Mastering Change: How To Simplify Adoption Across Organizations
In this episode of The Cloud Lounge, host Zeshan Randhawa dives into the power of Adoption and Change Management with Todd Kirk, Associate Vice-President of Solution Advisory at Brainstorm. With 69% of change initiatives failing due to resistance and poor execution, how can organizations turn transformation into a success story?
Together, Zeshan and Todd break down the must-have strategies for overcoming resistance, driving engagement, and ensuring smooth transitions. From effective training and clear communication to strong leadership and cultural alignment, they uncover the key factors that fuel lasting change.
Whether you’re leading a digital transformation or navigating new workplace technologies, this episode offers practical insights to help you boost adoption, enhance productivity, and future-proof your organization.
Transcript
You’re listening to the Cloud Lounge Podcast, a show about business, technology, and all that jazz, brought to you by Softlanding, a leading IT service provider in Canada. Let’s get started. Here’s your host, Zeeshan Randhawa. Welcome to the Cloud Lounge Podcast. I’m your host, Zeshan. With digital transformation on the rise, change management has become even more critical. Organizations need to be agile and responsive to the technology advancements to stay competitive, but they also have to ensure that people effectively adopt these tools and technologies and process changes. And this is where adoption and change management comes in. For those that may be unclear, adoption and change management or ACM, refers to the structured approach organizations or people can take in order to ensure a smooth transition when implementing new processes, technologies, or even strategies. The goal is really simple. It’s to minimize resistance and maximize the effectiveness of change, ensuring the seamless integration of this change. Key elements of successful adoption and change management can include things like effective training programs, robust communication strategies, and strong leadership, really leading by example. Leaders must articulate the vision and rationale behind the change to foster an understanding and buy-in from all stakeholders. A staggering 69% of change initiatives failed to achieve their goals. This high failure rate is often attributed to resistance to change and poor management of the actual change process itself. Effective change management can significantly boost employee morale and productivity. It’s simple. When employees understand and support the change, they are more engaged and more productive. This leads us to our guest for today, someone who not only understands the importance of adoption and change management, but actively promotes it. To talk about our topic today, we have Todd Kirk, Associate Vice President of Solution Advisory at Brainstorm. Welcome to the podcast, Todd. Hey, happy to be here. Excellent. So Todd, could you just start us off by telling a bit about yourself to our listeners a bit about yourself and your change of management journey? Sure. So I’ve been at Brainstorm for about 12 years. I started in the early days in partnership with Microsoft to help their enterprise customers move to the cloud. If you were to jump back to the early teens of the 2000s, that was when Microsoft was making a transition from being primarily an on-prem company to a cloud first company and a SaaS company. And I did live services with their field to go out and help do change management with executives and over time transitioned into more of a digital change management experience, helping customers to think about and work in a more scaled approach to reach more of their users. Excellent. And, and what a pivotal time and change that was. So Todd, start off by telling us a bit just about adoption change management. What does ACM mean to you and why is it critical in today’s workplace? Yeah, you know, ACM is a critical part of any technology initiative that an organization is going to go through, because obviously if you’ve purchased software or you’re going to change software as your standard, the first thing you want to have happen is that people actually use it and that they get the value out of it that they’re trying to achieve. So many organizations put a lot of effort. I mean, imagine you’re a larger enterprise with 50,000 users. Well, if you’re going to deploy any new software to those users, it could be extremely disruptive to their day because there’s so many different things that you have to think about. How do they work? What do they do on their teams to use various elements of their software? What are the deployment strategies? So how are they going to access it? How easy is it going to be for them to log in? And do they know how to use it? Are they going to feel confident that it’s going to make their lives better? And a lot of organizations know from sad experience that when you go through any sort of change initiative, you run into these problems really regularly where users are not happy about making the shift, they become resistant, they might even openly rebel if you’re not careful and it can get pretty negative pretty fast. So there’s a lot of resource that gets put behind change management. From my perspective, one of the things that’s challenging is that a lot of change efforts. There’s a lot of science, there’s a lot of psychology. There’s a lot of best practices, frameworks and processes that have been developed by various organizations over the years. Some of those work really, really well if you put a ton of manpower and human energy behind it, but a lot of organizations just don’t have that. They don’t, I mean, you can’t afford to hire a 10 person change management team and spend millions of dollars unless you are a, you know, mega billion dollar company with tons of resources. courses at your disposal. And even if you do that, it’s still very manual, it’s very driven by human interaction. And as a result, it can oftentimes be short-lived. So the change initiative is viewed as a project that is like a one and done, and then a lot of times organizations are like that didn’t work. So then they just have to do it all over again and they start afresh a year later