we start with you again theresa we'll go around the horn again sure um so one of the the the initiatives that i've seen doesn't get enough attention after you do the assessments and get the information is the communication plan i think people don't really understand well i shouldn't say that the traditional way of a communication plan is structured in such a way where it really does not address what the change is how it's impacting people et cetera et cetera so when you when i've done change uh communication plans we've done like message mapping and we focus on the rhetoric model so it has to be logical you have to have an emotion tied to it it needs to come from someone credible so it really kind of answers the question before it's even asked so when you do that and you address the issue you create what you create trust you create okay they're hearing us they're listening to us so it's not just hey everybody you know our system's going to change next week good luck it has to be more intentional than that it has to even go beyond the dates and things like that so the communication plan in my opinion um needs to needs to have certain elements to really not communicate not just communicate but to create the ownership and the accountability of the people who we are wanting to have the change impact yeah yeah eric what are your thoughts on that yeah i think that's that's a good one so i won't take the same answer but uh i guess one of the it's hard to pick one i guess that's not part of the question it's hard to pick one that's the most important because they all kind of fit together and there's there's so much inner interconnectivity between them but i'd say one is something we talked about in the last session today which is the uh the business process improvements and having a clear sort of business blueprint not a technology software blueprint but a business blueprint for what the organization's going to look like from an operational perspective and then ultimately that feeds into the organizational design the organizational impacts and that's a you know even if we if we skip that step it doesn't matter how well we do all the other change management stuff we're on shaky ground and we don't have that foundation or that blueprint to work from so that's one and i guess i'd say it's tied it's either that in my opinion or the organizational assessment piece of it which you know you kind of need that just to understand the lay of the land and really understand where the you know what the culture is and what the the nuances of the organization are yeah and i think i think that to add on what you're talking about um is is i think it's really scary when you when you or you really know you have a lot of work when you come into a client and they say we're ready you know we're we don't have a lot of change to do or or when you get the client that says oh we've been thinking about this a lot and they open up a 30 deck slide deck saying here's where we need to change because it's likely the answer is somewhere in between but um you know it really is anyone that thinks that there's no change coming up and everything's going to be fine is really kidding themselves and anyone that thinks that the world's coming to an end is probably kidding themselves as well it's it's somewhere in between and they're probably a lot more capable of handling the change than they think but there's also a lot that they don't know that they they need to be aware of agreed what about you julia after you're the third so you only have only have one or two answers to to give i'm gonna go left field and i'm gonna see about benefits ah bad for realization that's a good one really because i find um and i have phones in the past that um that and i think because i think it's because ocm is is is a bit misunderstood that people when you're trying to sell the value of ocm to an organization or to a client um they can see it as a bit of an add-on or you know it's a it's a nice to have and actually you know what you're trying to do is you know it it it does link to benefits you know what you're trying to do is you know increase cost essentially increase customer satisfaction reduce cost um increase your increase your organization's profile so they all you know all of the of your change initiatives do link to benefits and i think that that link and that demonstration of that to you know the people that give you the money to do the to do the initiative is really important because then it shows you that actually it's just as important as having a project manager or an si or any of the rules that you wouldn't necessarily question i vote for years that was good you know and i and i think i think the one thing to add to yours um and i really i think benefits is so far overlooked but i think it's really important too that you have realistic benefits if you if you go into an ocm engagement or if if management goes and promises the world to their employees that your job is going to be the easiest job in the world your customers are going to be happy you're you're setting yourself up for failure and it will literally i think it'll literally show itself sooner rather than later so if you go in and say hey here's going to be some of the tough sledding that we're going to have over the next six months we're going to go live things aren't going to be a ton better when we go live but in two three months after go live here's what you can expect then then you really build a trust and again to to talk about what teresa had talked about you you're you're managing the message you're giving them a realistic idea of what's going to happen you're you're delivering the message and you're giving them a realistic idea of the change that's coming so that they don't go and create their own message and and create their own reality off of what they think is going to happen versus what you feel is projected to happen yeah so taking uh now that we've talked about kind of the most important steps why change management what's the importance of change management um what what do you feel is the best way to position an organization for successful change so um if you had to say we were doing this project at third stage consulting how would you best position us or how would you best kick this project off and position this project so that it'll be successful in the earth it'll make it the most chances for success in the future maybe starting with you julia thanks um i always think that honesty is is one of the key tenets of anything especially with ocm um is that honesty and the ability to understand requirements um is is really key um and also an understanding of who does what role as well you know i think eric said earlier on that while we can while we can lead um well we can lead change for the client um change is best coming from the organization itself you know if i come in and said and sent out communications or you know try to train some people though like who are you what you know what have you got to add to the organization whereas it needs to be you know the organization needs to be bought into it and understand that you know they have a part to play in that as well and it's very much a hand-in-hand effort you know we can provide yeah we can provide the expertise but you know we need we need the we need the client to you know bring something to the table too yeah we we don't do change management we guide you through the change management absolutely but we're not going to do it for you absolutely yeah and we and we can because you know we who's going to you know with the best well in the world that you know people don't know me and a client from adam whereas they might know you know the the chief operating officer and they're more inclined to lessen and believe in that person than uh than a you know than a consultant who they've never met before and it's all about building as teresa says it's about building trust absolutely absolutely as well as identifying the right individuals to influence the change once we have the information that we need um interesting story uh working on a project and they wanted to assign this role to a pm when the pm has so much to do you can't you have to make it all the time you have to make sure that you have the right people in the right place to communicate the right message to get what you need done and if that doesn't happen we are in a lot of trouble yeah one of the biggest challenges with change management that you're alluding to theresa is that you can't see and touch and feel changed management so to your point about just handing it off to a project manager limited time and resources you have two options you can either do all the change management stuff you should be doing or you can do the stuff that's broken with the technology that you can see and touch and feel and so that's broken i can see and touch and feel it it's not you know we're not getting through testing the way we should so i'm going to redirect all my attention over here and it happens every time like i can't remember a time where a pm successfully managed change because inevitably the needle shifts or the focus shifts over to the technology absolutely so we we have a bunch of questions so i thought let's um before we jump into the questions here to kind of wrap things up i i will i will end with the ultimate open-ended question for our open-ended questions for the three of you and maybe starting with eric on this one um what what can you tell us is your most successful change management engagement why do you feel it was successful and what was your biggest challenge what was your most challenging change management engagement and why do you feel that the challenges were were in place or what what led to those challenges funny you should ask that and it's a segue into it's another segue now you're setting up the segways um actually as you were asking that the first person or the first client that comes to mind is actually a client that i'm going to have on a live stream tomorrow every friday i do a live stream q a type thing with different guests and i use that for our podcast that comes out every week but i live stream it live just so we can get questions from the audience why not but um he's going to be on the live stream tomorrow so if this is of interest to you i highly encourage you to check