0:00
Emma. Okay, so I met our next speaker, Emma Roloff, back in 2021 when she was the director of enterprise sales for a solutions integrator, and was first getting started with her podcast, I was actually lucky enough to be one of her early guests. We became friends immediately, and now, years later, she has conducted over 300 expert interviews in the space of digital transformation. Is the co founder of roll off consulting, and is infamous on LinkedIn for drinking wine in the rain to make a point about the importance of change management during technology implementations. Today, she's joining us to share a simple framework to make us all a little better in taking a people driven approach to technology. Let's give Emma a warm welcome. Thank you. If I were a clicker,
1:01
all right. Thank you very much, everybody. So I want to start by just first saying My role today is to call bullshit on something that Walker said this morning. I think he said he likes to disagree with people, but he opened up his presentation this morning talking a little bit about three things that always cause failures within digital transformation. But in my opinion, he left probably one of the most important ones out, and that is change management and adoption and really bringing people along with you on the journey of implementing tools and really any sort of change that you might have going on within your organization. You can do everything right. You can buy the industry leading tools that you're seeing demoed this week. You can completely re imagine the way that you are managing a process, and you can have a really staggeringly high ROI. But if you don't get adoption of the solution, you might as well be burning money. And I, as Jeff said earlier, have about a decade worth of experience on the enterprise sales side, working with some of the companies that you mentioned earlier this morning in manufacturing, like Emerson and Rockwell Automation, but my role was more on the back end automation side of things, so working directly with departments like accounts payable or HR, and managing things maybe off of the manufacturing floor. And when I was in that role, I kind of thought at the beginning of my career that people that focused on process were the gold star. I had a favorite customer, customer of mine, that was a global company that had grown predominantly through acquisition, and they were gold like gold star, standard of calculating ROI, starting with a problem, thinking through the process before they ever even brought us in as their partners to implement tools, and I was working with them on a project back probably five years into my career, where we were taking seven different credit memo departments that had come from acquired companies, merging them onto one software platform and bringing them onto a consistent process. And during that project, they had calculated that they were going to have over a million dollars worth of ROI just on the software savings from consolidating everybody to one platform. From a sales perspective, that ROI was like a dream come true. I was super excited for this project, and I was staying close to it to make sure that we were successful. We had gone through the full discovery. They'd signed off on the software. We were moving into implementation, and things seemed to be going well. And then I got a phone call that I think will live in infamy in my mind for the rest of my career. And I was sitting in my little basement cube in 2019 when the project manager over the top of this project called me and she said, You know what, Emma, we have to pull the plug on the project. And I thought to myself, like how we had already gone through the process. Side, there was this huge ROI, and she shared with me that they had gotten a new senior vice president over the top of the project, and he decided that he didn't want to deal with the people problems associated with the implementation, so he was going to pull the plug on the entire thing. And you know, for many of you in the room, you might be kind of sitting in this in between spot where maybe you are not the one that's in charge of the budget, or you're not the one in charge of the vision, but ultimately, the success of the project still sits on your shoulders. You are still responsible for bringing that project through to the finish line, and so whether it's you or someone else somewhere in your company who doesn't pay attention to the people. Side of a project, you're going to end up in a bad place. And again, my role previously was cross vertical. I worked with manufacturers, insurers, healthcare, biotech, and I saw this people part of the process, continually rearing its head and throwing off our implementations in every industry, with every company of different shapes and sizes. If they weren't paying attention to the people side of change, it got us into a bad spot. We were the same implementer with no matter who we were working with, we still urged everybody to take that role on. But if the people that were implementing the solution from the IT perspective and the leadership couldn't get behind this idea. We were never quite as successful as we were in the cases where we were actually digging into the people problems. And so, as Jeff said, My goal today is to talk through a really simple framework that I have developed over the last number of years to make change management, or the people side of implementing technology more accessible to every single person in this room, no matter if you're that decision maker or somebody just influencing the decisions that are happening in your organization. And I, you know, when I talk about this framework specifically for change management, it comes from probably one of my least favorite parenting moments that I've had, but this is one of those times where parenting, or my personal life and my work life really started to collide around that same time where I was starting to