Category: Change

We tend to think about change in terms of the increasing velocity and veracity that we’re facing today.  However, there’s wisdom in the way that commercial buildings are built to accommodate change and how they change over time.  While buildings don’t last forever, they do a good job of accommodating change given they’re made of concrete that isn’t readily malleable.

How Buildings Learn

Steward Brand’s book, How Buildings Learn, is built on the work of Frank Duffy.  It explains how buildings are built to “learn” – Brand’s word for change.  They’re built with the awareness that there are some pieces which can’t change or are hard to change – like the site the building is on – and simultaneously how other things change at radically different rates.

The model breaks down the components of a building into six layers, each of which changes at its own rate:

• Site – Permanent.
• Structure – The most persistent part of the building. The lifespan of structure can be measured in decades to centuries. When the structure changes, the building has changed.
• Skin – The façade or outer face of the building is expected to go out of style and be replaced every 20 years or so to keep up with fashion or technology.
• Services – These are things like HVAC, elevators, etc., which simply wear out over the period of seven to fifteen years.
• Space Plan – Commercial buildings may change occupancy every three years or so, driving a change in the way internal space is allocated. Domestic homes in the US are, on average, owned for 8 years.
• Stuff – These furnishings and flairs change with the seasons and the current trends.

What we can learn from How Buildings Learn is how to build a set of overlapping cadences for different kinds of change.  By building the awareness of different rates of change into the operating system of the organization allows us to communicate effectively about the type and scale of the change.

Scale

Changing the pen cup on your desk to match the season isn’t a big change – and shouldn’t become one.  It shouldn’t matter whether Bob or Suzi is sitting at any given desk (as long as there’s a red Swingline stapler).  Changes like converting from cubicles to a more open concept – or vice versa – is big enough to warrant some work and attention, but it falls far short of the planning necessary to change the ventilation system or the elevators.  Even that pales in comparison to the cost and planning – and external approvals – necessary for changing the skin or structure of the building.

When working on change initiatives, we should communicate to our stakeholders the degree of change that we expect overall and in their particular behaviors.  Without this knowledge, they will assume that it’s no big deal, only to be surprised later – or, conversely, be very concerned about a relatively minor change.

The mechanism you use to communicate the relative scale of a change project can be unique to your organization — and need not be related to buildings.  It must, however, be well understood by everyone, which means resources like Job Aids and Performance Support tools as well as continuous training and reinforcement as people leave, transfer, and join the organization.

Holding the Line

One of the things that successful building owners do is recognize when they should delay changes in the building and when the costs of maintaining the building require that changes be made more immediately.  Perhaps taking the perspective of a building can allow you to focus on those changes that need to be made now and those that can be deferred.

The Brooklyn Bridge, while not anonymous, isn’t nearly as famous as other bridges, but it does hide a secret.  It was constructed with faulty steel cables.  The faulty steel cables weren’t discovered until it was too late to replace them.  As a result, they remain in the bridge today – and the bridge is still safe.

Brownfield

Most change methodologies and approaches assume that you’ve got a greenfield to start from.  That is to say that the project hasn’t been started, and you can do things “right the first time.”  Brownfield projects assume that someone has been there before you, and the ground has already been disturbed.  These projects can be more difficult, because it’s not always possible to undo the damage that has already been done – like steel support cables being run that aren’t the appropriate strength.

Recovering a change project that wasn’t started right is possible, but it isn’t always easy.  It can be that the change got started and didn’t have the right support.  It can be that the change was initially approached from a bad perspective.  Whatever the cause, it’s your responsibility and opportunity to fix it.

More of the Same

In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge, the answer wasn’t to replace the wire that had already been run.  Instead, it was to spin additional wires around the defective wires.  An additional 150 strands of wire were added to provide the additional required strength of the main cables.  In short, it wasn’t something different to complete the Brooklyn Bridge, it was more of the same.  When we’re recovering a failed change project, our work is largely an amplification of the steps that we should be doing for any project.

We define the current state, the future state, and the steps between.  The current state needs to account for the current state of the failing change project, as does the future state.  However, fundamentally, it’s the same process – just more detailed, more intentional, and with more experienced resources.