that out but um the reason i bring him up is because uh they that client in particular which is a big steel company um i think have been the most effective at managing change and the irony of it though and this is where i'm kind of conflicted about sharing the story because it goes against what we're saying here first of all preface it by saying this company has a very unique culture here they have a very strong culture very unique culture they're very successful they're well studied in the world of academia and business and uh they uh they're going they're in the midst they're massive company and they're going through a seven year they're in the middle of a seven year transformation and they have not had for the most part they have not had a separate change team they've taken what i would call more of a trojan horse approach to change management they've they've embedded the change function within all the different business process and operational leads not not the project manager which i'll agree is a bad idea but more at the process lead level the business areas and part of it is because culturally they just don't like consultants and that's the irony of having them as a client is they don't really like consoles but they like us but they like to own things themselves like they want to be advised but then they want to run with it which is great it works really well for them and it fits their culture so they found a way to sort of embed change management in everything they do and that's extremely hard to do and it's honestly i think it's more a function of their dna and their culture which is has like i said been highly studied in academia and whatnot so they have a very strong culture in that way so it works for them i don't think it would work for a lot of organizations the same way works for them but it does work for them so i think the fact that they have such strong ownership and that they embed change within um within everything they do they don't rely they don't rely too much on consultants they're they're one of the best clients you for this specific thing and we're not going to let you take over the entire transformation like and when i say say a problem with us but a problem with system integrators for example um system integrators uh and a lot of clients will completely take over a project and sort of steamroll the client and you know client doesn't have any ownership and sort of takes that outsource approach this client's the opposite they say no no we're managing this we'll pull in the experts where we need them but it's our project we own it if we mess it up or it's on us and they've done a good job of it so i think that's probably been the best example they're honestly one of the best companies i think one of the best run companies i've ever consulted that's what makes it great to have them as a client so that would be the best example i could give you great so then i'm sorry i say tune in tomorrow for more on that there's a shameless luxury to listen to the live stream tomorrow yeah everyone's going to be excited to see who this successful client is that's awesome i'm not telling you you have to join the live stream so eric eric gave a success story uh julia or theresa you want to tell one of your bigger challenging stories oh there we go uh so one of my biggest challenges uh was working with a health care system that needed to move the mindset of a certain group of health care i don't want to call anybody out healthcare providers because they were they've been trained traditionally to think autonomously so you can't really participate in a change or you can't really in their minds it was more like i understand what i have to do i was trying to do this just let me go do it but with the ach and other other regulator regulations coming down the line we needed to work as a team so that particular project was very difficult because uh these particular groups of individuals actually were the bread and butter of the system and again i'm trying not to call anybody out here but uh it was a very difficult work through um eventually we did achieve what we were needing to do because they were accepting of being part of the change team a part of the initiatives and honestly when you give them that authority i think that was a trigger it was that authority that they had they kind of ran with it so again you have to identify how people think and and what they do and really speak to that as well as making sure that you get the deliverables completed and i did that in such a political way i was being very very careful on what i was saying it but that was one of my biggest challenges is meeting that resistance head on um because these these changes we needed to make were not local it was more of a federal so it wasn't an issue of i don't want to do it it's an issue of you have to do it because it's tied to the revenue for the system so yeah and that's all i'm going to say about that one that's going to be a little harder to decipher that client so julia uh you can go why don't you finish us off with either a success or a challenge and then we'll jump into questions sure let me let me just tell you about a challenge that's different from it's different from teresa's um you know i've worked for clients before and one that brings to mind is where there's a clear need to do something and i wasn't um i wasn't a consultant there i was part of the organization um but there was a clear need to do something but the management level couldn't decide what to do um so of course we were all ready to go we had a strategy ready but we were kind of like well we know the top level of it but what does it mean underneath and there was so much you know people couldn't at that level couldn't quite decide what it meant to them um and you know there's only so much you can do to try and influence that especially when there are other things going on like covey and you know you there's various other you know it was in civil aviation so you know there's plenty of things going on um and trying to make that a priority for them so you could do something about it without trying to miss opportunities was you know quite difficult to do um you certainly need to get people in there that are that have their ear to make them listen and put that as a priority on their table great great all right well let's uh let's jump to a couple questions and i think there's a there's an interesting one and this came from a point that i i think we made about a half an hour ago um we were asked um automated i'll just read it automating and process means that someone has to give up control and losing control scary people predicted that in in the i.t revolution in the 90s and onwards would reduce uh reduce to a would reduce weight loss in jobs but it actively created jobs instead not only people who could create fix and manage computers but also for those who could use them do we think that automation and particularly ai will also lead to more jobs what are you uh anyone want to jump in on answering that question i've got an interesting example from the type the city that i live in and i don't i think we have them in the us as well we have um starship robots um where they'll come and deliver your food from a store um but they don't deliver wine which is very disappointing um so they'll come so they'll come and deliver things from the store and and i see on facebook and social media that people say oh these robots are still in our jobs and actually they're not because all that they're doing is moving that the work from someone else that needs to go and still get the thing from the shelf and do all the work behind the scenes and put it in the robot and program the robot so actually it doesn't always translate into someone's going to lose their job because somebody still has to do the other work on the other side of it for the benefit for the customer okay i'd say that i i agree with that comment but i think it's i think that's a long-term view which is important but when if i'm an employee that's affected by that change and living paycheck to paycheck or you know i've got my own immediate needs i'm not necessarily going to back up and look at the force for the tree to see the force for the trees i'm not going to say oh well it's okay if i lose my job because it's just you know there's going to be demand for me elsewhere and i can reskill or retool that's just not the way we think you know it's it might be a long term in the long term it might actually be more opportunistic or better for us but if in the short term we think it might or we have the fear that it could affect us negatively we're still going to resist it so i think big picture-wise yeah i totally agree with that but you know when you're dealing to get on the front lines with people that are affected by the change is just that's not the reality that they see or that is real absolutely so for a practical example um i've been to tarjay i'll call it tarjay it's really target uh but you see many many self checkouts right so before there were checkout people and baggers and this and that so with the self checkout you just reduce until to eric's point someone just possibly lost their job so i think if automation and ai were to continue a discussion definitely has to occur on how to position the people who could be displaced into a better role or a better opportunity um because you know you go to tarjay and you go from ten to five people manning these these stations so it's a clear indicator of where we're going and i think the one the one thing that is also um i think the one thing that is also um pretty important to say and we we talk about this in our clients as well is that for the most part technology is there to help you think more strategically so you know i can't speak specifically for the target example but it does and in many ways it allows you to eliminate the laborious like the the tasks that are that are not really adding value and allowing you to to get to a place where you do add value and you are thinking strategically and you are taking what's given and doing something with it that's it's easier said than done and it's really hard for someone to see especially like eric said when you're living paycheck to paycheck and you're afraid of losing your job that's a challenge absolutely one last question