Category: business transformation

Nudge the network

Nudge the network

If you do have a spare 30 minutes I would recommend reading the Behavioural Insights Team Update report.

Click to access BIT_Update-Report-Final-2013-2015.pdf

As more enterprise tools such as O365 / Yammer and Jive the old traditional methods of IT adoption fail (if they ever succeeded) and that’s where the digital transformation agenda takes over. IMO any deployment of collaboration tools need to look at behvaioural insights, nudging the network and behavioural economics to ensure success adoption.

We all love a good story

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Storytelling can be a powerful tool when you want to explain how collaboration tools can help colleagues.

Stories are one of the most powerful emotional currencies we possess. They move people to feel, and they move people to act.

At work, stories take the form of narratives, conversations and anecdotes that connect us with the narrator and the subjects and broaden our pool of knowledge. When you share a story, you will spark a story or idea.

We use stories to make sense of our environment. They make us care. They provide a shared context for mutual understanding of events and issues that impact us. And they inspire us to change our point of view.

Ideally a good story around working with collaboration tools should communicate some form of causal resolution of a problem and also have the addition of meaning and significance for the audience.

When I speak to people around the capabilities of collaboration tools I generally don’t talk about what each feature or button does but how the enabling tool (and associated behaviour coaching) has changed the way people have solved an issue; or created innovation; or developed new engagement channels.

My favourite stories of how these type of tools have helped include:

  • Solving departure delays at Istanbul airport
  • Ensured passengers flying into Heathrow received their ‘Bloody Mary’s’ just the way they like them
  • Helping sped up the alterations to passenger wash bags
  • Safety lessons from drilling rigs were shared across an organisation within hours
  • How a banana ice cream maker could peel a thousand bananas at the same time

Obviously these lose much of their currency once taken outside the context of that particular sector so it’s beneficial to begin building a library of wins / case studies as soon as possible. They don’t need to be too details – just a good story. .

Often a new manager or colleague won’t know how these tools and behaviours may have made a difference, but peers and other leaders may have a rich store of anecdotes and memories to make the use meaningful.

Avoid the usual suspects

Transformation programmes are changing dramatically in the digital age.

The main theme of traditional deployments of tools was that change programmes were slow (cascaded from the top, filtering slowly down), soloed (by geographies, levels and departments) and exclusive (owned by leaders and nominated change agents).

In the digital era change is now fast-paced (focused on habit-forming to kick-start new behaviours), focused around behaviours not technology and inclusive (allows everyone’s input to be seen and for social learning to happen).

One of the key changes is the advocacy network that can be built. Forget reaching out to management and asking for the ‘usual suspects’ – the same folk that get volunteered for most change programmes. Use digital and networking technologies to create a broad number of advocates.

It doesn’t matter about the time commitment. Ask then to do what they can when they can. In the digital age getting volume at the ground level is important. Avoid traditional messages on the intranet and focus on getting role models, word of mouth and great use cases. This will spread the transformation far quicker than going through traditional and failing channels.

It’s more than just the coaching

At my current client we are running a series of ‘beginners guide’ coaching sessions for those that are new to business networking platforms.

We run through the basic concept of using a networking site, the importance of your profiles, how to use the network to get value by following people and groups, etc.

Most platform vendors will claim that little training or coaching is needed as their respective tools are intuitive. But not everyone is on a social network in their personal life and I find some coaching is needed to ensure ‘no one gets left behind’. It’s a common approach, particular from IT departments that run these projects.

But the challenge does not end there. Just because someone now knows how to do something doesn’t automatically mean they will begin using it.

We mustn’t confuse ways of imparting knowledge with ways of changing behaviour. To encourage a behaviour we need to generate the best conditions for it to arise and then reinforce it. Merely knowing what you should do is often insufficient to reliably bring the behaviour about and merely knowing doesn’t offer much in the way of reinforcement.

So to support the behavioural change we are also coaching how colleagues can
develop highly engaged communities through some hints and tips around building habit formation as a step to changing behaviour online – some steps you can take to ensure your colleagues begin to regularly participate on the business networking platform.

Coaching participants on how something works is fine but the value comes from coaching on how to develop habits to utilise the capabilities of the network on a regular basis.