When organizations resist data tools, start small with pilots and bring skeptics into decisions. Speaker B shares how investment banking's relationship-driven culture initially rejected analytics, then explains why involving stakeholders in the process builds ownership and drives adoption.
Whenever you're trying to change culture, there's always some in fact trying to change anything at all at work. There's always someone who complains. And so I think we need to talk a little bit about change management. So if you have employees who are kind of pushing back, going, well, this is the way I've been doing things for like three decades now. I'm not going to change my practices. How do you get them to, how do you encourage them to make more use of data or change your tools and things like that? Okay, so best practices for change management. Who wants to go first?
I can start.
Okay, cool.
Only because I have a funny analogy. When I first started out, like, forget like way before Tom Davenport came out with the article that said, here's the sexy new career data scientist. So a decade before that, right, I would go, I started in investment banking and so I would go into the company and I would say, yeah, we're going to use data and analytics to talk to your clients. And they would say to me, what, what are you talking about? I've had these relationships with these clients for 20 years, 25 years. Like what on earth are you going to tell me using data and analytics that I don't already know about these clients? Because you know, it's a very relationship driven business in that space. Right. And so scalability is not the same as when we think about it in the consumer facing spaces. It's just a funny analogy to your point, but I think one of the things that you do to help adopt change, I would say two things actually. One is I've learned over the years that pilots are really helpful, like POCs, proof of concepts, like let's not, we're not going to boil the ocean. We're not going to change all your processes today and start doing things new tomorrow. We're going to do take a little sample of people and do a pilot and let's see if it works. And then if it does, then let's talk about the next step, like incremental steps to get people to buy in coupled with their, this is key by the way, their involvement and ownership. Right. They have to be involved in the decision making process. We have to go out and get their input, particularly from the naysayers and we have to empower them to take ownership of the changes and the impact. Right. Because then they feel accountable. And once you get people to feel accountable for something, they are more likely to be in support of it and to try to drive it forward successfully.
I love the idea of a proof of concept. Laura, it seems like you might have some ideas around this.
Well, not around the proof of concept, but honestly, I was thinking, as Tiffany was kind of talking, I really want to understand why people have that kind of fixed mindset. What is that stemming from? Of why they're afraid of the change. And that's really important for me to know as a stakeholder. If they say, hey, I've been doing this for the last 10 years and I don't want to change, is it because they fear their job's going to go away? Right. Is it because they don't see value in what you're doing? Right. And so really understanding that, why with folks that kind of fear that change, you can then address it accordingly. Right. And that's been how I've kind of approached it in the past, and it's really been successful.
