Overcoming Resistance to Change

Mining your business podcast is back, yet again, with another episode about change management. Now, I'm not sure if you caught it, but I didn't mention that the Mining Business Podcast is a show all about process mining data science and advanced business analytics. Why? Because Jakob told me to change it up. You know, I was not a fan of this at first, because I felt some sort of resistance to it. Hey, Jakob, want to tell the listeners why? Yeah, let's get into it. Change is hard. Well, last episode, we actually talked about the change management and what is revolved around and how process mining can actually help with and eventually even accelerate a change within an organization. However, as you probably know from your own experience and from your own company, as I said at the beginning, change is hard. And there is a lot of reasons why people are avoiding, maybe even dodging the change because it creates an environment where things are different, things are changing, and sometimes things can even change for worse. And while, you know, us as consultants, or even you as a management who is in charge of the change, can't always feel people comfortable with the change. You can for sure minimize the discomfort that is resulting from such a change. And hence in this episode, what we will do is actually, first of all, give you a list of top 10 reasons why people are avoiding the change in the first place. You know, people in this episode will be pretty much switchable or replaceable with the word organization because if we are talking about people, it can go from one person but also to a whole department or even a company. And then we will try to kind of draw a blueprint and talk about various different ways on how you can eventually overcome such a resistance to change. Some of the examples will be from our own experience as a company, as a people, as you can imagine if you are a growing company. You are introducing a lot of change into your organization as well. And trust me when I say that being a process-minded expert doesn't mean that all the processes that we have are totally on point, Patrick is already laughing because he knows exactly what we are going to talk about. And I guess what we are trying to say is that I just want to highlight and put MMPs on it again, that change really is hard and it's probably even harder when you are trying to do it with dozens or even hundreds of people. Yeah, for sure. And I just wanted to quickly mention that I don't want to have this episode be interpreted as us like preaching like, "Hey, embrace the change, it's always good and all these things." Because I know from our experience that even though we talk about change, we identify problems and processes and potential solutions to these things and how that can benefit the company and all these positive things, when I hear that our company is introducing a new tool, I'm groaning myself and I get it, I think we're all in the same boat here, so I think it's a little bit of self-hush, we're also talking about this for ourselves because we've gone through the process, we know what it's like and change is hard indeed. Yeah, and the example, let's actually start with the example so that people can actually trust us when we say change really is hard and we've been there, we are not always on the other side talking people into changing themselves and their behavior but we sometimes struggle ourselves. And, you know, year 2022 was, I would say, very interesting for process and in many levels, not only the growth, but at some point when you are a growing organization and you grow from 10, 5, 10 people into 40, 50, 60, you've got to introduce some new tools to organize the way you're working because it's no longer the case that everybody sits in the same office and everybody can just go talk to your colleague about the problem, right? You actually have to create a proper management system not only to organize your work but also organize your knowledge, have a proper knowledge sharing sessions and so on and so forth. And one of the first things we've introduced earlier this year was actually a new ERP system. We didn't go for SAP, I think we are a little smaller for SAP at this point, but we went for another ERP system and this was a massive change in our organization because up until this point we were kind of utilizing the power of different tools specifically and most important with the teams which gives you a lot of tracking options and organizing the way you work with all the Kanban works but also the excel because half of the well, actually 95% of world runs of excel still. And we did so many mistakes when we went for it and we will actually list them today but I want to just say how it went from the very beginning, so imagine that you are just using your Excel tool for tracking whatever you need to track and suddenly your management comes and okay guys, so from next week onward we are using this new ERP tool that is not installed yet, it's not configured yet but it will be on from next week onward. So please start tracking that. And then you are just sitting there and you're like, what? Yeah, very, very abrupt I should say and also it was not just a there was fairly limited grace period given as in next week we start and by the end of that week we are just going to be using it full time. Everyone around is just questioning, okay how do I even spell this tool, never been heard of it. Yeah. The questions came in very hot and quick. Let's say. Yeah. Yeah. And I was quite a good example of how not to roll out a new tool, how not to do a change within an organization and let's not waste anymore time and we will actually dive right into our list of top 10 reasons why people and organizations are avoiding the change in the first. I love the first one. I love the first one because you see it everywhere. It's not enough motivation, right? Why are we even doing this change, right? What is it good for? What does it benefit me? What does it do for the company? I don't get it. If I don't understand the reason why we're doing this, why do I even bother to change, right? It's seeing the reason behind that is causing the problem here because if you don't empathize with the really the problem that this is trying to solve and why you need it and it might not be even applicable for you, right? You just need to change and you don't know why, but it's benefiting not even you but just somebody else. So it's hard to gain that level of empathy and therefore the motivation to even go along with the change, right? And so if it doesn't benefit you, if there's nothing in it for you, why even bother? Yeah. It actually happens very often, especially with process mining implementations because the business users and the consumers of our report are usually fed up with reporting as it is already. Imagine that your company is using not one or two tools, but maybe four or five different tools for different reports, for different capabilities. And then we come there with this big fanfare saying we have the best tool in the world for you which will optimize your processes and