Making bacon

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, said Drucker. So how do you go about making your transformation strategy look as tempting and familiar bacon, sausage and scrambled eggs?

Here are three simple ideas:

 1)     Point out it isn’t avocado on toast

Where people are very resistant to change, it can be most effective if your transformation appears to be very like what went before. User experience is key. If the user experience – the screen, the archiving mechanism, the functionality – is still familiar (if a bit smoother, cleaner or faster), it’ll still look like beans and fried bread and not some trendy non-breakfast that is only ever served within sight of the Sydney Opera House. Effort put into creating surface familiarity will get reluctant users over their initial scepticism.

 2)     Tell them it IS avo on toast

Where things are really broken and the audience is hungry for transformation, then be bold and tell the audience that the transformation will bring them a completely new experience. The old-fashioned content will be left behind. Even highly-resistant people can be wowed by getting rid of frustrating old kit and processes. Paradoxically, this type of message can be used in tandem with (1) – people really can believe two different things at the same time!

 3)     Agree that it IS avocado on toast, but let them find out it tastes like bacon…

Some audience segments will remain suspicious, even if they really want the new benefits the transformation will bring. This is where you definitely need to move from describing the fresh taste of the healthy, luscious ripe avocado – and let them taste it for themselves. Trial – long before the UAT stage – will win a good percentage of acceptance. It takes away the fear of change that comes from not truly thinking about the nature of the change. The new system isn’t that scary after all…

OK: now you’re thinking I’m devious, untruthful and probably downright crooked – I’m telling everyone what they want to hear and I’ll soon come a cropper. I’d argue that’s not the case, but that communication on any transformation is never one-size-fits all.

A successful communication plan does not treat the workforce as a single homogenous audience, but instead takes time and effort to address the huge variety of viewpoints that stakeholders will have. Yes, that means you will need different messages for different audience segments. As long as those messages are factually based and provable, they will all be credible. We now live in a world where it is relatively easy to tailor communications to smaller interest-groups: the trick is simply to have a communications strategy that puts in the hard yards and makes the effort to create targeted messaging.

This is an extract from Uncommon Sense: Alternative Thinking on Digital Transformation 

Amazon location:   https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08KSG513Q