pay more Attention to the people side of change. So I have an eight year old daughter, but from the moment that her little baby brain connected the idea that a needle causes pain, she started to have, like, absolutely massive meltdowns at the doctor's office, and so leading into her three year old appointment again, around the same time that all this stuff was happening at work and I was starting to pay more attention to these people problems, I decided, You know what, I'm gonna like, use some of my change management knowledge to make this transition to going to the doctor and getting the shot a little bit easier on her. And so i She's three years old. We did all of the things that I could possibly think of to make her less afraid of going to the doctor. We, like, watched Daniel Tiger episodes about getting the shot. Shout out to PBS. We did role play. We talked about the fact that, like, the shot was gonna hurt and what it was going to look like when we got to the doctor's office, and the fact that they were going to weigh her and measure her, and we did again, everything I could possibly think of to make her more comfortable with this change that was about to come forward in her life. Then fast forward a year to when she's four years old. I thought when she was three, we had, like, built the resilience to move through the doctor's office, no problem, and when it was time to go to the doctor, I told her on the way to school that day, like, Mommy is going to come pick you up early from the office and we're going to go to the doctor. And she didn't have a big reaction. So I continued to be, like, really proud of myself and my momming ability, and I went to work, and I came to pick her up that day, and before I could even get out of my car, I could hear her crying in the office of her daycare. I'm like, oh, okay, clearly that that went well, so I go in, and it took me 10 minutes. And I am not exaggerating, because at this point, I started to time it, because it was getting so ridiculous to get her into my car. Then on the way to the doctor's appointment, I was trying to do everything I could to again, kind of get this sense of like we're okay. We can manage this. We're all right. We called our dad. I think I called both of her grandparents. I made promises for ice cream. And I think, you know, the really good parenting, people will tell you that you should also bribe your children with toys when they're having tantrums. So I tried that too, and nothing I could do could get her to calm down. So at this point we get to the doctor's office, my only hope is that she will go into like captonic shock, like a little bunny when they come in and I'm thinking, like, okay, we're just gonna get through it. We walk into the doctor's office and they take pity on me, and they tell me that they'll put us into a family room that has a couch instead of like the normal doctor's office, set up, and we're sitting in there waiting for the doctor, for the nurse to come in with the shot, and all hope that she was going to freeze and shock went out the door the moment that the nurse walked in with the basket that holds the needles, my kid turned into a feral cat, and she jumped I'm not joking at all, jumped up behind me on the couch, was draped over my shoulder, screaming bloody murder. And. And it was in that moment, this is just the way my brain works, that I realized with like a sinking sense in my stomach that I had just done an absolute shit job of managing change for my kid. And this was not a reflection on her or her behavior. It had everything to do with me and the way that I had managed that change. And I started to think back over the course of the next couple of days after I had slightly recovered from the trauma of, like full body having to hold her down to get her shot, that I had done some very simple things when she was three years old to help her manage the change of going to the doctor that I had completely thrown out the window the following year. So first, when we were watching TV shows and talking about going into the doctor's office and what that was going to look like, and the measurements and the weighing and all of those things, we set a vision for her of exactly what was going to happen. But most importantly, we talked about the why behind needing shots and what the doctor does for us. And then in three year old terms, we gave her a strong what's in it for me, of ice cream and a reward afterward, and knowing that she was going to be healthy and hopefully not get the flu that year. And then the communication didn't stop there. We didn't just set the vision and then leave it there and go to the doctor. Two weeks later, we continued talking about it, we continued to share more information with her and answer questions with her. And again, we were incredibly honest about what the whole process was going to look like. And then as we went through the process, we celebrated small wins along the way. And so we would do things like recognize the work that she was putting into staying calm while we were in the car. We would celebrate little things that were happening along the way to make her feel a sense of accomplishment and feel like she could keep the momentum of like keeping her composure going long term, and the more that I started to reflect on those three steps of vision communication and celebrating small wins, the more I started to see the connections to the implementations that I was working on that were just clicking. And I started to ruminate more on this, and probably get a little fanatic in my viewpoint of how important the people side of change is. And then, kind of similar to what Jeff said, I took these conversations then in 2020 2021 out to the world in my podcast and in the content that I created online and over time, in my own little pocket of the internet, I started to see on Tiktok and YouTube and LinkedIn, more and more stories typically coming in in a direct