Freative Friday Episode 91 Video Podcast - The Art of Change Part 1

Welcome to Creative Friday. Mark Danolo here, art school MBA and CEO of Sales Globe. And as that day of the week, we get to take a fresh look at creative logic driven problem solving. In this episode, I want to continue on our fast moving topic that's important to plan for for your future and for the future of your organization. And that's AI for Sales. And the goal of our conversations, which I'm calling AI or you, is not to review all the new developments in AI, but it's to help you think through the human and AI relationship and how you can increase your asset value and build your future and your organization's future. And this is in a world where AI exists and it's going to play a significant role. So as I said before, we want to help you invest in the one personal asset you have that can't be AI'd, which is your human ability to creatively solve problems today. So today I want to talk about a super critical skill for problem solving that you can build as part of your human asset. And I want to start with a question which is what happens after we come up with the answer or the solution for a problem. Whether you solve that problem with AI or old school human, usually you have to change something and we have to change the organization or we have to change something we're doing, or maybe it's a business process or how we work or how we structure the organization, or maybe how we reward the organization. So I'm going to help you with the art of change and I want to share some tips with you for building your personal asset of making change. If we ask AI for a solution and we get an answer and then we just focus on the solution and we don't make change, well, we can see a great idea or solution fail because the organization doesn't understand it, or we can see it fail because the organization doesn't accept it. Or we can waste a lot of time invested in a great solution by not getting the results we anticipated. And I've seen this happen over and over in a lot of organizations that go through major initiatives and they never make a change and they never make a difference. In fact, I worked with a major client company recently. I was at their corporate headquarters and I was thinking, beautiful offices. They've got an impressive organization, they've got impressive leadership and executives. And as I was meeting with each of them, they talked about the different strategic initiatives they were each leading or they were involved in. And I thought, man, these people are accomplishing a lot of really important things. And that was until I got later into the day and we had some meetings in the afternoon where the executives started to become a little more forthright. And several of them said the same thing. They said, yeah, we have a lot going on and all the leaders have some major responsibilities and projects, but the problem is that we never actually get them implemented. The teams either have too many things going on and they can't focus, or more commonly, we don't know how to make the change in the organization. And our work ends up getting memorialized in some amazing presentations and PowerPoints and the organization doesn't really benefit from it. So I'm going to give you six steps to build your human superpower of making change. Number one, start strong. Conduct your due diligence to make sure the program or the solution you developed is bulletproof and it's ready to go. And make sure you cover a few important checkpoints so your solution is ready for introduction. So you want to enlist the opinion leaders for input at the start of the process and bring together not only the executive stakeholders, but also some highly regarded representatives from the field or whatever organizations you're working with who have a tactical operating view on the business. So you want to get their buy in. And these opinion leaders can provide valuable input and help communicate the right messages to their peers. But this step starts before you start developing your solution. You want to get to the organization early and get them part of the change early. Then you're going to pressure test the plan or your solution during your design phase. When your team has arrived at a good set of design options, expose the ideas to a select group of managers or even some top performing people for a cold look at it. This pressure testing group could also include the opinion leaders that we talked about before. And the pressure testing is most easily done in a small group setting or one on one. And I like the testers to try and break the plan or break the solution so we can find the weak points or the workarounds if it's a program or policy, before we go into general introduction. Number two, craft your change story. So be honest about the reasons for the change and develop a clear message around the C level goals or the priorities, the organization and what drove that change in the first place. So look back on your C level goals you had established at the beginning of the process and that can help you establish the why, why and the story around the solution you developed. So one piece of advice I give leaders is to look back at the original why when you did your fact finding in the beginning to understand the vision behind the challenge you're solving for. So often, the original why that you had in the vision will be the same as the why that you're going to use for change. Your change story can be told in a variety of forms, from planned messages from leadership to informal hallway conversations. In any situation, the story should be concise and consistent and positive. And the people telling the story, from the CEO to managers, should be well versed in the key messages and the range of possible questions are going to come up. And some of the components of your story might include why the change is happening, which would include where the organization is now and why change is important. What's changing? Is it an overall change to the organization or is it a tactical change? Who will be affected? So is it impacting certain groups or the organization overall and where it's taking place? Is it happening in a certain geography or is it going to be introduced as a big bang and big rollout? And when it's going to take place? Does it happen this year? How long is it going to take? Number three Understand the motivators of change it's human nature to resist change, so positioning your change story is key to moving the organization in the right direction. So think about how you might tell the story in one of four ways Aspiration, risk reduction, near term gain, or burning platform. So each of these motivators or change can be described by its time frame and its orientation toward pain or gain. So aspiration or Future Benefit so a lot of organizations want to communicate a aspirational story that excites the team about changing to capture future opportunities. And a person impacted by your change could be hearing this message and they might find it worthwhile to be part of the dream as long as it's not too far in the distant future and it doesn't require too much of their near term sacrifice to their lifestyle. But strangely, future benefit isn't as motivational as you might think if it's too far in the future. That's one of the reasons people don't save for retirement or kids college fund until it's almost too late. They the near term benefit of using that money is stronger than the long term gain of forfeiting the benefit now for the potential bigger benefit in the future. So aspiration is not as motivational as you might think. Future Risk Reduction if a person impacted by your change, here's a story about avoiding risk or great pain in the future that may capture a little more of their attention. For example, an executive a few years ago, described her company situation and it was pretty humorous. She said, it's all pretty comfortable now, but our competitors are encroaching on us and it's like we're the big ship in the harbor and we're having a party on deck and all these little speedboats are coming around us and they're eventually going to overtake us and they're going to start boarding the ship. So people need to clearly understand where we're heading on our current track. So future risk can be more motivational than future vision. If the organization can understand the eventual threat, then there's near term gain. So gaining some benefit in a shorter timeframe can be a positive motivator to make a change, especially if it's tangible and achievable. If a person impacted by your change can picture her family in a better position as her kids get to college age, she's likely to be fully on board and put the hard work necessary to support your plan and finally avoiding near term pain. So this is the biggest motivator change, which is often called the burning platform approach. So if the company attempted to tell a future risk reduction story and the organization didn't listen and it's critical to the company, it might decide to shift its message to avoidance of near term pain. So it could be something like, if we don't make this happen by next year, the organization may have to downsize half our people. So to somebody impacted by the change, that change doesn't look quite as scary at that point because the alternatives are worse. So in this case, the rep may not be fully on board, but she's also proactively looking for ways to help. So those are the first three points in the Art of Change. So let's pause right now and we'll pick up on our next episode on point number four and try these ideas in your free to Friday and every day.