Kathy Harris

Any complex initiative demands good planning, design, development and implementation. However, the teams that manage innovation initiatives often do these things well and still don’t succeed.  Most often, the failure point occurs after implementation and during the socialization of change –the first six months of an innovation’s life.  Socialization means that the people using the innovation adopt and internalize the new way of doing things – they also leave behind the old ways and diffuse the change through the organization. 

The success factors of socialization are well-documented — we all know the guidelines but often treat them as just another task in a big initiative.  Socialization implies a deeper commitment than most organizations acknowledge – in fact, socialization, its actions and its attitudes may be the most complex part of innovation.  Here are a few throughts on socializing change.    

• Key owners and sponsors must “sign up” for change. Many teams take appropriate steps and even ask sponsors to sign an approval document.  But, sign up goes beyond approval meetings and documents. The team leading the initiative must ensure that owners and sponsors know exactly what they’re signing up for – for example, which business units will be affected, what processes or products will change, when will these change, which jobs will be affected and what will we stop doing? This will probably lead to a lot of questions and challenges from sponsors and maybe more work – good job!
• Usability should be assured before development begins. Many times, a new process or product works but its usability is low. The initiative team should develop methods to confirm usability of processes or products before they build them. This probably means adding expertise and tasks for early prototyping, pilots or simulation; but if an initiative is important and costly, the additional time is well spent. Also, a good thing.
• At implementation time, educate the business and operational leaders first. Train these leaders to a level of competency that ensures they can hold their employees accountable for rapidly adopting new processes, methods, tools, etc.  You’ll need to train end users in the details, of course, but ensure that their business and operational leaders know enough to lead change. These leaders are your best influencers of change — people will look to them for signals on whether innovation is important and worth the effort to change. Some leaders may resist training so use your sponsors to help make the case for this.
• Retire obsolete processes and products when you implement new ones. Planning for innovation must identify the processes and other assets that will be made obsolete. Get sign up for these retirement plans including who is accountable for disabling the old once the new is in place. This is not extra work – innovation implies retirement and replacement; also, much of the ROI will be predicated on simplifying processes, retiring underperforming products, etc.
• Hold sponsors and owners accountable for achieving the ROI in the expected time frame. Once implemented, track the value achieved by the innovation – do this at least through the first year of life of new processes and products.

Finally, organizations should reward rapid change adoption and good change management by business and operational leaders. What matters most in innovation is that there is real change by the people who use the new processes or products.