and be like, let’s relaunch because our first try didn’t work very well. So if you’re not doing it right, it can become extremely expensive and extremely difficult, and you’ll fail to unlock the value of the software that you want to anyway. Absolutely, absolutely. We’ll definitely get a bit more into, you know, the way smaller organizations can actually try to implement some better ACM practices as well, maybe in a more succinct or cheaper way as well. But before we jump into that, you know, we’ve all heard the buzzword sometimes quite often actually overused of business transformation. With so many organizations dealing with the chaos of adopting these multiple applications that you were talking about and all these different technologies now with AI and and so on and so forth, what are some of the biggest challenges that they face? Well, so really good question. One of the things that I’ve noticed, if you’re an organization. It has about 2000 employees. On the average, in 2023, organizations had somewhere in the realm of 100 and, well, sorry, at the beginning of 2023. So let’s jump back a year. At the beginning of 2023, most organizations had somewhere in the realm of 187 different applications that they had deployed internally. What’s wild is if you jump forward to today and think about how many organizations deploy new software, it’s now well over 200. And so in the last year, it’s been on average across different organizations launching somewhere in the realm of 40, 40 to 45 new software applications. That’s an incredibly staggering amount of technology that is being put into the hands of different organizations. So this idea of business transformation, it is a buzzword, but it is also just, it is just reality, like to be launching new technology constantly, and that’s not always centralized. So there are different teams that are purchasing software, maybe they’re purchasing it on their own and not necessarily going through approval processes. So you end up with duplicate. that do similar things. People don’t know which tools they should use for what situation. And meanwhile, not only are you potentially spending too much on duplicate software, but you also run into a scenario that’s worse is, even if you want to keep those solutions, you don’t necessarily have a good way to manage the insurance that a user actually gets the value that you bought it for. And business transformation doesn’t occur just because you bought new technology. I think that is a common misconception. You’re only going to transform your business. If your people transform. Technology on its own, unless it’s some automated tool is rarely going to actually change your business without humans actually getting behind it. I love that angle actually making sure that your actual users transform along with the technology as well. It’s a great angle. Now, quite a few years ago, Todd, I don’t know about yourself, but I think we were in a position where a lot of organizations needed to be sold why they needed ACM. I think it feels like we’re past that definitely now, but I think there still might be some kind of common misconceptions when it comes to adoption and change management within organizations. Have you encountered that as well? And, and what are some of those misconceptions that you’ve come across? The first thing I’ll mention is that, and I had said this before, I think it’s really critical to remember that you have to change your people along with changing your systems, and that means you have to train and teach and motivate people to want to do things differently. But I’ll add something else on top of this. I think one of the barriers. That I oftentimes see is that ACM as a framework, as a methodology, there’s a lot of really good important principles there, but ACM on its own right doesn’t do anything to enable an organization actually change. So I do think that one of the misconceptions is that if I understand the framework, then we’re going to succeed. And the problem is that like understanding the relationship between the project team, the executive team, the leadership team essentially. And the end users and and how everybody’s going to think about this and how they’re going to work together. Yeah, great. There’s lots of good principles on that kind of three-headed monster in an organization, how you’re going to change. But there’s not a lot that’s been done in the world to try to help enable those organizations to make those changes. So change management ends up becoming pain management, and you’re constantly in this ever state of change without actually arriving at some new state that you want to get at. And that It’s all about enablement. So there are some things that you want to do as an organization to enable change to happen faster, helping more effectively, help users get on board. And if you don’t do those things, you can just eat and be in this constant state of flux and never actually get the outcomes that you want to achieve. I’m definitely going to be using the term pain management from now on, just to let you know. So Todd, earlier on you talked about, you know, not every organization can have these massive ACM teams or dedicated roles and so on and so forth. So in your perspective, when managing change in small to medium sized businesses who may not have those big budgets, what are some of the key strategies you recommend to ensure kind of smooth transitions or adoption of technology? Great question. There’s a few things that I think are are challenging. When you go down into being, if I’m an organization with 2000 or 50,000 employees, as I’ve mentioned before, I likely have some resources, some people I can dedicate. And when you’re in a smaller business, most of the time people who are responsible for managing the change are having to wear multiple hats. So that might mean that I’m the CEO and I’m actually the project lead, and I’m the leader of the company, and I’m also an end user. So I just mentioned that three-headed monster of how you’re driving change, right? There’s someone who’s responsible for the change, there’s the leader and there’s the end user. Well, if you’re in a small business, you might actually have to play the role of all three. And so that can be a challenge on its