message, as opposed to a comment, where people feel more safe about exactly how much missing these components derailed. Millions of dollars worth of software implementations, according to STATISTICA in the US alone, $30 billion a year is wasted on software platforms that are underutilized or not adopted. So this is a real live issue that is happening all over the place, across industries, and it is severely impacting how we get the actual return that we're looking for when it comes to this big, sweeping strategy of digital transformation. And before we like move into specifically how each one of these will impact you within your company, and how you can use these tools to really drive change internally, I think it's important to recognize the role that each and every single one of you, being a technical resource, plays within your organization, again, especially if you're not that decision maker that's maybe setting that enterprise wide vision. You are a bridge. Every single one of you is a change manager, whether you want to admit it or not, you are impacting how your team adopts technology, and you are sitting in the place of being the bridge between whatever vision is set at an enterprise level to the people that are going to be consuming and using the technology that you're implementing. And it is your job to help take that enterprise why, and if it's missing, it gets a little bit more complicated, but take that enterprise vision and connect all of those people that are doing the job, day in and day out, with the what's in it. For me, statement for them, I mentioned that I create a lot of content on Tiktok. And I have one video that I'm going to continue to reference as we're going through this presentation. And I just point blank, asked everybody that is in my following, and you know anybody that it showed up in front of, if you could share one thing with your executive team, like as honest as you can be about. How you view your digital transformation, or what they should have done different software implementation. What would it be? And this idea of the why continued to come up over and over again, and you can see, I specifically cherry picked some of these so that you can see there's somebody that's Gen Z, there's millennials. I had a number of people that were saying they were Gen X that all care deeply about understanding why they have to do something, and that their adoption or their buy in is going to be absent if they don't understand that, and more specifically than just understanding why the organization is moving forward with transformation, like Walker said this morning, there's plenty of executives that don't know what the hell they're doing or why they're doing it. You have to have a what's in it, for me, for the people that are going to adopt your solution, because if you don't have that North Star for your whole team to come together and drive towards this change, you're not going to get the kind of adoption that is actually going to make you as successful as you're going to be in your mind while you're planning out your projects. And so before we talked about the vision, I really wanted to focus in on the importance of that idea of why. So then when we take a look at again, the change management for everyone framework, it's super simple because there are plenty of really robust tools, like pro size methodology or cooglers Change Management Framework, but what I find is that they often are, you know, multi step, and they're kind of hard to come back to in the moment and really like reiterate on and even if you have a change management team and you have people that are dedicated towards communicating and driving forward change within your company that doesn't like that structure, that's at that enterprise level, doesn't come down into every conversation that you're having. These three things can come down into every conversation that you're having. So for any of the decision makers that are in the room, one of the things that I've done, again with feedback from my community online, is start to think through what was an easy equation that I could use to help people realize what needs to be included in the conversation of vision. And for many of you, this might be influencing that executive that's helping shape that and how do you influence up in a way that makes it clear to them that you need all of these components? So I purposely made this equation a multiplication equation, because if any one of these four P's ends up being a zero, you are not using an effective vision for communicating with your team, and so the four P's are purpose, surprise, surprise people process and then participation. And you can use this again, even if you're like, really leaning from the middle, because you can help pull that why out based off of what you know of how you're going to change the process, and you can help share your participation, but especially at an executive level, these components are incredibly important. So first, the purpose goes back to that idea of the why, what are we actually doing all of this for? Is it so that we can compete with Amazon? Is it so that we can compete with Tesla in their cycle time for any of the Toyota folks in the room? Or is there a deeper meaning that goes back to the work that the people in your company are doing? How are you actually making their lives better, and really breaking down why they should care, so that they don't have a sense of fear. Especially in manufacturing and on the manufacturing floor, there's going to be a substantial amount of fear based off of all of the headlines that we hear, based off of the idea that plenty people have that AI is coming to steal their job and make them irrelevant. This purpose needs to be incredibly clear, and it needs to be talked about often, and then the people, part of this is really bringing them into the conversation, anybody that is going to be impacted by a change. During lunch, I