Layers of Change - a New Change Management Perspective

Hello and welcome to Leading Digital Transformation with Rob Llewellyn and the Digital Transformation People. In this podcast series, Rob interviews experienced practitioners, authors and thought leaders whose stories and experiences provide valuable insights for digital transformation success.

I'm joined today by Andrew Ward. Andrew has been bringing about a refocus to experiences and the ways technology can help for almost 20 years. With a varied career ranging from a children's farm and hedgehog hospital through to global change with the University of Nottingham, he's identified the layers of change which can help bridge the communication boundaries which are inherent with such changes. He's now part of the digital team at British Gas Business where he's helping bring the same transformational changes to how they interact with customers and provide a better level of service. So let's learn more about this by jumping into the interview with Andrew. Andrew, welcome.

Thank you. Morning.

Hey Andrew, you talk about layers of change which can help bridge communication boundaries which are inherent with change itself. Who are the layers of change you talk about actually for?

We think the layers of change vary between those that are performing a transformational change in an organization. So either those that are trying to structure a large change program or the individual change agents that just need help to understand how to explain their idea to those that feel like they're talking a different language. We're hoping that the different layers allow people to appreciate the different points of view all the way from the contextual that occurs within every organization down through the touch point into the data based insights that tell you what's happening in different data sets. So our focus is mainly as a communication platform for those that are interested in change in some way or want to get over the communication barriers that they experience in a lot of organizations. The main one I was trying to tackle when we created this was between information services or IT and marketing and the rest of the business. Because there's a lot of time it feels like you're talking a different language to one another even though you're trying to bring about the same positive outcome for your organization.

Now Andrea, I mentioned in the introduction that you work with British Gas, which is a pretty large organization, is are these layers of change applicable to all sizes and types of organization?

We haven't found one that it's not yet. So even in British Gas business, where I am now, you have layers of understanding. So if we think of those on the ground with your user experience designers as an example, they're looking at the journey or the interaction point that someone is a customer is focused on but aren't necessarily looking at the way in which the brand ties into it. So what's the unique selling point or the wider contextual change? So we have found that it works for, well, for very small businesses it's a lot easier because there should be less degrees of separation. But once you get into an enterprise organization of seemingly any size, it helps stabilize the conversation between the different levels and different skill sets that are involved in any such change.

Can you elaborate on how the layers of change actually help an organization?

Yeah. So if I use an example from when I was at the University of Nottingham, which is where we came up with the general framework for this idea, we're trying to bring about a change for the university and they're focused in United Kingdom, China and Malaysia. They also have very different priorities across the business. So you've got some areas that are looking at undergraduates, some areas that are looking at postgraduates, commercial partnerships, the whole infrastructure and building of the estate. So we identified we needed to bring a united understanding. And it was a little bit of a strange one when we first came up with it. It was the conversation of if you spoke to someone in a pub that had no idea what a university was about because they hadn't been to it, what's the highest level that they would understand that a student goes through? And that's your contextual layer. So that's the layer that applies in everything. So if we look at an undergraduate student, you've got a decision making process of where you're going to go, what you're going to do. You've got some form of application and enrollment to be accepted or supply the right qualifications to be able to be accepted. You've then got this whole being a student and then you've got graduating and then going off and get a job. So a very, very high level, everyone can agree that is an undergrad student's life cycle. But then under each of those stages, you bring out the more functional elements. So if I choose decision making again, you've got chair based research. So looking online, looking at different reviews online, face to face research, which could be attending an open day, speaking to a lecturer, course planning and selection. So what type of course am I interested in now? I've actually spoke to someone I might be more interested in a different type of course, and then an inquiring decision making, what do I actually require to be able to move on to the next stage? So even at that high level, those that were practitioners within the area still agreed all of those elements needed to take place. You then Apply onto that the brand, what we call 10,000ft, which was the unique selling point, what is the differentiator for a face to face research? So for the University of Nottingham, some of it was about the high quality of the estate, the quality of the lecturers, all about the quality of the provision. So they wanted to make sure that that was shown at that point. But then as we broke it down further and further, you could take it all the way down to the individual touch point of well, in order for a student to attend a talk of this higher quality, what's the journey that they need to go on and what are the variations that change between those that are doing it digitally versus those that are doing it physically and how does that all interconnect? So as you got down, you got into a bit of a pyramid from the decision making as a single thing into four stages at the functional and then it expands into the brand and it keeps going out. On my portfolio site, I've got a few of the examples on there so you can see the high level journey and then how you can use that to inform different change programs. So we were looking at a number of different projects and aligning them to which key points in those contextual journeys we would be able to influence by the different transformations of change, be that improving our legacy, improving our website, improving our student record system, all of these types of things were all on the cards. And it helped as I which elements of the journey and which projects had the biggest bang for their buck, which would have the biggest impact on that audience. And it helped us talk this very, very similar language, even though we all had different, should we say, motivations for why the change needed to take place.

That sounds really interesting, Andrew, but what problem does it actually help to solve?