before we jump back over to parisa we i think there there's been um the point was made panel members have a variety of clients experience with many different platforms what's the best way to acquire technology knowledge and experience i i mean the way i view it i always go back to my first you know one of my first uh erp digital transformation type projects where i was the change practitioner but i had you know been trained in the technology and whatnot and over time even as i was involved in other types of technology that weren't sap which is where i started but you know i got involved with oracle implementations and eventually microsoft and i was in the utilities industry for a while and i knew nothing about the utilities industry so i had to kind of learn it from from scratch but just as an example i think that's part of what makes you a good change management consultant is being able to adapt and learn uh faster than the organization or the individuals affected within an organization are going to and it allows you to relate a little bit better to them too and so i i don't think it's necessarily a bad thing i know a lot of people would say well to be a good sap change management consulting you need to know sap really well and yeah it does help but i don't know that it's you know i think the key is that you're willing to get your hands dirty and understand and learn the processes and the way the technology works and so that you can help pave the way for the other that are you know the employees the front line employees that are going to be affected so it doesn't hurt for sure i mean if you know you're going to go through the implementation of technology x then go learn as much as you can about technology x as soon as you can but if it turns out that it ends up being technology why and you you know nothing about technology why i don't think that's necessarily a liability uh that you need to be overly concerned about just means you have to dive into the deeper role of your sleeves on learning a little bit faster yeah absolutely i've not you know i've started you know a million change initiatives without knowing anything about it you know from collection systems to uh data protection to cyber security um and if you only ever you know never limit your you to your current expertise you you can't because you you know you're going to ring fence yourself so it's just you know you learn and you pick it up and it's all about again about that business and other society just about being naturally curious about how things work and asking questions and showing that you can understand because it's okay not to know but you know you we all learn absolutely um i agree with all that as well as the fact that when you're engaging in in a in a team that maybe you don't have that experience you don't have that exposure to that industry letting people know that you're the expert in what you do and you're going to partner with them because they're the experts and what they do creates a huge channel of open communication and trust in my opinion so being able to roll your sleeves up and not having the hubris of oh i know everything you know be willing to learn be willing to try be willing to ask questions ask questions that even if you think is a dumb question ask it anyways because somebody i've heard this ten thousand times since i was like five but sometimes when you you ask the question there could be someone who had the same exact question so question probing willing to learn rolling your sleeves up is is what i would suggest as well 100 great great well thank you thank you all uh for participating today and i i think um i i know breeza will hit on this as well but would would like to um ask anyone who's on the call if we weren't able to ask answer your questions or if there was anything that we threw out there today that didn't make sense or that you'd like to discuss further please give us a call please shoot us an email and we're we're happy to line up a zoom call with you or just get ahold of you on the phone talk more about what your challenges are and how we might be able to help you in the future or if you're going through a change management initiative now and you just have some questions on what's going on please let us know and we'd be happy to give you our thoughts on it absolutely couldn't have said it better nate and great job to all of the panelists those were some amazing insights so thank you for for shedding your knowledge on us appreciate it great so i i gotta say one of the pieces that stood out to me was when you guys were talking about vision and how executive teams need to have a vision for where they're going and taking it a step further being able to have it trickle down to the rest of the team in order to get from a to b you have to sell it if you will and the other side of it too if you're in middle management and you see the importance of you know putting an organizational change management strategy in place and your leadership team doesn't necessarily see the value you sell it upwards you manage up so i mean it's it's kind of building on that team aspect whether you're on the you know top of the org chart or somewhere else of how are we going to get to where we're going and a lot of that it comes down to the people side of it so i love that point i loved all the points you guys made and i love all these questions coming through you guys are amazing so we're gonna just so you know we're keeping track of all of these questions we're doing our absolute best to get to them today but if we don't we're writing all of these down and we're gonna use it to create our content going forward whether that's you know in our videos and our blogs and our podcast topics we're listening to what you're saying and we're gonna translate that into some more ideas around the subject so keep the questions coming we'll hopefully get to them today if not um keep an eye out for your question to pop up in one of our podcasts or other other content that that we can't constantly are rolling out so with that said um let's go ahead and do a couple of housekeeping items before we go to break i want to take a five minute break but uh just so you know we're going to send the replay link for this entire workshop out um as well as all of our contact information so that you guys are able to reach out to us directly just like nate was just saying um you know if you had a specific topic that you wanted to share with a team um or you know just listen to again to write the ideas um you'll have the replay link um as well as the slides as eric mentioned we're happy to send out the slides for each of these presentations as well you'll also see a button if you're on crowdcast you'll see a button at the bottom of the screen that says 2021 digital transformation report um if you are not on crowdcast we're happy to put the link in the comments if you're on linkedin or youtube so you have access to it but at a high level this is a report that third stage consulting puts out annually and it covers up a very in-depth view of all things digital transformation so you know you have things from the average trans transformation times and costs depending on the size of the company you have a list of the top uh you know erp crm hcm systems uh ranked depending on whatever industry you're in there's just so many different pieces of content different ideas statistics that you could dive into so click that link right now we'll put it in the link or in the comments as well um and you can download it for free and have that information to take with you as well all right so let's go ahead and take another quick five minute break we'll jump back into it and i'm gonna invite theresa and julia back up with us and we're going to dive deeper into organizational change management so we'll be back all right welcome back everybody let's dive into the third session this is the third and final session for the day and i feel like we we've definitely done more than scratch the surface we've made a pretty good dent but we are going to dive even deeper this is the title of this segment is change management methodology deep dive so teresa julia and nate are going to really peel back the layers to what it takes to drive transformation success or failure i mean we talk about erp success erp failures a lot here at third stage just because we believe that you will learn a lot from case studies and a lot of the time it comes down to how well were they able to manage change and manage um just the new normal for their team so with that said i want to invite teresa and julia and nate back up here i think i see teresa i think i see julia she's sharing her screen so nate i'd love to invite you back up um you know their their expertise shines through that conversation that we just have had um they are the experts and this is literally what they focus on daily is how can we help our clients and our organizations that we work with meet um kind of the finish line of whatever transformation they're going to so with that said i'm going to go ahead and pass it over to you julia theresa and i believe nate is going to be up here momentarily and you guys can take it away on an even deeper dive into ocm awesome okay okay am i i'm i'm i'm sharing my screen but i can't see from you or not so i assume that i'm not yep can you guys hear me yep cool fabulous all right so welcome to our deep dive um i uh let's do this right so yes so welcome to our deep live so teresa and nate and i are going to be in this session so first of all um give you a quick introduction about us um and you can see pictures of us and are where we're representing as well so i'm from scotland um although i've lived in england for about 20 years now i live just north of london um i am an apmg change management practitioner i've worked and changed my ocm for about 12 years now um and i've worked before for lots of big british companies and global companies i've worked for easyjet i have worked for volkswagen group i've worked in higher education um and my well my lots of strings to my boat but i i advise on strategy development stakeholder communications stakeholder approaches and benefits realisation amongst other things so teresa do you want to introduce yourself absolutely so thank you for that um so hello again my name is theresa richardson