If you are an entrepreneur or a business person who has paid attention to best sellers, you have more than likely heard of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, where the concept of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle was introduced.
I’ve been fortunate enough to drive or be a part of a lot of exciting changes around culture, best practices, and foundations for growth various organizations in my career. However, it was not until recently that I recognized that some folks do not understand that their initiative isn’t actually done when senior leadership buys in. I’ve even seen a scenario where an initiative was being built just to ask senior leadership to appoint someone else to do the hard work of making the change in the company.
While thinking on these events, my need to measure progress, and to drive myself to complete the adoption of my initiatives, I recognized a pattern I’ll share with you in this article. I’ve based the concept of “The Initiative Adoption Curve” on Geoffrey Moore’s Technology Adoption Curve. In doing so, I am offering you a tool you can use to ensure you and your leadership team have the correct mindset of how to drive changes in your organization and a tool you can use to measure your progress along the way.
The first step in understanding this tool is to understand what the Technology Adoption Life Cycle represents. Here’s an image:
It essentially describes who will adopt your innovative technology and their expectations of your product in order for you to successfully meet their needs and move on to the next group of people. Read Geoffrey Moore’s book to get the real details, but at a high level, here’s what each group needs in order to adopt your product. The Innovators are the thought leaders who will adopt early tech, knowing that is it more expensive, unstable, and probably doesn’t have all the best features yet. They are the cool kids on the block and want the bragging rights for having the newest tech before anyone else. Early Adopters have a pain point they need solved. They are willing to pay a premium to solve that paint point. They may know who you are and they may buy into your story or grand vision as well as your early product. They will buy your product to solve their problem, even though it is not ready for mass consumption yet. The Early Majority don’t know who you are, and don’t care about your story. They expect a mass manufactured product that has the 4Ps of Marketing figured out to the point where they get good value at a reasonable price. They take some risk in adopting your new product. They are the mass market, and when they adopt, your sales follow the hockey stick growth almost every company dreams of. The Late Majority really don’t care much for taking on new product, but they will eventually buy it since everyone else has. As the market commoditizes the price, the Laggards will finally buy it. The Chasm describes the incredibly difficult leap in changing your offering that will make it appeal to the mass market.
The Initiative Adoption Curve is quite similar. Below is an image, where I have mapped the path an initiative will take when you are trying to drive that change through an organization:
In the early days, you have a problem you see, and you start to form a solution. You have some colleagues, usually those directly on your team or partners who you know will agree with you that this problem exists. They are also more than likely those who you trust to give you solutions or honest feedback on your proposal. You build a proposal and show it to them, have a conversation, fix issues, make tweaks, review it again, and so forth until you have done enough due diligence to converse with confidence and pitch a thoughtful solution. You expand your audience a bit here and there as you discover another stakeholder will either want your solution or block it. You keep in mind that any change will have associated stakeholders who will be affected. That may be more work for them, or it may help them in some way, you had not considered until speaking with them. Once you do this a few times, ideally you will have surfaced at least the thought leaders with stakes in your proposal and eventually have no one else to consider. You will also ideally have built consensus or at least surfaced the rejections that you will need to address should your initiative get leadership support. You will ideally be able to say, “Stakeholders X, Y, and Z want this change to happen.”
At that point, you are ready to seek out leadership support, specifically as high in the organization as you need to go to ensure you have senior support. Some organizations call this sponsorship. More importantly, you just need to ensure you have risen high enough in the company with your proposition, that you know it won’t get stopped cold by a Very Important Top Officer (VITO). You pitch Senior Leadership, which in many ways is really just another stakeholder. They have one major difference that sets them apart from your other peers and stakeholders in phase one. Senior Leadership can see more impact across the organization than you do and generally have much more experience running organizations, so they can simply see more risk than you can. This is why it is so critical to share your initiatives with top leaders in your organizations, only after you have really put thought into them and well before you start actually attempting to push the change. If they see problems, you will want to fix those before trying to move ahead. If they don’t see the point, you will need to ensure you really have defined the problem well. If they do understand the problem, if they can see you have captured the risks of impact and have a plan to address those, AND if they see that there is real value in the change you are trying to bring about, then they will approve and support your initiative. I will also say that if you access to speak with senior leadership early and can have the right conversations up front where you test waters on an idea, that’s ok too. If you can ask, “I have an idea I am vetting on X, but I’m not yet ready to pitch you on it. Any major concerns I should think of right up front?” that’s a powerful way to ensure you are not wasting company time going down a path they would dislike anyway. If you don’t have that direct access, you will have to determine for yourself, whether you are willing to ask the early question like that. The risk you take is having to explain the concept before you have fully formed it. But once you have vetted your change idea with your leader(s), you should be quite excited, because you have reached a major accomplishment in your change effort: you have gotten Leadership Alignment. However, your job has really only just started.