own right. Let’s say you’re launching a new compliance software for legal. Well, maybe your head of legal is actually responsible for educating your sales team on how they need to bring up compliance information with their customers. Well, if that’s the case, well, now you’re he’s also having to go out and sign contracts and negotiate terms and red line and meanwhile, he’s supposed to be expected to run and drive change. So one of the things that I think is really critical is you need to, if you are a smaller business, it’s really beneficial for you to enable your team, whether that’s in IT or whoever you think should own the change historically, you need to enable them with tools that make it possible for them to drive change without it taking over their whole lives. And I think that’s one of the big gaps that a lot of smaller businesses don’t think about is you’re not going to hire a 50 person team to go out and train everybody manually. So what you have to do is figure out how do you do that and More scalable approach. Having good communication templates, good training resources that are pre-built, pre-designed, and hosted in a place that your change team can push people to is a really good way to think about that, just as an example, right? So some strategies that are really key is figuring out how do I make it easier for the team who has to own the change when they’re having to wear multiple hats so that they can do that on their own and without it just consuming their entire lives. Absolutely. And kind of on the same topic then. I have worked with Brainstorm in the past, but for the listeners that don’t have much exposure to Brainstorm. I’d love for you to explain kind of how Brainstorm approaches change management different from other companies, especially when helping organizations with diverse tech stacks and also with organizations that might be on the small to medium size. Yeah, for sure. Brainstorm, I love Brainstorm. I’ve obviously mentioned at the start, I’ve been here for a long time. And one of the things that I think makes Brainstorm unique is the fact that we’re a bunch of end users who wanted to create solutions for end users. So a lot of times, Change management, especially there’s a disconnect between how IT speaks, how they think about users, and what they’re trying to make happen and what the end user feels themselves. And so for us, what we tried to do years ago was figure out ways to support customers better at driving change in a scalable and effective way. And that means in the beginning a lot of what Brainstorm did was instructor led training and print materials that we’d put on people’s desk for deployment Monday. And what we discovered was that those methodologies on their own were really incomplete, and they didn’t drive the long term change that people wanted to see. So over time what we did was we tried to learn what did users need and what did they experience, and we saw that educational services that were done digitally had a dramatically more impactful reach, but they had to be built the right way. So what Brainstorm has become really good at today is delivering awesome end user experiences that teach them how to use technology in a system that enables IT to track and see how things are going. So we integrate with the Usage data of the software platform that’s being launched like Microsoft 365, and then we’ll provide training and resources and we’ll track and see how that’s actually going for the customer. So it’s been really awesome because Brainstorm as a result, and I’ve gotten to see this now working with other Sas companies outside of the Microsoft world. Most change initiatives fail, and they fail pretty hard for a lot of companies because they don’t have a system or a tool in place that enables people to really feel like this is gonna be worth it and it’s going to be easy, right? Every, every single change has to come from the perspective of, is it going to be worth it to me and is it going to be something I can do without too much effort and you’re always weighing that, right? If it’s too hard, but I think it’s marginally valuable, the likelihood that I do it is going to be low. If I don’t think it’s valuable, but it’s still easy, it’s not going to be something I do. So it has to be worth more than the effort to actually make it happen. And that’s what I think Brainstorm’s done really good at trying to develop is a system that makes it easier. For a user to get the value out of the software faster. In term, also kind of level the playing field for some of the, again, smaller organizations out there as well by kind of reusing some of that pre-built training or pre-built communication templates and and what have you. Right? Yeah, there’s a little bit of a snowflake fallacy. We all kind of think that we’re unique and different and in some ways that’s true, but in others it’s not. And so we have decades now worth of experience that we’ve used to design experiences that can be reused and pre-built for. Customs and then because we have learned that customers want to have the ability to customize and change those experiences for their own needs, they can. So we basically provide the templates, everything’s ready to go. You could launch in minutes or if you want to, you go in and customize it, add your own training, and your own resources, all of that kind of thing on top of it. So it really is designed to be flexible but also easy. So Todd, you’ve alluded to kind of leadership playing a role in helping ACM or drive ACM. So again, from your perspective, what role does leadership and company culture play in actually driving successful adoption of new tools and technologies? And how can leadership actually set the tone for this change? It’s such a critical question to think about. So many organizations, I think miss one critical thing in the change process, and that is that you don’t start with how, you start with why. And one of the big blockers that I see is organizations spend a ton of time on the front end trying to help users understand how a tool works, but knowing how a tool works doesn’t convince me I should use it. So a good attitu. to always remember is that users ask why before they ask how. And culturally, I think it’s really valuable for