Critical Communications

One of the important aspects of recovery is walking the line between transparent communication about the limitations of the current state of the change project and not allowing blame to develop.  Dennis and Michelle Reina explain in Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace how communication trust is as important as contractual and competency trust.  However, as Amy Edmondson explains in The Fearless Organization, we must be sensitive to make the environment safe for everyone – even those who have made mistakes.  There are undoubtedly difficult conversations – the kind called out in Crucial Conversations – to be had, but they need to be had in a way that allows people to save face and simultaneously admit their mistakes.  As Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) explains, when we aren’t able to accept responsibly, we create larger problems for everyone.

After the Change Success

When it’s all done and the change has been successfully implemented, it’s time to take the step back to identify the systemic failures that led to the project getting out of control in the first place.  The After Action Review process is a blame-free way to figure out what happened and how to prevent it in the future.

It’s not a secret that germs and other pathogens exist.  Everyone is taught in elementary science or health class about Ignaz Semmelweis and how he discovered that washing his hands helped mothers and babies to be healthier.  Some of us even got the extended version, which explained how he would go from dissecting dead bodies to childbirth – without washing his hands.  If everyone knows that they should wash their hands, why don’t they do it, and what can we do about it?  The problem seems to be in the way that we process information.

Reticular Activating System

It’s a funny name of a part of the brain that controls our sleep-wake cycle.  The reticular activating system (RAS) is the part of the brain responsible for determining which things to pay attention to and which things can be safely ignored.  You can see it in action in your life when you plan to buy a new car, and suddenly it appears that everyone else is driving the same car as you.  Before you considered that car model, you probably have no memory of anyone driving that model of car.  Your RAS changed the importance of the car model, and suddenly it appeared from the noise around you.

Consider the other direction of the dial by remembering when you were first learning to drive and how much of your attention it commanded.  You could be totally focused on driving – or perhaps should have been fully focused on driving – because everything had to be consciously evaluated for its degree of importance.  Every rattle, dial, and indicator was a potential threat, and you evaluated as such.  Over time, the RAS recognized that the minor things weren’t threats and you began to build pattern recognition for things which were and weren’t important.

The problem is that healthcare providers don’t have personal experience that their handwashing or lack of it has any impact on patient outcomes – and as a result, the RAS begins to classify it as unimportant.  But it is important.  They know if they fail to take immediate action for someone with a heart attack, they’ll die.  There’s no such short-timeframe cause and effect relationship with handwashing.  It takes a long time and it’s rarely clear that a failure to wash hands was the cause.

Investment

More than any other effort, the National Institutes for Health have been trying to solve the handwashing problem.  Research proves that it does have an impact on patient outcomes – but not generally in a way that makes an impact to people personally.  There have been hundreds of studies that have manipulated variables in an effort to increase compliance rates – and it’s still painfully low.

Alcohol-based hand sanitization was added to the inside and the outside of patient room doors to get providers to use it in both directions.  Reducing the barrier to access to the desired behavior helps – but not all the time.  Lights, signs, and other reminders have been designed to trigger the novelty effect of the RAS with the predictable reduction in efficacy over time.  The RAS treats new, novel stimulus as important.  The problem is that it quickly recognizes the stimulus as normal and therefore it ignores it.

Ultimately none of the approaches that have been taken have got our compliance to 100%.  In the United States, it’s estimated that only 50-80% of the time do providers wash their hands when they know they should.  Worldwide, the number is closer to 20%.

Secondary Task

Complicating the problem of not having direct, emotional experiences to trust that handwashing is important is the fact that it’s a secondary task.  When flying a plane, a pilot can use a checklist.  Atul Gawande explains in The Checklist Manifesto how the same approach can improve healthcare outcomes.  However, that presumes that the primary objective is well known and the secondary concerns – like handwashing – can be added to the checklist.

Too many interactions don’t and can’t have checklists.  We can’t elevate the secondary task of washing hands to the level of importance of evaluating and treating the patient – no matter how much we should.

In our change efforts, this means that we need to consider how the behaviors we want to change are secondary to the task they’re doing and how as long as they remain secondary, they may be difficult – if not impossible – to change.  Ideally, we’ll find ways to change or support the primary behavior in a way that makes the secondary behavior natural.

Should you push people towards your change or wait for them to pull themselves towards the change?  The answer is simple, but making it happen may be more challenging than it seems.

Seatbelts

was the 1960s, and people were dying in automobile accidents at horrifying rates.  It took the work of Ralph Nader to initiate a reform the accidents being the fault of “the idiots behind the wheel” in an industry that didn’t try to integrate safety into the design of vehicles.  One of the innovations to increase safety was the introduction of safety belts.  No one wanted something to constrict them or crumple their clothing, but something needed to be done.