I think it comes back to the cultural problem that we all have within transformation. Everyone wants to do the right thing, but they don't necessarily either know what the right thing is or don't agree. And when it hits onto the don't agree a lot of the time, from what we've seen, that's because they actually don't understand the other point of view because they're coming at it from a different direction. So we believe the layers of change allow you to bring those two conversations to a similar point. One example we've taken a little bit further on that is using strategizers, work of the business model canvas and the value proposition to be able to unify that level of understanding and that brings things to a more equal playing field and we believe the layers of change also do the same. They bring it on to. So you're discussing things at the same level, rather than one person talking about a color change or a button change or something really small that would impact a user and another and talking about a new provision of a mobile app delivering a new talk, understanding why an audience, or segmentation, why an audience wants to interact with you and what they need to get out of that interaction.

Andrew, can you give an example of this in practice so we can get a better feel as to how this works in the real world for an organization?

Yeah. So I'll use the University of Nottingham again, because that's the one we did the most work on whilst I was there. So I was working with three colleagues at the time, Mark Griffin, who was an architect, Mike Watson, who was a business architect, and Mike Haber, who was a data analyst. And we were trying to understand the scale of the transformational change that University of Nottingham wanted to undergo. And whilst we were going through that, we had many different disciplines, some that identified it should just be an IT change program. We needed to sort our data out. We had other areas that said, but we need to engage better in the market. We had others that said we needed to improve the student experience. We had others that said we need to increase research funding through better engagement with research councils and others that said we needed support our local businesses or our local communities to a better level, as well as a plethora of others, but they're the core ones. So from there we modeled out under all those different cases, the high, what we called the 32,000 foot journey for all of those different audiences. So the highest contextual level for the different types of audience and different types of business that the University was undergoing. From there, we brought united understanding of all of those people, of each other's different problems. We could then identify under that what the experience and what the journeys were for each of those audiences and then in turn identify the pleasure and pain points. So we modeled out the experience at a relatively high level to start with. In some areas, like undergrad, we went into quite a deep dive, all the way down to the individual touch points that they had, and did a number of behavioral and ethiopic research in it to observe the behaviors of students to see if our data was correct. But from that we got a full understanding and a full agreement from the different areas of the University of the order of change, what needed to occur first, because you could identify some areas where we wanted to drive change. The experience Actually wasn't bad. Yes, there was motivation to make it even better, but it wasn't bad. But in other areas, we had some areas that students weren't particularly happy with. So that highlighted areas that we needed to change quite significantly and quite quickly, and that allowed us to bring about a united focus, even though, to start with, there was very different and in some cases opposing commercial views on the direction of travel that we should be following. So that's mainly where we found it helps the translation between different audiences to be able to bring them together and have a discussion, I suppose, an equal playing field without the specialist knowledge. Alongside that, it also allowed people that didn't necessarily focus on one area to compare to another. So those that were focused on the community didn't necessarily spend a massive amount of time focused on the undergrad or community. So they had a different perspective and were able to come up with new ideas that they'd used when doing community outreach that would actually work within our undergrad community as well. So that fresh perspective without feeling, well, stupid, really, you didn't feel like you were being an idiot because you could actually see the structure. It was put into a way that everyone could understand and everyone could appreciate and discuss at an equal level, which really leveled the playing field and opened a lot of conversations.

What was the biggest challenge you encountered in this particular example at the university?

Andrew, as with everything, funding is always the biggest challenge, from my experience, at least. So we did a small amount of work to start with to show that the idea was correct and doable. And when we did that, we identified on a research professor because we thought that was going to be the easiest one. Once we modeled that, we then moved on to the undergrad students and it just ballooned the amount of data that was involved. So if you remember, I mentioned a pyramid going through from the decision making, the amount that that expanded out was crazy. The amount of different variations, the amounts of different options that we gave students in different scenarios was crazy. But you never got to see that because you only previously looked at it on this student who is going to study chemistry. What options do we give them? The options we gave that one student were perfectly reasonable. But when you looked at every possible variable that they could take and every possible interaction, that ballooned to a massive level. So I was really glad that we got Mike Haber, because he managed to create a Neo4j database which modeled the relationships and the entities of every possible touch point, which is just a hellish view if you look at it. It's a giant Thing with lots of bubbles on. But that allowed us to drill down then and getting that data was eye opening because there was no single source of truth. So you had to go out and interview people to understand how all the relationships work together, what the knock on effect of one change to another and then you'd find something new. So you'd have to go back to someone that you'd already interviewed to say, well, what happens in this scenario? So after we secured the initial funding, we were allowed to go on to do the wider modeling piece. And I think it's the scale of the change and for us that highlighted that the normal transition of change that we were planning to do, of just going through identify the pain points and bring about some changes wasn't going to be the right way. So instead a leapfrog approach was what was required. So we needed to identify what the future should look like and jump to that rather than transitioning through to it.

Andrew Our listeners generally consist of managers and leaders who are involved in transformation and change in many different industries all over the world. How can they practically put what you've been talking about today, how can they practically put it to use in their own organization?