save your $10 million a year. And they're like, yeah, but why, what do I get out of it? It's probably even more work, which actually leads me to a second point that we have here, which actually is just more responsibilities for the person who is eventually at the end of the chain when it comes to the change. So even introducing the new tool comes very often with more work and more responsibilities. And getting back to our example with the ERP system, not only that we had to start using something where we just didn't really see the motivation because well, you know, Excel is fine, right? Works perfectly fine. Is it to just some couple of fields and just get the output that you need? However, now with this new tool, it was not only that you have to start using it, but it's actually on top of what you were already doing because suddenly you have to manage so many different things. In process mining, it's exactly the same because it's usually means that you have to learn something new. You have to change the way that you were used to do things and start having a different mindset. Yeah. I mean, you bring up such a good point. It's the that needing to learn the new system on top of already still doing the old one and figuring out how to transition and getting used to the new way of working. It might not just be even be a new tool, but it might be that the thing that you're using might be replaced by something completely different and also maybe the process by which things happen could be in a completely new order. It can have the potential to turn your entire way of thinking about how you work on its head and just not even the task of learning the new way of working, but also just adjusting mentally and figuring out your new place in this new process is a big deal, especially if there hasn't been a significant change in your department organization or something in quite a while, you know, being that set in the way that you do things and then breaking out of that can become a big challenge for a lot of people and it's true. It will require work and I think there are some things on this list later, spoilers. That will help a little bit in this regard. Yeah, you guys who I'm sure you guys know how the changes are usually working. You get a new task, you know, your manager just says, you know, carve out two or three hours a week from your schedule and work on this, but you're like, I'm already working for six hours a week. When I'm supposed to do that, right? Yeah. Yeah. With what time, sir? Please tell me. Yeah, please tell me. And it can even get as bad as that it could raise your own concerns about your own competence because let's be completely honest here. Some of the tools are difficult. Some of the tools are not straightforward to use. And I mean, I don't know about you, Patrick, but it really took me a while to understand what process mine is actually doing. And I'm not saying it's hours or days, but more like weeks or almost months to completely grasp the logic behind it and what we are trying to do there. And if you march into an organization and tell people that they need to start using something new while they maybe even lack a training and a knowledge to do so, it can be very challenging for them to a degree that they start being or question their own competence for doing their job in the first place. And Jacob, I'm going to be honest with you. I still don't know how your piece system works. I don't tell anyone. Oh, I'll keep it for myself, Patrick. No, but you speak up. That's why I have to always redo your artwork. But you bring up such a good point. It's that same thing, like having that organization like being twisted, like turn on its head and you just don't know where you fit in anymore. And that can seriously harm what you think about your own competence, like you said. And that can be very detrimental. And you know, lack of confidence in yourself and the way you do things, you know, learning new things is hard. You're going to probably suck at it at the beginning. That's normal, you know, I would say some people are, I hate those people, but are just naturally gifted whatever they do, right? They just kind of figure it out first try and it's like, yeah, yeah, it's actually really simple. You just do this and then you keep thinking, I hate you. I hate you so much. I don't know how this works and, you know, so it's, but I think that's completely normal. Like whenever you learn something new, that skill gap is always going to be there. And it just takes some adjustment time to get a hold of it. Yeah. A similar point of view is actually point four that we have here, which is a loss of control. And I have a beautiful sentence here actually. Our sense of self determination is often the first things to go when faced with a potential change coming from someone else. And it's really clear, imagine that you are managing your own tool and you've been in it for years. And you know every single detail about how to use that. And suddenly your management, your organization decides change or introduce something new. And you just feel completely without any control while before you knew exactly what to do and how to do it. Suddenly, you're not only struggling with learning something new, but you also have someone who is potentially more skilled or even better in this new job telling you what you should do, which is something that not everybody can handle so easily, because people are proud. People are egoistic and sometimes even egocentric. And it's just natural that sometimes this is a resistance that you might face. Yeah, I'm for sure. And I think that's where that level of control that you like to have about, hey, I get to determine how I use the tool and blah, blah, blah. And then immediately goes out the window and I mean, we can move on to 0.5, which I think is the, which I think is kind of underlying and underpinning most of these points is the excess uncertainty, right, better the devil you know than the devil you don't know. I like these quotes that you wrote in here, by the way, this is a very good, exactly. So whenever this has changed, whenever something new, a new person gets hired or a, hey, something new gets introduced, there's always uncertainty because, hey, it's going to be new. It hasn't been done yet. It's not in the past. We can say things for certain about things that are in the past, but in the future, it's kind of looking into a crystal ball, right? So there are risks, right? There could be that this change is detrimental, right? That can happen. It could be that things are going to be worse for you after this change. So with that uncertainty comes, you know, fear comes, you know, and sense of doubt in management in whatever the whole company, you can, you know, it can unsettle you. It's can be rather frightening sometimes. Yeah. And actually recently, I don't know if I read or listen to an interesting book where there was an interesting point on introducing new technologies specifically, when the author in this book was arguing that it's not always about this incremental change because if a people or if a person is resisting this