um and i am a proceed certified change manager change manager a certified coach as well uh lean six sigma black belt and i have an nba as well my experience ranges from manufacturing to healthcare i.t logistics and financial and wealth management so i am from michigan so if anybody from michigan knows you either have your career started off in automotive or care so i have been able to uh have the benefit of being in both yeah it's neat it's nate joining us yes i believe he is [Music] yeah okay i'm here there you go hi there yes hello get on it's your turn it's your turn okay hi this is nate storm a director of digital transformation with third stage and my career has mostly been spent around the finance and energy industry i started off my career with delhi consulting working in their digital transformation group around finance transformation since then i've been working for about the last 12 years in organizational chan change management and software selection and technology a strategy working on all three different aspects of of those projects so um with third stage work on a lot of projects that bring all three of those together in in one project fab great so okay so we know that we're here to talk about a deep dive and police have said that you know we're going to dive into the detail of ocm um but just to give us a heads up just so we know what to expect um firstly what do we mean by ocm um i think it means a lot of things to a lot of people what are our guiding principles what do we do as a consultancy um how do we do it what's our approach and our methodology and of course any questions that you've got um as with two sessions before um just jump in um put your questions in the text box um and we'll try and answer them as well okay so one thing we want to interject here is um if there are pieces that we're not able to get to because of the time constraint um i believe this is available to uh to our audience so absolutely absolutely we can definitely share this for sure all right so first of all um what is ocum um so i hear all the time and i've heard a lot of times in my career oh it's just a bit of training or if we do a bit of communication that will be enough or it's our change control process and i hear you know i've heard so many times that that change management or ocm has been that role or that capability has been given to a project manager to do on top of the project management role when it comes to delivering change um and you know it's it's obviously more than that um and i think there's some your assumption sometimes can be well a project manager can pick that up um but you know that's not the skill set so you know it's it i i think there's you know it's it's it's it's misunderstood it's a misunderstood child so but it's more than that it's more than just training or comms um and if you've listened to the previous sessions that we've had tonight it's about the people side of change and it's about getting people through the change curve or the transformation or whatever you want to call it whatever that changes with as little disruption and pain as possible and we're not saying no disruption or no pain because you know if we're realistic that's sometimes not possible sometimes you know changes are a disc benefit to people but it's about helping people and just managing that management managing that transition from the old way of working to the new way of working um and that it in there sorry other things there are things that are involved within that so there are processes in any change um organizational processes will change um the people that use those processes will change their skill sets will change because of that technology has change so um if you're implementing an erp um clearly that's a massive technological technological difference where automation might happen um for some of your processes or you may have a completely different way of working um from the way that you work at the moment um and that therefore may mean that the organizational structure will change so you know job families will change job roles will change so you know lots of things can happen as a result of technological change and it's about managing the people through that so it's about understanding um and it's about accepting and it's about embracing change um and you know the key skill set for me and we talked about this before is about understanding the way of the world and understanding what's in it for people and what's not in it for people and just understanding how it is for them um and the key point is that there are many elements to the work stream um it's you know as with anything with project management it's complicated um there are toolkits there are things that you can do to help yourself um and we're here today just to give you um to give you the you know the deep dive into into that so let me just move this on so in answer to the question do we really need to bother with change with ocm and yes absolutely um you can deliver a new system you can create um and implement an erp that's great you've got a new system but you know it's all it's only going to go so far unless your people are involved and they're on board and they are ready for the new way of working they are bought into the new way of working um if they're not bought into the new way of working you can understand what the resistance is you can target that resistance um and it also gives you the opportunity to embed new ways of working before go live so that on day one no one's sitting at a desk on i don't know what to do with oracle i don't know what to do with workday it's about making sure that those happen but moreover as well it's about adoption and sustainability of change and it's making sure that those changes stick so that people don't people do the right thing going forward so that they don't find shortcuts in the system that provide disk benefits it's about making sure that we make sure that the things that we do are the right things and that our organization is primed and ready to take those on yeah does that make sense to everybody yes yes perfect any comments from teresa and nate um no i want to be respectful of people's time and we literally have like 40 minutes so yeah yeah all right well then let's talk about common ocm challenges so teresa sure so you know we we've mentioned uh several ocm challenges uh in the previous sessions but i i think one of the the best ones to coin is if you fail to plan then plan to fail so making sure that we have a good plan we understand where we're at we use a baseline metric to measure the improvements is very very important um as well as executive and digital transformation misalignment that's another one as we as we mentioned in the other sessions um if the business needs and the the leadership needs if they're misaligned and they're not understood we're going to waste a lot of time and having to go back so misaligned leadership uh leads to a company's misalignment in new which creates no clear direction and that is not good especially when you want to have a change go across the company if the top leadership doesn't have alignment and we're not you know on a consensus then then we need to to go back to the drawing board um failing to pinpoint resistance to change is huge as we mentioned in previous uh sessions there is an obvious resistance and then there is an unintentional resistance so being able to touch all the stakeholders necessary to identify those cues and making sure that we get a good understanding of what that resistance looks like we'll then we'll be able to put uh plans in place to address it um i think we've mentioned this several times julia comms is not change management again it's not you know working with um the the communication team although they are great partners um but we really need to have thought and intention on what we're trying to communicate by level by department our responsibility to make sure everyone is understanding what it is how it's going to impact them and what they need to do and then what's in it for me is very very important i honestly don't believe anyone comes to work wanting to do a bad job and that really comes through uh communicating with the teams and being able to be honest and open with what we're doing and to show them the benefit you can go to the next slide oh do you have any questions or comments okay can you go to the next slide please julia i think we have a question while we go to the next slide from liam liam you're on fire with all these questions i gotta say gotta recognize that does diversity in the workplace have any bearing on acceptance or resistance to organizational change management well i think that's worth a discussion to make sure that everyone is included in the changes that impact them and if there is a diversity issue then it needs to be addressed head on absolutely um so i don't really think it's a barrier i think it's an opportunity to bring more people into the discussion um and to get the perspective from where they are and what they're doing to make the process changes and the shift uh palatable for everyone i don't think it's an issue i think it's it's definitely something we can benefit from yeah sorry i was on mute and i was chatting away well teresa was saying go to the next slide and i didn't realize that i was on mute um i i i yes just to record what teresa has said um you have i mean diversity and inclusion is is a massive thing and i think that you know we're aware of work before um i and where i work now also um is that we i will work with the diversity and inclusion team um to make sure that we reach all areas of the organization um um to make sure that everybody is included in that um because you know and i think we'll talk about this later but you know a change agent network is a really good tool i've been able to to to target those hard-to-reach places in the organization and to make sure that everybody has a voice don't want to go to the next slide teresa yes please sorry no worries no worries um so the guiding principles for uh successful change from third stage consulting i do believe that we did go over this earlier um i don't want to spend too much time on this due to the time constraint we have but i think one of the most important is that we involve the appropriate individuals when we're looking