Introducing a new software or hardware system to an existing group of people involves dislodging their existing knowledge and working habits to introduce new ones. The hope and expectation are that the cost of these changes is much less than the benefits arising from doing things differently.
The best forms of this transition are approached as a collaboration, because a collection of minds works better than a disruption.
Key stakeholders in this collaboration are:
- the people instigating the change e.g. executive managers
- the people providing the change e.g. a technology supplier
- the people experiencing the change e.g. operational teams and their customers or users
Often, as in the examples above, stakeholders come from both within and without the organisation. This makes the interactions to at least some extent new, which is an opportunity to define them as a specific collaboration. Even if there is a history of poor or loose collaboration within the organisation there is no reason this one cannot be different.
Complexity and controversy are inevitable: the change is a wholesale and significant shift in the organisation and not everyone can have the same view about current state, future state, and how to transition between them. This should be dealt with as an asset to triangulate from different perspectives, not ignored or sidelined as a threat to the intended benefits of change.
Collaboration helps keep these challenges small and manageable. It doesn't eliminate complexities or disagreements, it facilitates their observation and resolution by breaking them down into a continuous flow of small events rather than establishing large truculent barriers.
All of this exposes and tests an organisation's existing culture. In particular its communication, trust, agility, and self-knowledge.
An important thing to appreciate about communication is that it happens whether you want it to or not.
Silence is a form of communication, so secrecy (or openness) and information control (or information expression) will be well understood features of how an organisation chooses to communicate its intentions and uncertainties, typically from leadership outwards.
Trust tends to grow when information is more widely shared, because the people who instinctively want information to be able to judge the output of decisions will gain insight and, from that, reassurance and agency to contribute ideas, and the people who don't care to have that level of information will simply ignore it unharmed and undistracted. For the providers of information this is a chance for valuable feedback about areas of the organisation they aren't close to, and aspects of the change they haven't considered (or have considered, and can be proved accurate about).
Trust enables organisations to grow their agility, their responsiveness to change. Change arives in the demands, constraints, and opportunities the organisation faces. Leaders who have the trust of their colleagues can reorganise resources with less information in the short term, which is revealed intentionally or simply by practice subsequently when urgency has subsided.
The more an organisation knows about itself, the more it can use the behaviours of communication, trust and agility to add value and solve problems. Communicating freely about a limited set of real world information will not lead to effective action. One of the most useful things to do at the beginning of any incoming change is to review what you have, what you know about your blindspots, and use that to assess how the change can be made use of actively rather than reacted to passively.
An organisation that approaches tech transitions with this knowledge can use the disruption to actually enhance and improve its capabilities in these areas, as well as bring about the operational and tooling changes it is seeking.
Not doing so will only slow down every attempt at transition and make failure more likely.