Automobile accidents remain a top reason for death in younger adults, but we’re making progress.  In 2019, about 90.7% of the miles traveled occurred with everyone in the vehicle buckled in.  However, this took decades – and there’s still a nearly 10% non-compliance rate.  Why?

In 49 States in the United States, you can get a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt.  Only one, New Hampshire, has no seatbelt enforcement laws, but their state motto is “Live free or die,” so it sort of makes sense.  The rest of the states’ laws are a patchwork of primary and secondary enforcement.  Primary enforcement means you can be pulled over for lack of seatbelts, whereas secondary enforcement means they can give you that as an additional ticket if you’re already pulled over.  No matter what the enforcement is, there are legal ramifications to not wearing your seatbelt, but still it happens.

Clever advertising campaigns supported seatbelt use, including the crash test dummies and newer slogans like “Click It or Ticket.”  After countless millions of dollars and laws, we’re still only seeing a 90% adoption rate.  Much of that is there’s no desirability to seatbelt use and only limited belief that a person will be in an auto accident – and therefore needs to use it.  There may not be much we can do about seatbelt use beyond what has been done.

The Tragedy of Experience

The truth of the matter is that most people will experience millions of accident-free miles in an automobile.  However, there is a lifetime 1:107 chance that you’ll die in an auto accident.  Insurance companies expect that you’ll have approximately 3-4 accidents in your lifetime – not all of them serious.  Despite the very real probability that you’ll have an accident, and it may be fatally serious, your experience is that driving is relatively safe (except for the idiots behind the other wheels).  As a result, as Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, you develop an experience bias that tells you that the statistics don’t apply to you.

For our change projects, people’s experience tells them that their current behavior works – or works well enough.  Their experience tells them that the tragedy or outcome you’re predicting can’t be, because it’s never been that way in the past.

Pulling People Along

The only way to break past this experience bias in most people is to create an experience that helps them to feel like things will change.  Once the vision that you’re painting causes the change to be required and makes sense to them emotionally, you’ve got a chance to get them to make a change.  All the logic, statistics, projections, and math in the world won’t change someone’s mind until you can inject an experience into their world that makes them believe through feeling it.

 

 

Our ability to read each others’ minds is what makes us truly unique as a species.  In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt explains that it’s a sort of crossing of the Rubicon – something different and special.  Mindreading goes on to detail how this seemingly magical capability is used in ways that we don’t even see and how different it truly is.  All this centers around the idea of “theory of mind.”  That is, our ability to predict what others are thinking and believing.  Gary Klein argues in Sources of Power that we’re all prediction machines and the experts have better models of the way that things work.  Inside Jokes argues that our prediction engines have built in error checking that leads to laughter.

Stepping In

With that as a background, it’s no wonder that most of us have the capacity to consider things from other people’s perspectives and consider how they might think about something.  In addition to the innate abilities, we have frameworks, tools, and training that can help us to more accurately predict the way other people are thinking.  Personality Types and Who Am I? both offer frameworks that we can use to evaluate people so we can better predict their responses.  Many classes exist on developing empathy and compassion.

For most people, the process of predicting someone else’s behavior isn’t the problem.  They may be accurate or largely inaccurate in their predictions, but they can make some prediction.  In Superforecasting, Phil Tetlock encourages us to look at predictions from multiple perspectives.  Most of us can do this by predicting which factors the other person may find most interesting or compelling.  The problem isn’t simulating the other person’s responses and predicting them – but staying with it.

Getting Distracted

The problem is that simulating what someone else is thinking is cognitively taxing – and we don’t like that.  Though our brains make up only 2-3% of our body mass, they consume something like 20-30% of our glucose.  We’re constantly trying to be efficient with our precious resources, as Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow.  The result is our natural tendency to stop caring about how other people might respond and instead focus on the tactical objectives that we need to get accomplished.

We shift into a mode that is more efficient and less concerned with others.  In Destructive Emotions, the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman ponder whether we’re fundamentally compassionate people who become selfish or fundamentally selfish people who become compassionate.  The truth from neuroscience may be that we’re compassionate when we can afford the calories.   The Blank Slate explains that familial altruism (sacrifice) comes from a genetic perspective, because our families (and tribes) share many of the same genes.  So, even in cases where we might have to make significant or even the ultimate sacrifice, we can do so when we believe it’s in our genes’ best interest.