was having conversation with some folks at the table, and I asked them how many employees were in their company, and they said, 100,000 you clearly can't sit down with every 100,000 employees, get their feedback and get all of their information and coalesce that all to decide your vision, but you can communicate with them, and you can communicate early and often in a way that helps take away some of the mystery behind the change that's coming, which goes into this idea of purpose, I'm sorry, of process. What are we going to be changing? What is actually going to happen? I have this nasty. Habit of, again, digital transformation and change management rearing its head in everything I do in life. And a couple of months ago, I was at a yoga class, and I was talking to the woman next to me, and she was like, I see that you travel a lot. What do you do? And I started to share with her that I get to do this kind of stuff all day. And she was like, Oh, that's interesting. You should come talk to our company, and I said, Oh, really. Like, tell me a little bit more about what you're talking about. And she works for a large health system that's in our area, so not in the manufacturing space, but she was saying, I'm in finance, and I approve all of like, the invoicing and do all of the management on the back end. And I know that we're going through a quote digital transformation. We just hired a new CEO and a new CFO to come in and help us with this whole process. And I see every invoice that we're paying, but I still have no idea what the hell we're doing. And I said, Well, what do you mean? Like, haven't they have they, like, had a meeting where they, like, shared what was happening. She was like, yeah, all they did was just say that they were going to be digital transforming, and used a bunch of acronyms that nobody understood, and everyone that I've talked to has no idea if we're implementing new software, if we're changing our process, if we're just paying out the ask for consultants. And she literally said that to me, and I said, Well, that's so interesting. So this guy, like these people that were brought in, were specifically brought in to manage this. So have they been successful with their changes in the past? She said, Well, I don't know. I would assume so, since they hired them for it, but I have no idea what they're going to be doing. So this is somebody that had sat in on town hall meetings, and again, saw had complete visibility to all of the invoices that were being paid and the vendors that were being used, and she still had no concept of what the actual process of change was going to look like in her company. So especially being somebody that has a front row seat to all of the conversations that are happening this week, you need to be a translator back to your team of exactly what the process of change is going to look like. And there will be certain things that the communication can simply be we are doing X, Y and Z, and it is not going to have an impact on anything that you do day to day, but that level of transparency and communication starts to take away some of the fear that can be associated with change, and then the last p, this idea of participation is especially important for leadership, or again, from the IT perspective, equally important, but from a different like lens, from a leadership perspective, one of the things, and I'll pull up some comments here in a minute, that I heard over and over again in the comments of that video that I made on Tiktok, was that they want executives to actually show up and do what they said they were going to do. That they actually wanted the executives to be involved in the projects that were happening, and not just like set a vision and Ghost, and especially from an IT perspective, again, when it comes to helping guide people through this process, identifying that part of your participation is not only going to be building the solution, But helping to fill that role of translation is a really important thing to really go out and clearly communicate with your team. And again, these pieces of this equation all came from the comments on my Tiktok videos. I specifically asked questions to get true feedback from people where they were not filtered by the lens of being associated with their employer on LinkedIn, or feeling like there was some sense of like these comments coming back to them. People are anonymous on Tiktok. They'll give you the truth, and they'll tell you the stuff that's going on in their companies, and the amount of times that I get messages from people that are working for very large brands that we all know, and you know you hear things about in the headlines because they're publicly traded, and they start sharing all the details of what's happening, and it all comes back to these ideas of what we wish was happening When a change was being implemented, and these people are yelling for what they need, but for some reason, we're not listening, and we continue to do the same things over and over again, and specifically from your seat as somebody that is driving change, from a technical perspective, when we take A look at like implementing this vision. It doesn't matter how great the vision is, if it's an executive propped up saying we're going to do X, Y and Z, and it never comes to fruition. And part of the reason that change is so hard for so many companies goes back to the idea of legacy implementations and kind of like trauma that we've all had from bad software implementations. You have to execute on what you are saying. So if you come forward and you say to your team, here's why we're doing it, and this is how it's going to impact your life, and this is what I'm going to do to help make sure that you feel comfortable as we move forward with it. Not only do you have to deliver on. Technical side, you have to deliver on that adoption and training side so that they feel comfortable and confident moving forward.
