How to pronounce "buyin"
Transcript
The way we work is evolving
practically every moment of every day.
New approaches keep emerging
and the pressure to innovate is high.
But too often even the most promising new ideas
can fail to get across the finish line.
Why?
(light music)
I'm Professor David Schonthal,
and I've spent my career thinking
about why some new ideas, businesses and systems succeed,
while others - especially good ones - end up failing.
Over and over, I've seen great ideas
that never make it off the ground,
and it's not because the ideas aren't worthy, many are.
Instead, it's because of how they're introduced
into the world.
As it turns out,
there's some fascinating - and predictable - human factors
that can stop new ideas in their tracks.
My colleague Loran Nordgren and I
call these human factors "Frictions".
Frictions are the psychological forces that oppose change.
The four we've identified are:
Number one: Inertia.
Our overwhelming tendency to stick with what we know,
even though we know the current system is inadequate.
Friction number two: Effort.
The perceived exertion required
in order to make a change happen.
The third Friction is Emotion.
The unintended negative emotions triggered
by the suggested change.
And number four is Reactance.
Our impulse to resist being changed by others,
or what I like to call
the "don't tell me what to do" Friction.
So, when it comes to introducing new ways of working,
how can we overcome these Frictions?
Let me give you a couple of examples.
For example number one,
let's say your company is switching over
to a new internal software system.
You and the tech team are confident
that this change will help make everyone's life easier
and save the company money.
But when you announce it,
you're surprised to meet a lot of resistance.
People aren't eagerly signing up for the training,
and they're saying, "you know what?
I'm cool. I'm just gonna stick with the existing system."
Turns out you've triggered the Friction of Inertia.
People feel like they're being forced to leave a system
that they're comfortable with.
And even though the new software
will make everyone's life easier,
the human instinct to resist change is getting in the way.
One tactic to avoid triggering this Friction
is to shrink the size of the change.
In other words, position the change
not as one big major system shift,
but as a series of smaller experiments.
Could we try this new software out for a month or two,
and then decide whether or not
it should become our new system?
Starting small and framing new ideas as experiments
are useful tactics
because they make the change less intimidating -
plus, people know that experiments can be undone,
or even totally fail.
And here's example number two.
Let's say, and tell me if this sounds familiar,
your company wants the organization
to embrace a new commitment to innovation.
The Friction that this could trigger is effort -
meaning people feel like they need to take on
all of the cognitive effort of figuring out
exactly what this change means for them,
and how to build it into their day-to-day responsibilities.
For employees, directives like "be more innovative"
are ambiguous and often confusing.
Instead of feeling inspired and motivated,
people feel paralyzed.
One tactic for making this idea feel less ambiguous
is road mapping.
Turn this big directive into a series of steps.
Now, getting concrete in this way
can not only help a team see where you're asking them to go,
but they can see how to get there.
Ultimately, the secret to getting buy-in
to new ways of working
is about anticipating the frictions
that your change could stir up,
and then putting just as much thought
into how you introduce those ideas
as you put into designing the idea itself.
The results of doing this can be even more valuable
than generating simple buy-in:
You might even see the transformation of your listeners
from passive recipients of an idea
to enthusiastic champions of new ways of working.
(upbeat jazz music)