Fighting the Feeling

The research shows that simple things can make a big difference in our ability to be focused.  The ONE Thing speaks about research done on comparing error rates when the subjects were given lemonade sweetened with sugar vs. artificial sweetener.  Those in the artificial sweetener group made more mistakes and appeared more distractable.  So the first way to keep ourselves in the shoes of the other people may be to make sure that our blood sugar doesn’t drop so that our brains start trying to conserve resources.

A more tangible and practical approach may be something as simple as a checklist or reminder system that asks the question about how people will react to the change, so we force our brains to reactivate the simulation for the other group even if it gets (temporarily) shut down.

One of the problems with any new system is the tendency for people to not know what they’re supposed to do and therefore freeze.  Here’s how you can understand, respond to, and overcome the cold start problem.

Freeze Frame

It’s not just children who will freeze rather than telling you they don’t understand.  It’s a natural human reaction.  We’ve learned that the greater we’re able to clarify our desires and the methods to accomplish them, the more results we’ll get.  You can show college students a horror film about the hazards of tetanus, and that won’t get them to get a vaccination.  Conversely, if you provide them a map to student health center where they can get the vaccine for free, they’re likely to go.

Because they don’t know how to start to solve the problem, they freeze – no matter how motivated they may be to protect their health.  A map is a fine way to make things clearer when it’s a vaccine you want them to take, but it gets harder when you want them to take some initiative and use some judgement.

Expectations

The biggest challenge with any new behaviors you want is helping people understand exactly what you’re looking for.  What may seem obvious to the designers isn’t obvious to everyone.  Consider the problem that Amazon.com had when it launched reviews.  No one was doing them.  No one knew what to do or what to expect.  As a result, Amazon paid (rewarded) people for reviewing products to get the process started.  With the processes primed, they could gently nudge reviews in the direction they wanted while continuing to support new reviews.

Amazon knew that people needed social proof – to know that others have used and like the products – to make them more willing to buy items, and that required reviews.  They knew what they needed, but they didn’t know how to help everyone understand what they wanted.  That was taken care of in part based on what they wanted because it created visibility.

Visibility

Everett Rogers in Diffusion of Innovations explains that one of the five factors that drive adoption is visibility.  That is, others need to be able to see the behavior and the positive results.  In the case of Amazon’s reviews, the individuals themselves got the reward from the reviews.  They got greater confidence that the product they wanted was one they’d like.  In many cases, there isn’t a built-in mechanism to create visibility.  That’s why we need to highlight success stories with the new behavior both to demonstrate what we want and to create visibility for others’ successes.

Jump Start

If you’re looking to change behavior, seed the behavior with visible results.  If you notice a street musician getting started, you may see that they put in a few dollars into their own change cup.  They do that, because it helps you understand what they want you to do.  It seems more normal and right.  For your change, create sample records, demonstration posters, and whatever else you need to demonstrate the behavior you want to see – so you can get it.

Most people wouldn’t consider crisis response a part of the change process – but it’s the other side of the planning and preparation, and it reminds us to plan for things going wrong occasionally.  The Apollo 13 mission was almost a disaster.  It was how the teams on the ground and in space handled the situation that made it successful.  That’s what we want and need for our change projects: good responses to unexpected situations.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

You never know what’s going to happen.  All the planning, intent, and preparation doesn’t mean you’ll get the results that you expect.  The introduction of steel axe heads to Stone Age Australians resulted in the degeneration of societies and families and the rise of prostitution.  That could not have been an anticipated response when the Christian missionaries came with their attempts to elevate the lives of these tribes while sharing their message.

The reality of any moderately-scaled change or larger is that there will be unintended consequences and situations that can’t be adequately planned for.  The result is the need to build teams that can adapt and can respond well to the inevitable crisis that will occur.

Character

Part of crisis response is being willing to stand up and admit that something happened.  It is negative, and it’s hard to communicate about hard things.  More than that, no one wants to be the messenger with bad news.  The saying “don’t shoot the messenger” is because that used to happen when you brought bad news.  It takes a strength of character that you as a change leader need to have – and it takes additional strength of character in the rest of the leadership team to admit there is something going on and it isn’t good.

Trust

It’s one thing to be willing to stand up and call attention to a problem, but it’s more challenging to develop the kind of trust the team needs to be able to work together without fear of covering their faults.  In a tight team built on trust, the team can respond as a unit, because they trust that the others will look out for them, too.  “I’ve got your back” started as a literal statement as teams of soldiers cleared buildings, with one or more looking forward and at least one covering the back.  It’s those kinds of teams that can respond to the crisis appropriately.