25:08
So then, once we've set this vision and influenced it, and have a nice idea of exactly what's going to be happening moving forward, like I said with the case of my daughter, we can't stop the communication there. The communication has to continue far beyond that initial vision. And how many of you have heard of the rule of seven? Okay, like a couple of hands. So the rule of seven is essentially that you have to hear a message seven different times before you fully pull it into your brain, have it settled there and can act on it. And a lot of times, people will talk about the rule of seven in the space of marketing. So companies will try to get their marketing message to you seven different times. Or a sales person will try to have seven different touch points with you before you combine like before you feel comfortable knowing who they are what they offer, and maybe taking a call with them, the exact same thing is like, translates into change management and software implementations if we're setting that vision, and all we do is talk about it one time at a town hall, and then no one hears anything about it for six months, and then all of a sudden, something's like put in front of them, and their whole world is turned upside down, because the way that they're managing the process completely changes. They're not they're going to feel like they didn't know what was happening. And the other tricky part is, is of those 100,000 employees you might have in your organization, all of them learn differently. All of them communicate differently. So if you have seven town hall meetings, or seven zoom meetings that are recorded and or you send seven emails, that's not going to be enough to actually reach all of your employees, because there are going to be people that don't read those emails, there's going to be people that don't show up to those meetings, and so your communication has to become almost constant on what is happening. And it can't just be with the project team that's super close to it. You have to extend that communication back out to the people that are going to be impacted by it. And the other part that we all know, when we're working with software, things don't always go as planned. What we have as our vision, or our idea of exactly what's going to happen shifts and changes over time. So that means that our communication also has to keep up with the clip of how things are moving and changing. So you just need to keep that rule of seven in mind, and think about that with how you communicate to managers that might be speaking to employees. So even if it's not, you know, a big all team meeting, they're still hearing about updates in their weekly touch bases, or they get memos that have that information in it on a regular basis, so that you're able to keep that communication going. Now, another thing that makes this more complex too is you guys are all talking about solutions that are on the cutting edge. You guys are talking about literally changing the way that manufacturing works. And when we're in that cutting edge space and we're pushing boundaries, the likelihood of most of the people back at your home office, actually understanding what the hell you're talking about is very low, and so part of your job when it comes to communication. I mentioned this idea of being a little bit of a bridge. Another way to think about this is being a translator and really helping people understand what the different dynamics of technology are that are going to be impacting them? Do they even understand what you mean when you say edge computing? Do they understand what IoT is? Do they understand what AI actually is beyond robots coming to steal all of our jobs? It is your job to help be that translator or that bridge, to take what you're talking about this week and make true, genuine connections to what they're doing, and going back to being that bridge or that translator for the what's in it for me, statement a nice little reminder for all of you that communication is bi directional, and so while you're helping translate what you're trying to do on the technology side, breaking down all of our acronyms and our buzz words and the things that we understand innately because of the work that we do, we also have to be willing to stop and listen to what's happening on the other end and understand what their viewpoint is on the changes that are coming. And that doesn't mean taking every bit of information and changing direction or strategy all the time, but you do have to listen in order for communication to actually be in place. Otherwise, you're just dictating and. And I don't know about you guys, but I don't like being treated like a child and just being told to do something without at least understanding why. When I was in a previous position, one of my bosses said that he knew that he couldn't ask me to do something unless he had a good reason. Why behind it, and not because I was a difficult person, but because there's so much happening all the time, and there are so many priorities that are constantly battling with one another that I needed a strong why. And so every time he would ask me to do something, part of the question and the communication back would be me asking why and giving feedback and having that dialog. And so you need to open up opportunities again. Maybe it's not every single employee, but go find the grumpiest guy on the manufacturing floor who is the most technologically like adverse person. Talk to him. Figure out how you can make him feel like there's a why and win him over and suddenly he'll be your biggest cheerleader. You can use communication strategically to help manage that change. And then the last piece, and I think this goes really closely tied with communication, is celebrating those small wins and these go hand in hand together, because this is where you have your opportunity, especially when Walker mentioned earlier the idea of being able to convince leadership with of why you need to do something, and he brought up the idea of winning with results. It's another way of celebrating small wins. So spend the time after you are able to implement small solutions, to really start pulling out wins that you have, and keep it short and simple, when you start to celebrate the wins that you've had within your organization. Don't try to boil the ocean and over exaggerate what's happening. Keep it to the point and use as much data as you have to tell stories. We all connect with stories a lot more than we do just numbers and facts and figures, and especially when you are a couple of steps removed from data, it can become more difficult to tell that story on your own. So help your executives or other departments understand the story that your data is telling you, and as you do that, use those stories to show the momentum that you are building within your organization. Show the small wins, so that you get the Yes to iterate. Show the small wins so that you get the next component that you get to build a solution for, so that you can slowly start to scale over time, or hopefully quickly scale, because you've had enough impactful small wins that you get to celebrate, because when you can bring this idea of communication and celebration together, that's when you start to create momentum. This isn't my equation, by the way, in case anybody isn't, you know, like the vision one I made up, but this one I'm editing. But you get momentum from communication and telling those stories and really getting your team behind the momentum that you've created with these small wins, and without sharing those stories, you don't have the bandwidth to continue to get that buy in, or that yes next for budget or the the cooperation from your team, because all They've seen is that it changed their lives and made things harder for them. So my hope is that one you all add a fourth number to the list of why transformations go wrong, and that's lack of adoption and the people side of change, but also that you continue to come back to these ideas of building from the why to create a really strong vision, doing your best to communicate with any channel, channel that you have, and then celebrating those small wins and showing the growth and the opportunity that you've had to build momentum over time within your organization. So with that, I will stop here. If anybody wants access to the slides that QR code will lead you to the slide deck, especially for like the visioning statement and stuff like that. And then Jeff, I'll leave it to you.