at this change it's very very important to make sure that the individuals that are involved in who's touching this process is available for the discussion again if you don't do this from a process improvement standpoint and you're doing the work streams when you're trying to understand current state you skip that you go to the next um stage which is change management we could miss something or someone or someone's department so it's always good to make sure that we have the right people at the table as well as driving the change from the top down sponsorship is very very very important sponsorship in my opinion can either make a break a change management initiative having a clear vision making sure we have our sponsors who support it who are visible who are there um and actively show their participation is huge you can go to the next slide yeah i just want to add on a bit as well about sponsorship and i think that what what what what can happen is that there is a a misunderstanding about what's meant with by sponsorship um yeah the role of the i mean for me i guess for everybody the role of the sponsor is absolutely pivotal and more often than not um i have found that the sponsor doesn't really realize the the the the responsibilities placed on them um and i think that sometimes they may think that well it's just doing some town halls and being the figurehead of it and actually it's not it's driving us through driving the strategic direction of the change um and also yeah sorry and then blocking things that you know can't be unblocked anywhere else so you know there's you know it's a it's a massive undertaking agreed and through the tools that we use to help develop the sponsors um making sure that they're prepared making sure the vision is clear having that sponsorship roadmap is huge to help support them yeah and and again also just to add and we've we've peppered tonight's discussion with this but and we i know we say on one hand it's not just about communications but without communication you know check organizational changes nothing you need to tell people what's happening but not just with one-way communication two-way communication and feedback is a really really key thing um you know you need to hear from the organization you need to understand what they're saying what they're thinking where the resistance is um and you know i think i've i when i did my my change management practitioner um one of the things that was said to me was you can't communicate too much and i don't always agree that that's the case because i think people can get communication fatigue and they switch off when they become disengaged but certainly plentiful communication that's targeted and is diverse then is a really good it's a really good tool to get people engaged and get people on board and feel make people feel that they're part of it because we do change with people not to them right absolutely yeah fact that move to the next level yes yes that would be great yeah all right so next slide please we're going to outline the uh change management approach organizational change management approach uh phase one is the ocm discovery phase two is planning and strategy phase three mobilize the change phase four execute the transformation and phase five vendor selection if applicable so as we go through this presentation you will see how through discovery it builds with planning the planning and strategy builds with mobilization mobilization builds on execution so again the the tools that we're using are fluid and we we're picking the right tool for the right um uh circumstance however there are key tools that we're going to hit on and i'm going to then hand it over to you yeah yeah sure great let me just move to the next slide so there we go so you know this is this is a methodology this is our methodology in third stage and with chain with business change and organizational change management like project management there are different methodologies around um you know that there are um they you know we like they have prince2 we have plus i we you know there are different methodologies and we we have this one um and that's this is kind of like it's it's more of a toolkit i guess um and we said i think we said in the q a session that you know the best the best change managers are flexible and they cut the cloth to suit so you know it's all about what your client needs um it's not about enforcing prescriptive documents on them um i mean the best change management is when you can identify what's needed um you can you can change the documentation to suit your client to suit what's needed you know i've done impact assessments before and i've changed them every single time to different parameters just depending on what the ask is where they are on their change journey what the organization looks like what their maturity is towards change um because another challenge that comes up quite a lot is that we understand organizational change some people in the client organ client organization understand organizational change but not everyone does so sometimes you'll get people who work with you that are very systems orientated who just don't live in the living system world and they don't live in the people world so it's about trying to cut that cloth to suit and trying to find the right solution with the right tools to get to get what you need out of it so i hope that makes sense um so to point the point one about the discovery toolkit so we talked we talked earlier about vision and we talked about the key to change when we had the q a session with nate earlier was that we need to know what you want to be when you grow up so what do you want you know where are you going what are you trying to do and that's great because you know you need you need a roadmap you need direct direction you need a signpost brilliant that's great but the other thing that you know is is it's a really you need to build on solid foundations um and that's that's the discovery phase so you can see there that there are a whole host of things that you can use a whole host of tools that you can use and again i'm going to emphasize the word toolkit because you know you don't have to do every single one of them um you pick the ones that you want to do and what we want to do now is i don't want to take you through every single one but let's have a look at a few of them and understand how we use them what the benefits are just to give you a flavor of the things that we do in this stage so first of all organization taxonomy um i'm working with a client just now i'm trying to well i've got that information from them now sometimes it's not that easy to get um you know not all organizations um have a nice lovely pretty organizational diagram that shows everybody in every department um some organizations grow organically so trying to get that sometimes can be a bit of a job in themselves but what the benefit of this is is that it outlines who who's in the organization and who might be impacted by change and what the touch points are with customers or with suppliers or with clients or where you know where do you need to be focusing effort so trying to get that is a bit of a challenge but once you've got that it helps you get that landscape of the organization and understand what you're dealing with and it's good you know if you can do that that's a tool that can be used by other elements of the project as well sis are interested in that um it helps understand the the number of licenses that you need to have so it's a really good ground and the first thing to do i i actually think that this is a very important first step as well um if as a leader you look at this and you say wow i didn't realize x y and z it really opens them up to the the change i the idea of change saying okay we really need to do this we need to make these these initiatives happen and i didn't realize x y and z so having this snapshot in front of a leader is very very positive very powerful yeah absolutely and it helps i mean it helps define the enormity and the scale of the change um because quite often when you're you know you're at sea level you're at board level you don't see and you don't appreciate how many people are at the cool face and i think it gives them a real good appreciation as teresa says about who we're included in this and why and why we're throwing money at it um because then it makes them think well actually yeah okay i get it now so you know it just helps them see what's going on yeah great sure okay great um stakeholder mapping brilliant right okay we'll move on to the next one so stakeholder mapping um is an i guess is the next stage to the taxonomy so you have a taxonomy um it's everybody in the organization but some people in that organization might not care they might not be impacted by the change yeah you don't want to you certainly don't want to be throwing out a one-size-fits-all communications to lots of people who go do you know what i work in facilities what's an erp got to do with me um so it's about understanding who has skin in the game and not just that but understanding the impact that they have of that the impact it has on them and their level of influence um because you want to know up front who has influence who can derail it who is important to target um and who's important and how do they feel about it as well you know if you have someone now who's gonna know i don't want to do that i want to have you know i just don't want to do it um it's a good it's a good point that you can identify that and you can put into action a plan to engage with them and manage them accordingly and i'm not saying that you know it's a panacea um it's not going to solve all your problems but it helps again set out that landscape of who you who you need to talk to who's involved and how you feel about things so on that point there's a number of different things that you can do you can see here that the first thing is that you name you name your stakeholders you work out where in the organization they come from and there's a couple of things that you can do you can use power or influence interest you can and again you can change these variables on depending on your client depending on what kind of change it is doesn't have to be power and interest i've just done one that's influence and impact um so you