Checklist

If your change team is going to respond to a crisis, the steps are remarkably similar to the process for the entire change.  First, you need to understand the crisis as much as possible given the probability that you’ve got limited time to resolve it.  Second, you must define the desired state that you can get to given the crisis and the resources you have.  Third, you must define the actions and interventions that you believe will result in the change, and you must do them.

Recovering the Recovery

Perhaps the biggest change when working with a crisis is the need to be more attentive to what may be going wrong or how you might need to adapt.  Because crisis responses are often devised quickly in rapidly evolving situations, there’s the need to continuously revisit what is happening and what was expected to ensure that your proposed recovery plan will function appropriately given the new information.

If you can do that, then you can respond well to the inevitable crises that are a part of any moderate-sized change project.

It shouldn’t matter.  Pluto is literally miles and miles away from my home and where I grew up, but somehow changing the number of planets in the solar system rocked my nostalgic world.  There’s no reason it should – but it did.  And the reasons may just be why you’re struggling to do your change.

Elementary Science

I don’t remember when I learned that there were nine planets in the Solar System.  I do, however, remember being fascinated about how the planets orbited the Sun.  I’ve been to many of the scale models that show the distance of the various planets are from the Sun, and I’m in awe.

Somehow learning this so early – and it being foundational to other things I’ve learned, like black holes, galaxies and so forth – made it a part of what I came to expect.  It was a way that I viewed the world and when it changed, something changed in me.

Planetoid

Do I agree that it doesn’t meet the criteria to be called a planet?  Sure.  I’m on board.  Not that I really even know what the definition is – or why we arrived at that definition.  The thing is, neither the fact that Pluto is now a “planetoid” and not a planet nor the quite rational decisions for making that determination matter.  It doesn’t actually impact my everyday life.  It’s not like I leaned over to the kids and said, “Let’s go to Pluto for vacation this year.”

But without impacting my actual day-to-day life, it is a change that impacts my view of the universe – and that may be what is going on with your change project.

Identity

The closer that your changes come to personal or corporate identity, the more likely it is that the change will result in a loss of stability that is hard to articulate.  It’s hard to articulate, because we rarely encounter things that make us question our view of ourselves or the world that we live in.

Recall your first major betrayal.  That point involving someone who you thought was your friend, your mentor, or your ally, and you discovered something you believed was true about them wasn’t.  The betrayal was certainly a problem; but perhaps more challenging was the fact that the betrayal made you question what you knew about the world.  It made you question your own judgement.

Recovery

If your change has come too close to either a corporate or personal identity, and you’re challenging what people believe about the world, you’ll need to restore a sense of safety – and allow for some time to recover.  The challenge to our identity necessarily reduces our sense of safety, because we believe we’re no longer able to predict the world – and we rely on that to keep us feeling safe.  So, during changes, we need to pay particular attention to how much people feel safe in their environment, in the change, and with us.

Ultimately, I’ve let go of Pluto being a planet.  I never stayed up at night about it, but gradually I’ve come to accept that the Solar System only has eight planets.  I’ve even considered, on the plus side, that there’s now a market for the model of the solar system I had where Pluto was broken off – maybe I can make a few bucks on eBay with it.

Everyone wants to be a champion – a winner.  However, when it comes to changes, you need to make others champions if you want to win the change game.  Here’s how to do it.

Connect to Care

The first step is connecting to the people who care about your change.  For some changes, this may happen naturally.  People are naturally interested in the latest technology, the opportunity to reduce their work, or the chance to feel like they’re making a real difference.  However, there are too many change initiatives that aren’t sexy or inherently interesting.  For those, it’s important to connect the change to something that is important to people.

Infrastructure change initiatives are particularly hard to get people to buy into.  The change itself doesn’t do anything for the person.  Here, connecting the vision – the why – for the infrastructure change is important.  The change itself may not be that exciting, but the idea that they’ll be able to create their own solutions, reduce frustration, improve customer service, or simply deliver better product can be something they can get behind.  It can be something they can care about.

Make it Special

As humans, we have a natural desire to be a part of an exclusive group.  We want the VIP access – even if we must pay for it.  The result is an opportunity to engage a group of champions through creating special access – even if that special access is minimal or trivial.  Creating office hours that are reserved for champions, a special badge, tag line, or identification can go a long way at getting people to want to support your change initiative with neither official responsibility nor any kind of tangible compensation.