34:10
Let's start off by giving Emma a round of applause.
34:18
We are going to use part of this time to add to the agenda to offer Q and A which we didn't originally have on there. So if anyone has any questions, we'll put up the QR code. Feel free to start putting any questions you have. She'll be up here for a few minutes. Otherwise, in by two o'clock, we will have the next one. 232, 25 No, the next Oh, at, yeah, sorry. So we'll wait just a minute because we didn't give you a heads up beforehand. If you had any questions for Emma, I.
35:04
While they're coming in, I will continue with some my dad jokes. Why can't you hear a pterodactyl go to the bathroom? Because the P is silent. Recently, I visited the tiniest wind turbine exhibit, honestly, not a big fan. My wife said, What starts with F and ends with K? I said, No, it doesn't i Oh,
35:45
that one got it
35:48
all right now, we got a couple coming in.
35:52
Okay, so how do we start a digital transformation in a company where there is no knowledge, it went away, oh, okay, where there's no knowledge on it or C level. Okay, so the I always talk about building digital literacy at an executive level by making it as approachable as possible. So this is nothing against any decision maker in the room, but one of the things that I see happen pretty regularly at the executive level is a very, very, very surface level understanding of technology in terms of, oh, we should be doing AI. I've actually and Jeff, I'd be curious if you've heard this too. I had somebody tell me once that they were curious what kind of AI solutions I thought were valuable because their board of directors told them that they need to be investing in it. Have you heard that kind of like conversation coming from executives of like, we know we need to do it, but we have no idea where to start? Yes, all the time. Yeah. And so one of the things that you can do to kind of get that momentum started is go to go to your HR department and ask if you can do a lunch and learn. Tell them that you want to help start educating people on what the art of the possible is. Lean on vendors that you have relationships with and bring them in to help you start educating people in the company. One of the things that I did a lot when I was in sales was kind of that art of the possible conversation where we would give people just enough information to get the ideas rolling, so that they could start to have the conversations internally about what they wanted to actually build and what direction they wanted to take the company. And the more that you can start to, kind of like filter that information in, in that way of either leaning on vendors or having it be something that you start by talking to learning and development or HR, or your IT leadership, because they probably know that they need to be doing this stuff too, is going to help you just start to generate ideas internally and get people excited about it. Because part of the reason that companies are adverse to change and adverse to technology is the sense of unknown. So the more that you can educate and build digital literacy within your company, the less that that fear of unknown is going to impact their decision making, and you're going to have more wiggle room to be able to propose new ideas or get feedback from people of the direction that they think that they should be going. What about the grumpy employees who don't want to change they have their silo and they don't want to drop it. So most of those grumpy employees there, I've found, typically have been through a number of failed software implementations or failed process changes that have ended up being like a start and stop for them, and they've probably seen things change that impacted their productivity in a negative direction that were then rolled back. And they've seen this back and forth and this start and stop so often that that creates that like chip on their shoulder and that grumpiness. And the other part is, is that they are typically in their silo. They're happy. They feel very content that they can deliver what is expected of them in that role, in that capacity, with that process. And so it's very hard for them to think about changing that, and it makes them question their value, and it makes them start to think like, well, if we change this process, and I'm not as good at working in this environment, versus what my current silo looks like, what's my value and how, how effective, effective am I going to be moving forward? So that's where you have to get really strong with your communication to that person, and be really direct about exactly how you're going to do it differently than any of the other failed attempts that they've seen in the past, and like actually hearing what they have to say about why other projects failed in the past and helping explain. How you're going to do it different, and then going back to that idea of the why you have to actually have a good and compelling reason why they need to change, and then paint the picture of how you're going to help make sure that they still get to be that person that has the expertise and gets to be effective in that process, and how you're going to help get