know it's about again it's about you know varying it just depending on what you need you can use whatever skills that you want that's fine um and then it's a you can what's helpful what's a it's a really impactful thing to do is to plunk everybody onto um onto a matrix so that your senior management can see actually yeah okay this is why we need to devote money to communications we need to maybe get another internal communications person or we need to make sure that we've got enough resource to do that so it gives them that opportunity to understand again the enormity and the the benefits of what we're trying to do yeah i also want to interject really quick i think this is a good tool to show um who you should put as these change agents or these major change stakeholders because if you have someone who has low influence or a low interest score and you assign them to be a change agent in a particular area well i mean we can work with them see how it goes but if time is of the essence you might want senior leadership to reevaluate what that person the what that role who that role should really go to yeah absolutely absolutely so again that's just the finished i finished example a worked example of stakeholder map this is something that i would generally use as a tool to inform senior management and sponsor level of you know where people are sitting here and don't forget that you know and i think people may also misunderstand this in organizations from time to time that it's a living breathing document um yes it's absolutely a snapshot of where we are at this moment in time but stakeholders change roles change people's opinions change um you know people's resistance changes so the absolute key thing to do is is use this use this document um throughout the life cycle of the change and beyond um and map the engagement and you can do things on it like you know you can have target levels where you want people to be you can measure how far they are off target and again you know we we don't do change in a darken room so this is very much about getting your senior stakeholders in place and having meetings with them getting them getting their input about what they how they feel about other people in the organization and sometimes yes sometimes some of that information can be this document can be quite sensitive you know your people might not feel you know comfortable sharing it um so it's something that i would always password protect and keep quite quick keep quite closely under lock and key um you know it can be quite inflammatory if somebody was to open it potentially um so yeah it's about so it's a living document and it's about development and managing those stakeholders okay this time it's 4 40. so again other things that you can do leadership workshops um i think we mentioned this earlier on that um you know we need to make sure that our senior leaders are aligned um you know if one person thinks one thing and one person thinks another thing and they're telling their team something different you know you can see where that's going to run into problems so having those workshops with senior leaders um really valuable to understand where the how they feel about it and and moreover what we're going to do about it business impact assessments really great tool there um again this is about using um it's about using the change sometimes that's requirements sometimes that's a process taxonomy but understanding what how um what the what the um what the impact is on teams um and if we talked about this earlier we talked about automation just because a process is being automated doesn't mean that it is going to be plain sailing and everyone's going to be happy about it that itself brings us it brings a lot of resistance so it's about trying to understand how the change is going to impact people in terms of technology their roles are they going to have to change location because of it um all of that things this is probably a good time to look at the business process um activities that have happened hopefully before that just to kind of bump them up against each other to make sure that nothing was missed to understand um was there a stakeholder missed et cetera et etc how is this really impacting um so i think that this point is it's a good it's a good exercise to kind of compare it to yes absolutely and again again we just want to get to the point that you know we don't do this in a darkened room this is about reaching out to stakeholders reaching out to smes in the organization reaching out to people that are at the coalface to ask them what their views are of it you know we don't know you know we know change we change experts but we don't know the organization so it's about it's about getting that information from them and we talked very much about business analysis this is absolutely business analysis and understanding how the business is yeah and it's about the nosier you can be in my opinion and the more questions you can ask the more valuable this tool is going to be great and then i don't want to it's 447 yeah it's 4 42. so i don't want to spend too much time on this but all of that leads out to a change approach and plan um where you want to have a strategy you have to have an approach we talked about the vision we said you know you know where you need to go this is about this is about how you get there um and um what key activities are going to be in there what milestones there are and a good plan has things like um ownership who owns the change um how do we assess progress um how does it align to rules and responsibilities how does it fit into benefits and again this is something that's sellable to your senior level that says actually yes ocm is a valuable thing yeah and again readiness assessment good tool really great tool for looking to see now as a snapshot at the beginning of a change or at any point during a change how ready the business is to accept change and that includes parameters like what else is going on in the business at this time are people change fatigued are we asking them to do too much what's going on in the past um you know where how do people feel about things what else is happening you know covert is going on you know people are in a state of flux so you know all of that falls into business readiness yeah right sorry so you're on i've talked i talked a while i'm so sorry you're fine um i honestly i would even suggest that we possibly have another one to go a little bit deeper and ask have the audience ask questions this is such an important important thing and i know we're in time constraints so we're gonna get through this and have it available for uh absolutely um so planning and strategy making sure that um we do touch upon may the plans for the communication the leadership action plan the leadership engagement and again the change agents have a plan to identify who those influencers are do we have the right people and then making sure that when we have all the pieces in place we launch the brand accordingly next time cool yeah perfect sure um so touching on brand launch again um making sure this is a great time to have the buy-in that we need so having people shake their head yes i get it i'm gonna do it versus actually doing it is two completely different things so when your stakeholder team or your sponsor when they have the idea and they understand where we're going what the initiative is about and then bring change management into it their buy-in is imperative as well as developing a communication launch for our ocm initiative again we touched on this before what what's the strategy um why have we chosen this direction and what's the benefit of the change again the way the world is moving so quickly change is inevitable so really hitting on those benefits and how it's going to positively impact the daily lives and the daily jobs of the people that we're targeting is very very important as well as it's the what's in it for me i think that is is one of the keys again understanding that people want to see how this is going to impact them so developing that communication plan around that is imperative next please all right let me just get my mouse to the right please no worries all right it was misbehaving right we'll change agents for change management uh professionals we can roll with it it's fine um so change agents this is again a very very important point and i think we touched on it in the other sessions that making sure that the right people are in the right locations for the right initiatives i read a book called from good to great and it's amazing i would definitely recommend it um because you have to make sure that the the individuals who are promoting the change and pushing the change really believe it do they own it are they accountable for it do they they add positive um interactions to it because if not then a lot of the work that you're gonna do you're gonna have to redo so identifying the influences of the group making sure that they're clearly educated on what we're doing why we're doing it get their input so we can develop a plan for them to move the change forward communication plan and i think we've all mentioned this before it's not just an update as to where we are um the communication plan needs to be tailored by level by department by impacted group so we can speak to them on how this change is going to impact their their daily uh jobs um and i mentioned it earlier as well having that message mapping session making sure that we target those uh three levers so is you know is it logical are we creating some type of of emotional connection is the person delivering the change credible source or respected source those three elements together really help the acceptance of the information to the person that we need to receive it so putting that communication together with the coms team or with the if there is no comms team at the location then just putting it together with stakeholders is very important um so next please uh leadership engagement i'm i'm pretty sure we could talk about this all day but again uh leadership support is imperative this will make or break the project and it's not support it is is understanding of what's going on it is um making sure that they are prepared to communicate the change and why we're doing it in the initiative as well so all leading all