When we work on change names, logos, and tag lines, it can seem silly, trivial, or even frivolous.  But it’s these activities that allow us to activate the desire to be a part of an exclusive group for our champions and provide the fuel that they need to continue to support the initiative after their initial enthusiasm fades.

Training and Support

The enemy of champion engagement is frustration.  Nothing shuts down a supporter faster than feeling like they don’t have what they need to be successful.  That’s why your champion group needs to have training and support.  They need to be the ones who can be seen as the experts and the people to whom employees and other stakeholders can turn to get answers.  You can’t be everywhere, but they can.

To get the training and support right, you must first listen to what they’re asking for and be responsive when new needs arise.  With the needs clearly in hand, you’ll want to develop training that can be delivered not only to your initial champions but also to the new champions that you attract as the change continues.  That generally means getting training materials together so they can be repeated – even by existing champions.  It may be easier to record training sessions to replay for new champions.

Additionally, developing productivity/performance aids and knowledge bases that the champions can refer to will reduce the load of answering their questions – and will make them feel empowered to solve their own and others’ problems.

Plan for Change

Inside of your change initiative, you’ll have to accept that some of your champions are here for the marathon while others are like sprinters in a relay race who only participate for a short time.  That means staying on the lookout for the next champion and wishing well those who have supported you but need to move on.  Even change itself has change, but by engaging and supporting champions, everyone can be winners.

Everyone wants to talk about the digital transformation efforts that their organizations are doing.  They’re leading the way into the new digital age.  The problem is that what they mean by “digital transformation” isn’t clear, and it’s equally unclear how that helps organizations.

Agility and Resilience

If you were to pick two characteristics that organizations need today, agility and resilience are likely to top the list.  The pace of change has continued to accelerate in the last half-century, and it’s showing no signs of slowing.  Instead, it’s showing exponential growth rates, which means we must get better at adapting to change.  That is agility.

We also know that complex adaptive systems have very odd and unanticipated results.  Steel axe heads can lead to prostitution.  (See Diffusion of Innovations for more.)  As a result, organizations must find ways of being resilient when their business models are suddenly invalidated by the constant change in the market.  We’ve seen entire industries transformed by rapid changes.  Brick and mortar stores struggle for relevancy in an electronic commerce world.  Taxi companies – and car rental companies – are adapting to ride share applications like Lyft and Uber.  Commercial real estate is poised to struggle as the COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations to become more work-from-home friendly.

What’s the How?

The digital transformation is more than taking the existing processes and approaches to work and converting them from atoms to electrons.  It’s more than taking a facsimile (fax) based process and replacing it with a fax server and multi-function copier-scanner-printer devices.  It’s transforming how the organization works together.

Luminaries like Richard Hackman in Collaborative Intelligence explained decades ago that the measures of collaboration aren’t just the immediate output, it’s about how teams work together and their ability to learn and adapt.  He explained that it’s about changing the thinking and processes about how they work in Work Redesign.

In most organizations, digital transformation amounts to little more than converting paper-based processes into electronic processes – the same thing that we’ve been doing for three decades.  However, in some organizations, digital transformation is correctly formed as changing the way that people work together.

Social Knowledge

One of the ways that digital transformation can be effective is by unlocking the knowledge of the organization from the confines of personal email boxes – or in people’s heads – into social networking platforms that support the broad sharing of information.  The move is from the locked, “need to know” approach of security to open sharing, and it’s transforming the way that the businesses work, making it easier to get the knowledge resources necessary to be successful.

Exposed and searchable to everyone, knowledge and information makes it easier to mash up – or connect – multiple pieces of knowledge to solve a problem.  For many organizations, this is a radical change from the siloed and protected information that only a few people had.  People in large organizations attempted to leverage their personal networks to gather the knowledge they needed.

Social platforms and social network analysis on productivity platforms provide easier access to the information and knowledge necessary and, more importantly, break down the barriers that prevent people from adapting to changing market conditions.

Transformation and Change

The good news about good digital transformation is that it’s both possible and probable if you’re able to focus on developing the business characteristics of agility and resilience.  If you’re focused on the enabling factors like making the sharing of information easier, then you’re creating the soul of digital transformation in your organization.  You still must eliminate paper processes and things that require people to be in the same place – but that’s the how not the why.