an organization to consider first is the expectation on the customer, the end user rather, is the expectation that that end user use this as part of their job and they are being forced to use it, it’s mandatory for them to use it, or is it optional? So as an example, a CRM system, if I’m in sales, I have to go in and input the information about my deals if I’m closing them. And if I don’t, my boss is going to come after me, right? I might be at risk of being put on a performance improvement plan or maybe even be be fired from the company if I’m derelict in my responsibilities, but the expectation to take notes in a meeting or add an agenda inside of a meeting, those are viewed as optional. If you did that, you’d be way more effective, right? But that doesn’t mean that I have to do it. So the two things that you have to remember when you’re driving change is, does the user feel like this is something that’s mandatory or is it optional? Because most software is viewed as voluntary, then I have to be much better at articulating why. And that’s where leadership plays the best kind of role that you. Can people want to know what the expectations are around the change, and that’s best communicated from leadership and then by extension, their own managers. So things that are important to come from, say, the executive leadership team would be things as to why you made the business decision. And that’s OK if some of the changes that you’re making are beneficial to the business, like it’s going to save us money or it’s going to help us to get products to market faster. There are technology change objectives that you have as a business. Those things need to be articulated from leadership. Managers though, also need to be informed by the executive leadership and be able to answer questions for users. What’s fascinating is at the end of most software rollouts that I’ve been a part of, We always try to ask end users as part of a survey with our software or through other systems if they feel ready to go, right? Do they intend to use the software? Do they not? Do they think it’s going to be easy? Do they think it’s not? And if there’s any blockers, what would those things be? And most of the time, the blockers that end users have, it doesn’t have anything to do with the value of the software or even how to do it. They have questions like, when do I have to be off the old solution? Like when is the old solution going away? They’ll have questions. Questions like how many other people are expected to use this and when are they moving because they don’t want to be the only ones. Am I expected to use this or am I not? So a lot of times the questions that are left over in a change initiative have to do with process. So first, be really good about articulating the why, enable the user with a how, and then ensure that you have management and leadership being proactive, helping people understand the timelines and the expectations around those changes, and it’ll go a lot smoother. And as long as you’ve through kind of those three stages, you’ll be in a much better spot. And then the last piece that I’ll say, I think that’s important to remember on that front at least, is that you can’t look at change as just a one and done thing. It has to be an ongoing process. Make sure that you’re reinforcing expectations, checking and seeing how people are doing, listening to your users getting feedback, and then ensuring that you get to where you want to go. Otherwise, you’re never going to get there and you have to own the change if your leadership, like your software vendor who sold you the software, they might come in. And do some training and provide some resources for you or whatever, but you have to own the change and make sure that you take that as a proactive step or you’re never going to get where you want to be. That was a long rambling answer, but hopefully there’s some nuggets in there. Absolutely, absolutely. And I can definitely second that some of the best or most kind of robust engagements that I’ve been a part of or successful engagements that I’ve been a part of. It’s where leadership has been front and center, communicating the change, why it’s necessary and really taking charge of that change as well. So that’s a really good point that you ended on there as well, Todd, about the one and done and how, you know, there is sometimes a misconception that ACM is a one and done thing. I go come in, I’m rolling out this app. Let’s do a bunch of training and we’re good to go. But for you, what does it look like when it comes to maintaining employee engagement kind of post-implementation? What are some of the key kind of factors there? Yeah, well, there’s a couple of really obvious ones that I’ll mention maybe as a starting point. So as an example, when you first go through a change, one of the things that we fail to forget is that organizations change a lot over time. And what I mean by that is, I might have someone get promoted into a new role and their expectation for using that software is going to be different. I might have a team member leave to a different job, leave the company, and I have to hire someone new to take on that job. And a lot of organizations do a really good job. HR will have a really buttoned up onboarding process and plan for new hires inside of an organization that teaches them what the PTO policy is, what their sick leave policy is. They have to go through harassment training and they do all these great things, but what we fail to do most often is actually prepare that user to understand what technology they’re supposed to use and how for their job. And what’s interesting is a lot of times you might be hiring someone from a different organization who’s never used the tool. Maybe you use Microsoft Teams and they use Zoom in a previous job. Maybe you, they used Google Sheets and now they’re being expected to use Excel for the first time. And we don’t do a great job of helping new hires understand the tech stack. And so anytime you go through a change initiative, but then you also have new hires that come behind, you risk reverting back to whatever your old systems were, or having a bunch of shadow initiatives going on that aren’t associated with your project. So having a good onboarding