How Organisations Can Navigate Change Management | Conformity Episode 2

Change is a law of life.

I used to loathe Slack. I thought it was horrible. I never fully understood it. Like I didn't. And then I had my friend Jean, he was like, no, you're being stupid. I think what people value the most is just kind of being included in the conversation, you know, from, from the get go instead of kind of being lumped. People want to feel included and they want to feel like that's they're kind of being heard, you know.

Yeah, that's true.

I also feel like Cage doesn't happen because you introduce something new, right?

Anyone can build a lot of things. Like some kid in his basement can, can. Can build a multi million pound business and you know, himself, right.

So in order for me to make that change physically, make that jump, I had to make that change mentally, right. And then.

So last episode we, we spoke about suppose the. In the pilot, like how shared values create conforming or functional communities and you know, trying to I suppose bring a positive connotation or to the word conformity. And now I think what we want to do is extend that to paint management and software. But really like if we talk about those communities like being a group of people, a business, a whatever, how do those communities adapt to change? And then how do you balance, I suppose the conformity with like the idea of change, change, resistance, evolution, new things, stuff like that. It's kind of why, what I think we should write about. Sorry, no, no.

I had a quote by, I think it was John F. Kennedy. It said, change is the law of life. Sounds hectic, but that actually got me thinking like what you just mentioned now that, that. That connection between change management and conformity, Right. And in order for you to conform, you have to know, I mean, I conform. You have to change your way of thinking or you can just conform to someone else's way of thinking, I guess, I don't know. But in order for you to change, I don't know if you conform, sorry, you have to change your way of thinking, Right. So when I read that quote by John F. Kennedy, change is a way of life, it made me wonder, right. If subconsciously we live our whole life conforming to someone else's belief or to, or to, to. To a, a predefined belief. Everything you know, my opinion at least everything you know about whatever it might be, whatever subject matter expert you might be and expert end or whatever you learned somewhere, right? And then you had to either come into agreement and agree with it or with that person or go against it, right. So Basically what I'm trying to say is technically, if you think about it, right, yes, change is like what John F. Kennedy said is a way of life. But technically we are conforming every day to something or to someone.

That's how I. Regardless of whether you accept the change or not, right, what you're saying. Exactly.

Model this regardless.

That's interesting. I don't know. I think the. I think for me, if I look at, look at like the issue like in our space, like in software specifically, I think change management is the. This is not a new thing. We're just saying things that I think a lot of people already know. But like change management is the either first or second biggest predictor of whether a piece of software, especially if it's enterprise grades or especially if it's kind of like core to how the business operates or facilitates a core business process, whatever it may be. So like suppose what I'm trying to say is like what kind of value does the. Is is the software being brought in to solve? And if that value is really, really high and the change management isn't executed very well, it's like the number one or two biggest predictor of success on whether that thing's gonna fit. Because if the people. If you've been doing working on Excel or Google Sheets or whatever it has been maybe for the last four years or you've been using another piece of crappy software and now you're trying to find something better and you find it, but people are so used to the way things used to be that there's so much like new is not necessarily better because it takes a lot of bandwidth to figure out like, how do I do this and how do I make it part of my workflow? And almost just like in your brain, like we've switched from Slack to ClickUp for our chat, right? And for like the first two days I kept going back to Slack. Like I would open my Slack instinctively, like come like, we'll do that. There's no one to talk to here. Then go back to my Slack. Let me go back to ClickUp. But now I think and what I always found, I don't know what you guys thought was like, I always find it really, really hard to manage my day to day work in one particular app. Like I've tried to use Notion, then I tried to use Notes and I was jumping between the two and then I was using my like Slack, my own Slack channel to create tasks. But Universe three and then it's Notion and then I ditched my I Can't use my nose that and then I was using just Slack and it's taking such a long time and I think the chat thing kind of nailed it for us. Like now ClickUp is like I don't open any other app to solve my tasks at I thought like mad like the value realization of like ClickUp is so much more now. Yeah. But that if they just had some sort of like onboarding thing like we only like we're not a big company. I'm sure they do for bigger companies. But like if there was just some sort of on the thing in the, the software that if you, you signed up we all got taken through like a mandatory process of like right, this is how you're going to use this app and now you can feel capable and this is why this should work that way and how you should set all these things up. I think you'd adopt it a lot faster. So yeah, in, in a long way. I suppose the point is like now ClickUp is high value for us but in another organization like let's just pay where you're not paying. You're paying a annual license fee and you're on a five year contract.

Yeah.

It takes 12, 16 months to bring your entire team on board to, you know, do this like use the software the way it's meant to be news. Like man, it's just like you just see it happen so often where it's like that's not the change management's so poor. And then people are like sitting around looking at the thing like all the software crap like no one's used it.

I mean, Sorry, sorry, go ahead, go ahead. Sorry.

But I mean what they say with change management, it's not necessarily about the software, it's the people that is the biggest thing. Like when it comes to change, nobody really likes to change because you kind of giving. And that's not to say that people will automatically resist change, but you're essentially pulling them away from something that they've used to, that they've gotten used to, that they feel comfortable with that they've like navigated through it.

Yeah.

So they are, they are your biggest thing and they are, they are the biggest, they're going to be the biggest adopters of it. They're going to be the ones that will praise it, complain about it or pull their, you know, kind of pull their hair out.

And.

If, I mean if they don't really have a massive awareness around it, around it and they haven't kind of been and your people don't have full oversight into why are we doing this? And kind of being spoken to then the impact of that I think on any team department company is you're not going to get stuff done as potentially as efficiently or and definitely as quickly. You know, I mean at least for us. Like the ClickUp thing. Initially I used to loathe Slack. I thought it was horrible. I never fully understood it. Like I didn't. And then I had my friend John who was like, no, you're being stupid. He's like, is amazing. And I'm like, I think I hate the thing. Like because we were Google Chats. And I'm like, oh, so great. Like it's just, you know, and then getting on just like I was like, okay. Like I kind of like this. It actually looks quite nice. Like it's cool. Not bad. There's fun things. I mean that one day when I discovered that you could add canvases to channel was channels were. Was like so profound for me. Love creating a document with emojis. And then we shifted over to ClickUp. But I mean lucky for us where you know the benefit of not being having multiple people, it was easy enough just to say, okay, let's try it. Like you said, let's try it. Let's see.

Yeah.

But funny enough, so I've, I've. I use the Slack app, desktop app. Only for chat. Only for chat. So it's. I've got the desktop app but I only use it for the chat just so that I don't miss anything. And then I like to open tickets and like comments and stuff like in my web browser. It's weird but that's how I do it and that's fine, that works for me. But like the desktop app is just chat.

We don't want to change my. You'll remind me remember when we switched from Google Chats to Antigua just before. Wow, this is last adding before you joined, right? We were using Google Chats for like a year and a half or a year.