I think for the most part it's not necessarily putting a structure in place, it's just about looking at the layers and being able to realize where you naturally are. So myself, I naturally think of the experience. That's where my natural mindset goes. It's not on the individual touch point, it's not up at the commercial objectives. I'm focused on the experience. So for me being able to look at the layers and be able to understand where I am and then whilst having a conversation with somebody else, identify either very openly and ask them where they think they are, or just from the conversation, identify what type of language they use, what type of descriptions they use when they're describing a problem. So that identifies where they are within the layers. And then you can understand how you need to transform your language, your presentations, the way in which you're interpreting information or displaying information to those different individuals or audiences so they'll actually understand it in a much cleaner way. It's like when we describe something at a very high level, strategic level to someone on a call agent, so on the contact center floor most of the time, yes, they can hear it, they can hear we need to make money, we need to grow, we need to save money, etc. But they can't relate it to what they do on a day to day basis. The layers of change allow you to see where they are and try and find the lowest level that you can naturally explain things on and the highest level that they can understand things on and still they're able to relate it to their day job and that brings them on that journey because otherwise you're just doing change to them, you're not bringing them along. So I feel mainly it's as a communication method or a communication technique that helps with that description.

So what should we be investigating Andrew, to be able to use this in the real world in the organizations that our listeners are working in on a day to day basis?

There's quite a collection, I thought about that before I came on of where the influencers were and it ranges depending on the levels and probably dependent on where the individual is. That's actually looking at the layers. So if we start at the top, the Essentials of Strategic Management would be a good one by Pitt and Cruff Loss Going Through Principles and Practice of Change by Deborah Price. I can give a list of these as well, but when we go through the lower levels it's things like Don't Make Me Think by Steve King or one of my favorites is the Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett because he puts a structure to those elements. And then there's obviously the wider pieces of design thinking. So Tim Brown's Tech Change by Design. There's plenty of reading out there dependent on the organizational size. My personal preference to try and kick off and unify the understanding is the design sprints that Google evangelized and they've pushed forward because that helps you bring that united understanding to a single problem in the room and allows you to test that out with an audience as well. And if you continue that practice moving forward, once you've developed or deployed whatever that change may be, you can then progress on to observe the behavior. So that's where something like Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirley would be particularly key because that's talking about everybody is different, but everyone is the same at the same point. We want to be treated the same as everyone else, but we also want to be treated as individuals. And the ability of bringing about the change properly means you can understand how to communicate those messages to the mass whilst it's still feeling like it's communicated to the individual and giving that level of personalization that should drive forward the change and bring up the adoption for almost any audience.

Now earlier on, Andrew, you mentioned that one of the challenges you faced at the university was getting funding. But aside from that, what are some. Some of the of course, most organizations face these funding challenges. But aside from that, what are some of the big challenges that people who want to, you know, implement this concept, embrace this concept, what are the big challenges that they need to look out for?

I think it's being open minded. One of our biggest successes was the utilization of WI fi data. So we already had it, but we didn't know we had it. So those that were looking at how do we understand how people move around the university, how do we understand which areas we should develop a little bit further. So one of the use cases, we were asked, where should we put a new student support center? And we had a gut feeling because our Portland building always had a lot of traffic. And that may have just been because it had the best Chinese food out there. So it drove a lot of traffic to that building. But we could also say the same of different buildings at different times. So we went through quite a long winded piece of change to identify how to work out how people were moving. And it wasn't until we changed our language. So we started adopting what's now turned into the layers of change to explain the problem to a much wider audience in many different ways to gain their buy in and understanding. And one of our technicians identified, well, why can't we use the logs we can identify from that the density of people in a building at any time? So we took those WI fi logs that we already had. So it was existing data. We anonymized all of them. So there was no way to identify who anyone was because we were purely looking at volume. And we put that into a tableau model. And that tableau model identified the movement of different Mac addresses between one building and another. And we could identify the buildings that people spent the most time in without understanding who the people were. And that allowed us to bring a much better solution to light further down the line from explaining it in a completely different way to people that normally weren't involved in any of those strategic conversations or in any of those discussions because they spoke a different language, they spoke techie and the marketing people didn't speak techie, so they couldn't have that conversation. The estates people that were looking at actually building the provision, they don't speak techie. So you needed that translation framework, if you like, to be able to pass one message to another without the Chinese whispers that usually occurs when you employ relationship managers or something similar.

Andrew, fascinating topic. We're going to have to wrap it up there. But before we do, I know you mentioned a couple of books earlier on, but is there anywhere else where we can point people who want to learn more about the layers of change?

Yeah, I have an Open post on LinkedIn such as Andrew Ward or I've got a portfolio site of Andrew Ward co that has a number of examples that you can see of the layers of change as well as some of the examples that I've talked through today.

Fantastic. And we will include links to those in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you very much.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Leading Digital Transformation with Rob Llewellyn and the Digital transformation people. Visit thedigitaltransformationpeople.com to secure the knowledge, talent and services you need for Digital Transformation success. To continue your journey as a a Certified Transformation Professional, visit roblewellen. Com. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and follow us on Twitter at the Digital TP and at Robert Llewellyn.