them there. What is the training gonna look like? What tools can they use to get up to speed on that? Because, again, it often comes from that fear of becoming obsolete or literally just not believing that it's gonna happen. So why should I waste my time? Okay, how do you approach change management within an organization that's experienced multiple failures with previous deployments. So again, this goes back to the grumpy employee. The grumpy employee has probably been a part of all of those failed implementations, and they are tired and they don't want to do it anymore. And so one of the things, again, kind of coming from the change management lens, that communication piece is going to be really important, but more specifically, the bi directional communication piece, so really leaning into finding a handful of subject matter experts that you can bring into the process and have them have ownership over what's happening and give you feedback on why things didn't work the last time and what they think you need to do differently this time in order to actually get through to the finish line and have the adoption and a successful implementation. A lot of times, we again, kind of get lost in translation between what's going on in the business and what's happening on, like the IT side and systems integration, and there's like that, that role of the bridge is really, really important when you've gone through failed implementations in the past. Because, I mean, raise your hand if you've been a part of failed implementation. Okay, I have a feeling some of you are lying, because like, that's actually shocking to me, of some sort of, some sort of tool that had a short lifespan because it wasn't adopted, or just straight failure, not even getting off the shelf. And if that many of you have been impacted by that, that means all of the employees that were in your company when that happened saw that happen as well. So you have to get really, really clear on that communication, and figure out how to manage that translation back and forth between your teams in order to actually get through this time. Do you want me to do one more sure? Okay,
42:34
do the C suite. One I can answer with you. Okay,
42:36
go ahead. So how do you encourage the C suite to adopt a digital strategy, Jeff, I'd be curious.
42:41
We're gonna wing this together, because I'm gonna answer from a different perspective than you. So any of you that may have seen me do one of my keynotes, where I talk about the art of the possible with industry 4.0 I give this great inspiration of what companies can do, and then show examples of what they've done, and I end my presentation, which is my most effective way of trying to drive adoption of digital strategy is to challenge them to go. If you don't have an answer for why you're going to do this, then I challenge you to go. Then you need to come up with an answer for how you're going to compete with your competitors that do come up with an answer for one of the two, and that usually gets them thinking pretty clearly, but I'd be curious to see how you answer that one. I wouldn't
43:23
say mine is far off. Mine is centered around the why when it comes to again, like the I already talked about, the education piece, I think that that is a huge part of it. And I use this analogy while we were talking at lunch, too, but change management as a whole, I had a podcast guest that brought this up, so it's not my my intellectual property, but he said that we're afraid of change for the same reason that we're afraid of the dark, and at a like instinctual level, we don't like the dark because we don't know what's beyond. We don't know what could be lurking or what could be happening out beyond where we are today. And the same thing is true for change. We don't like the idea of change if we don't have ownership in it, and we don't have a strong vision. So when it comes to pushing your C suite to want to adopt a strategy going back to what Jeff said, you have to start with the why, and they have to have a strong understanding of why they should be compelled to change, and that why is ultimately going to be what makes them go out and learn more about what the possibilities are. And so from a middle level, managing up, doing things like sending case studies of your competitors and what they're doing and kind of putting a little bit of like pressure on them, of like, why aren't we doing this and asking some of those questions, just like Jeff said, but doing it from your position, as opposed to being able to do it from his position as an advisor, sending case studies, letting them know what kinds of things you're doing to push your education and learn more, but anything that you can do to dispel that, like creepy darkness. That's lurking around the outside of what their current knowledge base is, is going to compel them to start taking those steps to educate themselves and get more and more comfortable with what could be. And then those ideas will start to flow, and they'll start to come up with a vision of where you could take the organization. Look at us. We've got eight seconds left. Wonderful.
45:20
Well, let's give em a round of applause. Thank you. Bye.