The next step is to plan and implement the Rollout. How you carefully roll out this initiative into the organization can make or break the effort. It can be disastrous, smooth, or fizzle out. When books like Developing The Leader Within You and Scaling Up Excellence say that just making a fancy PowerPoint or a bunch of fanfare in an announcement is not enough to make change, this is what they mean. Scaling Up Excellence suggests you need a template for successful replication and they call the rollout a “ground war”. So you need some early folks who are going to try out your model for this change; they are your early guinea pigs who understand you may not have it perfect yet, but they want to help (in exchange for getting good value). Those who are interested early can go a long way in your rollout plan. Once you have a few instances of success, you’ll have the model for execution well documented, you continue to expand exposure of your concept to more of the organization, and ideally this begins to happen organically with your efforts with other change agents who agree with what you are doing.
Eventually, you will have real momentum in this organizational change effort to the point, that you are seeing patterns of reuse – weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc… Where groups not directly working with you are using the techniques/instructions from your change, and they may ideally be suggesting changes to make it even better. That’s buy-in. Now that you are seeing the reuse patterns, it is time to cross the second chasm, one I have introduced for this concept. This second chasm is a systems change. If you are doing all this change yourself, the change lives and dies with your existence in the program. Your goal is to ensure it is repeating without your direct intervention, that people are trained on how to propagate it without you, and that new hires are getting trained on that change (if relevant). Having it built into new-hire training means the company is programming the chance in automatically, and you no longer have to drive that effort.
At this point, other parts of your organization may see what you are doing and want to adopt it. Do what you can to help them adopt your tech; train them too. Help them to solve their adoption problems in their organizations or in their locations, if they are in a different geography. In the end, assuring that more than just your launch organization is following the change may sound overwhelming or be to large to do on your own. Scaling Up Excellence gives good recommendations on how to drive your change initiative outside of your own department or launch organization.
Finally, once you are past that, the system has taken over. You’ll know you have reached that final point of success when the company keeps using the program or change you made whether you stay or have left the company altogether.
In order to drive change, you have to be patient and be in the right mindset. Below is an image of the mindsets for each stage:
The Idea stage is pretty simple. You form, vet, and anneal the problem and solution with stakeholders. You are also in a bit of a salesmanship role here. I don’t mean the used car salesman stereotype that comes to mind whenever people cynically think of being sold something. I mean that all good progress comes with respect, problem solving, facilitation, empathy, and insights that are common elements to any helpful sales process.
The Sell stage is when you are actually pitching your idea to those who can significantly help and support your grand vision or stop it right there in its tracks. They also understand the pain point you have and are willing to support your effort in solving that problem. Your are still using the diplomacy and salesmanship discussed in phase 1.
The First Chasm is finding and really hand-holding or even micromanaging your first trial users. Converting your theory into reality means being willing to be wrong and answer questions that you haven’t prepared for. Once you get a few of these early pilots down, the pattern can then be replicated.
The Grind is where you are really working to get traction and build this approach into your organization. You may need to perform internal marketing to raise awareness. You can quite easily drop the ball here and fail to make the leap, due to being too busy at work or realizing the work to get this initiative to the finish line is absolutely too large for you and the team you have built to drive it. By the way, THIS is the key stage you need to consider when you are planning to drive change in a company. You must ask yourself if you really do have the time, energy, and passion to bring your idea to the larger company, just like you would in bringing your product to the mass market. If you can’t see how you’ll push the initiative through this “long haul”, you need a better solution or someone else who IS ready to take it on at the helm. There are a variety of reasons why you might stop; to use another metaphor, this is where the “rubber meets your road”.
The Second Chasm is getting your changes into repeating cycles that are not managed directly by you. They are managed by other change agents, other leaders, etc. As mentioned above, you are also helping HR and other leaders get these change behaviors built into new hire training.
Support is where you are helping other organizations replicate your launch organization’s success. You teach, give collateral, answer questions, travel, etc. You help them help themselves. You must learn ways to replicate yourself and the success of your rollout early adopters, so that later adopters can do so with preparation and knowledge of the friction points they will face.
Once late adopting groups in your company are doing this in a repeating basis, and frankly they don’t even know that you had something to do with it, you have accomplished your task. Just ask yourself what existing paradigms do you follow at work and who created them. There are probably plenty, regardless of whether you know who spearheaded the effort. If so, those systems, values, and behaviors are now a part of the company. They are no longer a change; they are a reality. They will stay regardless of whether their creator is still at the company.
Finally, below is a tool you can use to track your own progress with a change initiative across the adoption life cycle:
Simply take the generic Initiative Adoption Curve (at the top of this article) and drop in a simple label with an arrow to track where you think your initiative is on the curve. You can also add next steps, milestone achievements, etc. You can put this in front of your leader, peers, or teammates who are helping you drive the adoption, to facilitate conversations and checkpoints on progress. Most of all, tracking your progress will help ensure you remember your work is done, only when you reach the last stage. Good luck in driving your changes for the better! You are also welcome to contact me on LinkedIn, if you prefer a copy of it in Visio.