#6 Change Champions vs. Influencers —And Tales from Windows 8

Ever wonder why some change initiatives flop even when the brightest people are on the team? In this episode, we dive into the world of change champions vs.  influencers and why excluding a very important group of users in your change champions can derail even the most ambitious projects. Together, we will learn from companies that failed to launch Windows 8 and how we can spot the right champions this time, avoiding common pitfalls.

Transcript

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In social media, we call them influencers. At work, there's actually a close parallel, change champions. These are the people in different areas and levels of your organization who help you evangelize and facilitate the navigation of the change. The question isn't about the need for them. It's no doubt we need them. The better question is, how do we pick them? Do we pick them the same way influencers are picked? The most popular, the superstars, or is there something more? Welcome to Change, Actually, a podcast about change in the workplace, in organizations, and in ourselves. I'm your host, Hilary Chan. I've spent years helping leaders, humans, including myself, and organizations navigate change, grounding what makes us human into practical strategies for individual and organizational growth. If this sounds like you, subscribe and follow the podcast. Let's continue with our thinking exercise. What would happen if we picked our change champions the way retail stores picked influencers? When you pick influencers, you're looking for reach. Who has the most followers? Can they speak about the product? Can they use the product and show its benefits? These questions are part of the questions we do ask when choosing change champions. But it's not the whole list. It's missing a whole lot actually. Change adoption does not happen because superstar Sally in Finance, who happens to rock the latest gloss and is ahead of every trend, is using SAP in the new way leadership wants. Influencers can create the desire to change, and desire is needed for change to be adopted. But again, that's only part of the reason for successful adoption. If change were easily implemented this way, we could just hire the Joneses, problem solved. No. The requirement for a good change champion goes deeper. Change champions need to be able to support others through the change. They have not been properly purposed if they're there only as a poster child who did a soap box that one time. Change champions help others in the organization skill up. Be there when others need some encouragement in using the new methods, answer questions, and show how it's doable, even as demonstrated through their own subset of challenges. Take the launch of the operating system Windows 8, for example. Ever heard of it? That was the problem. No one remembers how it worked. And somehow, when you describe it, everyone remembers the frustrations they had with it when it launched in 2012. So let me jog your memory. Before Windows 8, all the Windows operating systems had a start menu. Windows 8 was the first of its kind to replace the start menu entirely with a start screen. People didn't know where to start. The start screen was an entire mosaic of colorful tiles of different sizes, each representing apps or information. Revolutionary, right? Right. But most remember Windows 8 as hard to use. Why, you might ask? We've seen complex systems launch and succeed before. Otherwise, the whole entire world would have shut down when computers were invented. So, what was the problem with why companies lost a ton of ROI on this product? In many organizations, when systems like Windows 8 were rolled up, they ran the typical change management process. Picked their champions, ran pilots, had iterations, etc. The issue wasn't the process. It was who they chose. They picked change champions from their early adopters, their power users, also known as super users, their IT folks, to support and champion the launch of a visually complex IT system to non-IT folks. Power users are often not your average users. Their challenges often differ from the average user. For example, average users in a Windows 8 struggled to open a window, find the browser, grapple with the loss of a key button they used to start all processes. A power user might have been exploring the features more deeply instead of understanding where to find these features at all. Power users can be your most adaptable folks, ahead of the curve. And when you're ahead of the curve, you represent a very small group of the entire population. Essentially, companies were basing their forecast of change readiness on a sample of people who didn't represent the majority's experience. And as a result, they were heavily blindsided by the sheer scale of skill gaps across their workforce. So, how can we pick better? When we pick change champions, we want to pick a variety of people. I'm not saying you should exclude the power users. Having some of them on board can ensure the subject matter experts feel seen and heard. But you want the change champions to be real users of the change. Real users are the people who will be using this change every day. And within this group, you want to include the people who are done in your change, the ones who are most vocal about struggling with it, and the weakest links. As you work with these individuals and address their concerns, you develop a relationship that others in the organizations will hear about and witness. That deepened trust opens up the channel for more to pause and consider, okay, maybe I can adapt and figure this out too. And here's the added value by these champions. They don't just demonstrate change adoption. They can translate it to others. They can teach others to learn, not from perfection, but from their experience and their challenges. Challenges that they pioneered ways to overcome. Pioneered ways that can spread and speed up adoption. Because if one person has a question, chances are someone else has the same question. And yes, you must involve these champions early on in the process and grow this group, not last minute at the launch date. And if you want to learn more about early signaling, tune into the previous episode. Now, over to you. Think about an upcoming change that will affect a group of people. Might be your team, your after-school intramurals, maybe your family. Who would be your power user, your vocal struggler, your skeptic, and your frontliners? How are you going to approach them and use them to their strengths in making sure all on board onto the change? If you liked this episode and want to stay posted on All Things Change, like, subscribe, and follow me on LinkedIn. Remember, choosing only high performers or popular people to champion your change can make a change look successful until it hits the ground. The right champions don't just make change look good. They help your organization survive and thrive through it. And that's change, actually.