This is Hard. This is Fun. Change Management for Digital Transformation
Tim Mulholland
Last summer at the Data Governance and Information Quality (DGIQ) conference I was introduced by a colleague to Dr. Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, and it has had a profound effect on how I think of change management when implementing new systems and the challenges of introducing these new systems into existing workflows.
Dr. Dweck, a Stanford University professor, starts her book with a story of primary school children being presented with puzzles by their teachers and observers. Initially, the puzzles are easy and the children solve them quite quickly. But, when the teachers introduced progressively more difficult puzzles an interesting thing happened: instead of the children getting frustrated and quitting, they were instead excited by the increased challenge. They felt smarter the harder it got! Ten-year-old children were shouting out “I love a challenge!” And even “I was hoping this would get harder!”
Somewhere between the playground and the office, we lose the excitement we feel when challenged. In our day-to-day jobs, we often do not want to be introduced to change or new challenges. Instead, we feel smarter when we can be experts in what we know without expanding our horizons. In other words, to be set in our ways is not only comfortable but validating. The common phrase “Here, I will show you how we’ve always done it” creeps into common conversation. Dr. Dweck argues that this is just a mindset and if we adjust our mindsets to be more like those children in the study, embracing the challenge more than the destination, it can lead to growth and success. Dr. Dweck suggests telling yourself “This is hard. This is fun” when faced with new, often formidable, opportunities.
Here at Salt Flats, our Insights & Analytics team partners with innovative clients to implement new workflows and adopt new digital experiences and platforms. Often our partners are faced with the challenges of dramatically changing their operations. It is understandable for digital transformations to be met with some skepticism from teams that have been following the same workflow for years. We work with our clients to map out current state and future state workflows to visually represent the changes and all their downstream effects. Change management and digital transformation are never easy. As professors noted in the Harvard Business Review “Digital transformation is an ongoing process of changing the way you do business. It requires foundational investments in skills, projects, infrastructure, and, often, in cleaning up IT systems. It requires mixing people, machines, and business processes, with all the messiness that it entails.”
When I think about changing the way you do business, “with all the messiness it entails” I think of Dr. Dweck’s advice to think like the children, “This is hard. This is fun.” At Salt Flats we take that mindset to our clients, focusing on embracing the challenges needed to leverage success in digital experiences. Because while change management is often the hardest part of digital transformation it is crucial to long-term success.
Recently we had the great pleasure to work with a unique broadcast media firm. Operating in some of the world’s most inhospitable places for free press and media, the very nature of their business has taught them to embrace change and foster a culture of resiliency. While many of the change management challenges remained, human nature and all, instituting new workflows lent itself well to this resilient culture.
Earlier I mentioned the damaging phrase “This is the way we’ve always done it.” This oft-repeated phrase is very common in discovery work. With our broadcast client, we never once heard that phrase; it was replaced with “I’m sure there’s a better way but…” This simple reframing suggests an openness to change and was music to the ears of our team at Salt Flats and the change management agents at the firm.
Their team members also appreciated the scope of the challenge, which I believe is very important to the success mantra of “this is hard, this is fun.” We established a unified metadata structure for a new platform designed to support media distribution in 21 different languages and dialects. From there we were able to design new workflow operations for all their various journalism departments from content generation to fact-checking to creative operations. By not shying away from the challenge and instead embracing it, all client team members were able to contribute to the effort and create momentum that wasn't forced.
In summary, when faced with ever-evolving business landscapes, change management becomes vital to growth because it enables faster and more successful adoption of changes. As marketers, if we can keep a positive and appreciative mindset about change, this mindset alone can push forward new experiences and efficiencies. Implementing new digital experiences will always be hard but if we can remember to have fun with the challenge, we are steps closer to successful adoption.