this together will help us to execute the plan um when we are able to develop the communication strategy the cadence and how we're going to deliver there's multiple multiple avenues of media that we could take to help embrace the change next please okay so time constraint uh consideration uh there is a leadership action plan that we work to develop with uh the sponsor to make sure that was i just mentioned all of those elements are included in the plan uh one of the things i want to call out is the risk assessment which is huge and again this is a living breathing document so as we move through the change these assessments will continue to make sure that we're able to hit the mark that we're looking to do next please all right mobilizing change uh vision we spoke on this a lot as well having a clear and concise vision to communicate across the organization is imperative making sure that we work with the leadership team on creating it for the future state where are we where you want to go is is where this vision is created and be collaborative to make sure that all of the stakeholder groups or all of the people involved in these major decision major change decisions are at the table to discuss it so having the business goals and making sure that we align them to on the organization's goals is very very important as well as to identify the business challenges and risks the more risk assessment that we have available to us will help us develop a better change plan we'll communicate communicate communicate as i've been saying all along next week yeah now i just wanted to add there yeah pro tip as we've put in the corner is about it's about it's about appealing to hearts and minds um so yeah and that takes sorry sorry today well i was just gonna say when you when you do your message mapping and you use those three components um having that connection to an emotion is huge so you have to make sure that the message is it's coming from a logical perspective you have to make sure that there's is an emotion tied to it is if it's you know whatever emotion you want um and making sure it's coming from a credible source or respected source uh will really push that message forward so yes appealing to the hearts and minds as well as making sure that that message is coming from that credible source with logic behind it really opens the door to receiving the message absolutely yeah and appealing to her minds just takes people beyond um just beyond accepting it because they start to internalize it and believe in it so you know you don't just get people just to go yeah that's fine you want people to believe and evangelize it yep absolutely because if if they're open to receiving the message they can embrace it they can own it and then eventually they're accountable for it which is is more as you put skin in the game um yep beneficial sorry that's okay uh benefit realization is one of my hot topics one something that i really push to make sure that's clearly developed in the projects that we're on because at the end of the day people are are providing uh this we're providing a service with somebody and they want to see what am i getting out of the change that was made so developing you know identifying those kpis sometimes they're shared sometimes they're that you know you don't want to like an attrition we just talked about this earlier an attrition metric that's not something you want to share with the entire population of your organization however key leaders need to understand what's going on with attrition and how the change management can help with that benefit realization analysis is so so so important i can't stress this enough because again at the end of the day what's the bang for the buck right twice for sure no next one wow is this one i think so about to take it um yeah all right so i'm gonna do this in two minutes so that we've got time for questions um okay so this has all been so we have a methodology it's a logical methodology you understand where you are you mobilize your troops you plan you have your vision um and then you start to get ready and then you go live yeah so these are these are all types of things you might do then um you know it's all the practical things that you want to do about compensation programs um weekly meetings um and we've written down there again two-way comms um is you know is is absolutely invaluable and you know when we've talked about we we've talked about this you know for for nearly an hour change is hard i know it sounds from this that you think it's all plain sailing actually it's really hard um you know it's it it's like you know you it's kind of like you find it's like two steps forward and one step back all the time and someone mentions there and saying that changes it i can't say it iterative um it absolutely is um what we what i've said is it's that it's enough design upfront you know with if you do big design upfront and you plan everything out for the next three years um then you know it's not going to work so what the best thing to do is it plans the next quarter review after the quarter what went well what didn't go well what could we do differently the next time and take it from there um and and again be flexible cut your cloth to suit listen to the people listen to what they say and then i've written another pro tip honor the past absolutely be honest about yeah be honest about things that have gone before because people can see through nonsense they're not stupid and you absolutely have to give them that sense of trust so so there is one thing i do want to say here and this this is great information well i'm a change management person but anyway i think that we hopefully can do this again in the future because there's so much behind the tools and how to use them and what's the you know the outcome and what's the deliverable um that i don't think we were able to really let the audience see what this looks like in terms of practical application a lot of times people think okay change management and they it's not really intuitive as to what goes into it so i'm hoping there there's definitely a need or a desire to learn more yeah we could talk about this already so i'm going to miss out that and i'm going to just just because i want to have time to ask questions um and i hope i hope this translates because i i call it a takeaway but i think maybe people that are not in the uk call it i take out but i wanted to i wanted to try and be funny so you know it's you know it's a change management um but my joke is the takeaway it's not a joke the takeaway point is it's not about changing technology it's about successfully changing people people's ways of working and success depends on changing them successfully so that's the whole that's the whole crux of of ocm so i hope that makes sense and then it's over to you and if you're still hungry if you're still hungry for more that's my joke again about takeouts um then hear your emails and you're absolutely welcome to contact any of us i love your jokes that was great thanks very much wow that was action-packed thank you guys so much for diving through um you know everything you just talked about i think we have a lot of questions that we didn't get to that i'd love to pick your brain on um so we'll spend the next five minutes or so running through those and one of the questions that stood out to me is we talked a lot about resistance to change and how employees are going to be hesitant to change whether it's intentional or unintentional at what point should you seriously consider firing a change-resistant employee well i think that in my i'm going to take this one really quick um i i don't think that anyone intentionally i would like to believe that anyone not would intentionally not want to do x y and z i think the real issue is the root cause of the resistance and trying to understand what that really is um i'm not you know you know rosie sunshine all the time like 99.9 but there is that point percent that i'm like practical yes we have to make a decision here and that's really up to senior leadership to make that decision giving them all the information giving them all the facts and having them make the make that that call so how many times can we say that from 2020 to 21. you're on meal i was gonna ask julia nate what are your guys's thoughts on that does it get to a point where you need to just cut the cut the cord with someone who's not adapting well but you know i think i think it's like it's like any job performance and i think really changes changes this and this is way over cliche used phrase but change is happening all the time i mean you literally um whether you're working on a project or not and whether you're working on a technology implementation a change management initiative your organization should always be going through change and if someone's not willing to change and if they're not willing to grow and change with the organization then they're you know that really that's part of your job performance so i think i think the one thing that you do owe employees because i think we all have a resistance to change like i mentioned earlier um i think you do owe them the you do have an obligation to let them know how they fit into the change how the change will help them how it helps the organization and what the vision is and then you know at the end of the day just the same as any other part of your job performance if you're not willing to change and if you're not willing to do the work to to make yourself different and better for the organization then you really don't need to be there absolutely that's the truth and i mean you mentioned that a lot of it comes from fear so i guess how do you work with the people who are just genuinely hesitant because they're afraid they're gonna lose their job um if if you bring on this new technology for example how what do you say to them what are some you know quick tips that you would give somebody who has someone on their team that's not adapting well i think first of all um i think that change agent network is is instrumental in talking to those people because people people who are scared respond better to peer-to-peer rather than some faceless person that's in the change department or a consultant and i think it's much easier firstly for them to open up and talk about that and having