process for new hires and including technology tools as part of that, I would say is a really important goal, but the other side of that is your existing users, they’re going to forget. So let’s say I do a live training, like even just this call, if you’re on here, the forgetting curve shows that you’re going to forget 90 to 95% of what I said in the next two weeks. So if you just do this one time, I might be really motivated, but then go to a training, I’m really excited and then I have to fight a fire for a customer in the next 20 minutes after the training. Guess what? I just lost like everything taught me. Yeah, it’s all gone. So what you have to do is ensure That you’re also reinforcing the changes that you do. So being proactive about communicating and reminding people, and that could be just as simple as sending someone a quick tip on how to use the software in a way that you think would be valuable. You don’t necessarily have to try to get someone to sit down in a 2 hour training or even sit through a 15 minute online course. Maybe it’s just a quick message that’s like, hey, don’t forget there’s this really cool capability. Do you want to refresher how to do it? Check out this little one minute video I put together that can show you and help you. And so that’s some of the stuff that we think about too. Reinforcement needs to happen over time with your existing users and dripping out little quick ideas that they can consume is helpful. And then we need to have processes and systems in place for new people who move into new roles or are brought into the company so that you don’t lose the change that you had because of outside forces. Absolutely, absolutely. Well said. So finally, Todd, I’d love for you to share a bit of a story from the field of an organization that’s done ACM well or something that you’ve seen work particularly well for adoption and change management. Anything you can share with us? Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll give you a great example of one of my favorite customers. They’re a large bottling and beverage company and kind of food and beverage space. And they were rolling out Microsoft 365. And what was fascinating is in the very beginning, what they thought was, well, let’s just like put up like a SharePoint training page that we can send people to and see what happens. And this is one of those places again where we think enablement means putting resources on a page and hoping people go there. And the fact of the matter is just like putting resources somewhere does not actually make anybody do anything because they’re probably not even they’re they’re not even aware the page exists and if they are aware that the page exists, they probably don’t care to go consume anything there and they don’t have any desire to do it yet. So you have to start earlier and what’s awesome is we initially had this partner we were working with and they said, hey, nobody’s consuming this training. We’re not having really any traction. We’re really worried. We did a bunch of in person things. We’re sending trainers all around the country to go train people on site and it’s just not going very well and nobody’s doing any of these digital experiences that we thought would give us the reach that we needed. And so we said, hey, what if you thought like a marketer and you start communicating? And you know, dripping out weekly messages to each of your users, and they were really afraid to do that because at least for this organization, you’re talking about 100,000 employees and they’re like, yeah, we can’t start sending emails out to 100,000 people and we’re like, yeah, you can. So we convinced them to do it. And what’s wild is not only did they see the engagement of people skyrocket with actual training that was put out in front of the end users. But they saw a 400% increase in their adoption of their tools, and this was specifically around the deployment of Microsoft Teams. And what was so crazy, right, is they had been on Skype before and everybody hated Skype, but they didn’t want to change. Not only did they see a 400% increase in their team’s adoption, but they ended up getting to a point where they had better adoption of teams than they ever had with Skype. And part of that was because they thought like marketers. So like, one of the things that I love is to, if you want to be really good at change is there are different organizations that kind of become very specialized in parts of the change process. There are education companies that are really good on the how, there are marketing companies that are really good on messaging and positioning and how do you help users get over that initial. resistance phase. There are companies that are really good at trying to tackle other things like that. Look at thought leaders out in the industry and see what they do. And for us, like I said here at Brainstorm, I feel like one of the things that I love is we’re just a bunch of users who are passionate about this and try to build a system that takes best practices across an entire change journey and then build tools that enable to make that easier and. So that’s one of the examples that comes to mind to me is, man, I would love to see a 4X increase in my adoption in in a couple of months and be able to move off an old tool faster even with an organization with just 100 or 50 people, that can be a nightmare, and they did this with 100,000 employees in just a couple of months. So it can be done. It can be done. Absolutely. Well, Todd, thank you so much for spending this time with us, giving us some great sound advice. I really do appreciate you joining us on the Cloud Lounge Podcast. Of course, thanks for having me. I know it’s easy to get caught up on focusing on just the shiny new technology itself. Often we forget the people who will actually be using or adopting the technology. Knowing that companies that excel at change management are 3.5 times more likely to outperform their competitors should be enough to know that this is important. I would like to thank Todd Kirk for joining us today in our conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. Till next time, this has been the Cloud Lounge Podcast. Take care.
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