Don't Assume It's Simple: Why Change Management Needs More Than Guesswork

This may sound familiar to you... You're leading a project or an initiative and you feel pretty confident. You've done something similar before, so you think, "Hey, I've got this!" But then, out of nowhere, you hit a snag, and suddenly you're scrambling to fix things. It's happened to me multiple times throughout my career...

One time I was heading up the change for a big project to roll out an important new system worldwide. We had a change plan, we had a timeline - even though it was tight, we were ready to go. Or so we thought.

However, we'd made a classic mistake: because we were under pressure with a very aggressive timeline, we assumed we knew who our audience was and how to reach them. We figured it was all under control and the information we received that we built our plan on was complete. All we needed to do was execute the change plan, hold some meetings, send some emails and then let everyone know what was happening. Easy, right?

Wrong.

It turned out that a bunch of the people impacted by the changes didn't even use computers regularly and some didn’t even have access to them. And worse, a lot of them didn't speak English - which was the only language that all the communications had been written in. So, our carefully crafted change plan and all the emails were basically useless to half of our audience. We were essentially talking to a brick wall.

Talk about a wake-up call! We had to scramble to figure out how to actually reach these folks and get them on board with the changes. We ended up creating a completely different plan that include a separate approach for each different country that relied on in-person communications -, we're talking 27 language translations and it took a ton of extra time and effort.

Looking back, it's obvious where we went wrong. We assumed we knew what our audience needed, but we didn't actually take the time up front to check in with them directly and find out. We were so focused on the bigger picture and the technical side of things that we forgot about the human side.

The lesson here? Never make assumptions, even when you think you know the drill. Every change will likely be different, and people may need different things from you. Take the time to really understand your audience, and you'll save yourself a lot of headaches down the road.

So... my ask to you...

What I can do to provide YOU more value. Are there questions you have for me or courses you would like to see?  Drop me a note - I would love you hear from you