that change agent network allows the change agent to have the tools to go back and talk to them about it so i think that's that's step one um but you know we mentioned this a couple of times i think that you know part of it is is about being honest um and part of them but not being brutally honest sometimes you have to put a better spin on things but but you know sometimes automation of stuff doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to lose their jobs and i think that's a that's a key message that that needs to be played back that you know it leaves room for people to do more valuable jobs um so i think that it can be an opportunity for people as well so those are the kind of approaches that i would take that's great feedback i've even been on that end of it where you know i was married to my spreadsheet that i made in my last job and when we brought on a new software it was you know comfort zones they're easy to stay in right so um when you have people that you like trust and respect on your team that are more cognizant and welcoming to the change it kind of changes your mind as well it's interesting how well absolutely sure one one last thing i'll say to that too is is i as i think here's another overused cliche but i think change is 180 and and you really need to be make sure that employees are are given their job and they're given a reason why they're changing and they also need to see you changing as well and i think you know i kind of use the analogy you're if if your parents come in when you were a little kid and they say okay the family's not eating eating any more sugar we're all going to eat healthy food and we're all going to exercise all the time and then you look at your parents and they're sitting on the couch chugging coke and eating potato chips what does that say as far as you you know you're going to say well it's obviously not important to them they obviously don't believe in the change so why should i believe in the change and i think again you know i referenced our client earlier this week they they all were very clear about the vision they saw what it was going to do they saw what was going to help them all but they they said you know how do we how do we how do we get convey this to our workforce and so i think that it's really kind of a two-part thing is you you really have to live it yourself and then you also have to to make sure that they know what that vision is and what it looks like that's right lead by example yeah um let's see i have time for maybe two more questions then we'll wrap it up so in the chat i see a question another one from liam do you see many organizations fail to stay the course and see ocm through until the end and what caused them to swerve onto the off-ramp if you will on the ocm motorway you're on me at teresa [Laughter] a little smile goes a long way right okay so um i was saying i will take that one to start off with um yes i have seen initiatives start strong um and kind of taper off and the earlier my career gung ho let's get this done i think i took too much on i think i owned it too much versus letting having the client really embrace it and and just own that piece of the change and what we were trying to get done and then when i walked away it went you know kind of derailed so that i learned very early on my career having the sponsor active visible active engaging having the right stakeholders having the right change agents and making sure that they are the ones that really push it move it believe it breathe it i got it that's how change is lasting and impactful but if consulting comes in and they try to own everything what happens when they leave nothing so yeah i think just a separate point on this but i think what happens when a reason people get older or changes get to realize there's a change in sponsorship at the top where person b starts and it says no no stop i want to just change it and then all that good work has you know potentially gone on been undone so there's a there's a key stakeholder management piece there to say to them well actually you know what we've you know we've invested all this time all this money all this effort in getting people to point b are you sure that you want to try and undo that and that's honestly that's a really hard conversation to have but i think again it's a necessary conversation to have yeah i also have another one actually change saturation so you have too much going on and you do this project it was awesome and then you kind of get the leadership to your point telling everyone to sit switch gears so if again leadership is an understanding and they're not bracing and they're not putting that thoughtful intent behind how each of these changes even intersect or how the resources are distributed it could happen interesting good answers okay last question let's see how would you manage so we've talked a lot about kind of managing up if you need to and selling the importance of ocm to executive leadership that might not fully grasp it yet how would you manage a lack of executive support and active sponsorship with ocm he wants to go so i mean i'll go back to the example that i had um being honest and upfront so when i get pushback on initiatives or programs or what have you we want it done done done done because i don't really have time for this i don't have time for this so the question is okay i hear what you're saying do you want it done right now or do you want it done the right way and then when you put dollars behind those statements bing their eyes open they're like okay let me hear which because people don't want to lose money especially when they're accountable to a board or whomever um really being able to speak to that um has in my experience helped tremendously and honestly if there are you know leaders that don't want to participate or embrace it that is definitely a conversation that you need to have with that executive sponsor is this person the right person to lead the charge and if they're svp or what have you that's fine your titles are awesome thank you but at the end of the day we have to get this done for the organization you laugh julia only because it's true because i don't know i'm a truthful kind of lady i love it i mean another thing too i don't know i i'm thinking of how you could sell it um and manage up is take case studies i mean there's so many case studies out there of erp failures where a lot of it is due to a lack of ocm so you know if there's anything that speaks roi and the effect that it can have on a project it's you know let's learn from other people's mistakes and not do the same thing absolutely and their resistance to change is it's just the same as everyone else's and if they're if they're overwhelmed with work then we need to address that if they're if they don't see the value in it if they don't see the alignment in what we're doing then we need to address it and somebody made a decision to pay you a lot of money and somebody's making a decision to try and get the best bang they can for their technology bucks so whoever's ultimately making that decision needs to know that that the chances for success are going way down when you don't have leadership involved so one other point just for julia on the last slide she had i think it was a couple last slides but be honest about the past honor the past so you can always bring that up and like okay you had this failure this this didn't work this didn't work how much did it cost you if you tie the dollars back i'm telling you it works how much did it cost you how much did it cost you so absolutely great feedback money talks right awesome well thank you guys so much it is always such a pleasure to have experts on this panel experts sharing their insights and you guys are truly good at what you do so we appreciate your time today thank you for walking us through all these concepts and teresa like you said i mean there's so much left to unpack that we can unpack so maybe you just have to join us on the podcast and um you know we'll get you back on stage to keep sharing your thoughts we would love that along with my friend julia i can come with me yeah we can talk about it all day all of you you guys are amazing so thank you okay um i also you guys just saw i put in the chat here on crowdcast and we'll put it in the uh comments if you're watching on linkedin or youtube as well but it's just a handful of links from our website to our contact information for the marketing team i put a link for our youtube channel our podcast and our third stage linkedin page if you're not already connected i encourage you to follow us on linkedin that's where you're going to see all of our content be pushed out from blogs to new podcast episodes to new videos so we encourage you to tune in there and of course stay up to date on the new events that are coming um coming up like i said every month we host a workshop just like this so we will be having another one in june and you can find more information on that on our website which is third stage dash consulting and um in addition to that like i said the 2021 digital transformation report the button is at the bottom of the page and we are copying the link in the comments section if you're not on broadcast so make sure to download it just because it's a good resource for you to have it's a good resource for you to share with your team and it really covers the full scope of what makes a digital transformation successful in 2021 and beyond so with that said we really appreciate you guys joining us it has been an absolute pleasure guiding you through this workshop lots of amazing insights from our speakers lots of amazing questions comments um you can tell that the people that tuned in today also are in the industry know what they're talking about and are are sharing their knowledge with us as well so we appreciate you joining being a part of it and we hope to see you at next month's full throttle we appreciate it have a good one bye you

Channel: Eric Kimberling - Digital Transformation

Views: 49,980

Keywords: organizational change management, change management, change management training, change management methodology, change management tools, digital transformation, business transformation

Id: 42zyea2DXos

Length: 185min 10sec (11110 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021