change, if you tell him that you can do your task 5% fast or 5% better, they're not going to jump on that because 5% better, it's like, yeah, but I already have five years of experience, I can just mitigate this 5% by knowing what I'm doing. A typical example would be some kind of a macro or in or reporting in Excel using some macros and everything and while you introduce maybe a visualization to that, well, it's nice, but it just doesn't clearly cut it to the chase. And if you want to introduce like a significant improvement that the tool itself, the change itself should give you more than these 5%, it should represent something way faster, way better, way more convenient that brings the results that are not, you know, in 5%, 7% better, but like significantly better. A typical example of this was a search engines, like there was, before Google, there were other search engines like Yahoo and Bing, which were better, and then Google comes and it doesn't improve it by like 10%, but it improves it so drastically that it just doesn't make any more sense to use the old tools, right? Yeah, and that's a good point, actually, however, I do think that there is a bit of a timeline associated with this, right? Because I mean, if you imagine us with our new ERP system, the old way with our Excel and all the other tools that we had, we could figure things out fairly quickly. And I think once the new ERP was introduced, it took us a while to get back up to that level of speed and efficiency, right? So there's a bit of a curve, if you can imagine like the efficiency, kind of as soon as the new tool just drops because everyone's learning, no one really knows, people are going to make mistakes because it's new, haven't been trained well or anything, right? And then that hopefully kind of comes back to that original level. And as you said, exceeds that level by hopefully more than 5% because otherwise, you just said like a loss of productivity for like a couple of weeks or something and then you have nothing to show for it. Yeah, yeah. And that actually takes us to this point number six, which is everything seems different and it's exactly what you're saying. I mean, people are creatures of a habit, of routines. And if you have a routine, even if it's a bad routine, you will probably become pretty efficient at it and pretty good at it. And while introducing a change, this will pretty much change. It hasn't changed yet. Yeah, yeah. I think we might have mentioned it. So routines become automatic and it creates people efficient and confident that what they're doing and if you're introducing something new, well, you've got to give people time to accustom themselves. But let's not jump into solution, we'll just yet let's jump actually to number number seven and this is price. Yeah. Yeah. As you can hear from my previous example, the introduction of our ERP system was very much a surprise to us, right? Yeah. It was, came from one week to the next and the adjustment period of, okay, in order for this to work next week, I must know this, I must know that. I know how to do this. Where does this go? How does this tie in? What is it? Everything going to look like. Learning all of that in five days is a big ask in my opinion. So that's, I think, a surprising change. You know, the bigger the heads up, the better. I mean, there's just a limit to that, of course, but the surprise element is one of those things that can negatively affect even how positive a change it is can detrimentally affect the change itself. Right now. 100%, so, you know, changes and the bigger the change, the more in advance it should be communicated in the first place, because the more people it will actually take into account or revolve around, which actually takes me to a next point in my list, which is a ripple effect, which is something that sometimes organizations and managers are not completely aware of, because every change you introduce will have a direct impact on the people that they use the new tool or use the new way of working, but it has just such a big impact on everyone else as well. Imagine the ERP system, in our case, for instance, you know, first of all, we have to learn how to use it. Also, the people that are reporting to us as managers also need to learn how to use the tool. But, you know, since it's a reporting tool, it's since it's an ERP tool and we are reporting hours to a customer and everything, it also has an impact on customers. It can need to errors. It can need to some things that if not properly handled can create some unnecessary, complete and necessary attention, because if you knew how the tools worked before, you were fine, you knew what to expect, but suddenly you are confronted with something completely new, you need to create time for that, you are very likely to do a mistake, and it can have a negative impact on many people in, you know, down the chain who are dependent on this change of yours. Yeah. You're so right. And it's very much one of those things that we can point to that, you know, it is some, what have changed for us to change this behavior into this new tool and this adapt to this new change, but also it has so many effects further down the road, some direct, some indirect, and it's kind of fascinating to see how far small changes can even traverse the organization and have somewhat even, because if you imagine like a wave, like the biggest, you know, the height of the wave is closest to, you know, where the ripple originates, but sometimes that doesn't have to be true, right? Even the smallest change, at the point of change, can have massive waves further down the line, right? So that's, it needs to be carefully considered when even doing the change in the first place is that what ripple effects could occur, and I think a lot of them cannot be anticipated even at the start. Yeah. One of the ripple effects that is probably anticipated, because it usually impacts the people in the first line is a loss of face, which is also item 9 on our list. What I'm trying to, what I mean with this point is that people associated with the latest version, with the latest tool that you've been using, the latest process that you had in place, and if it's the process that didn't work, if it's the tool that wasn't popular or you spent a lot of money on it, a lot of development time, might get pretty defensive about the new change, because they invested heavily on it, they put themselves into it, they really put their chops on the line, and clearly it didn't work. And now they are the first one who are probably being blamed by their co-workers, by their management, even though if you create this environment of fail-safe kind of an organization that can be prevented, however it will still create some tension, and these things should be handled with care, because the last thing you want is to lose your best people who might have just worked on a bad project, just was doomed to fail from the very beginning. Yeah. A track record of successful changes leads to adopting the newer changes more easily, because if you, I mean, everyone remembers that last time somebody rolled out a change, and it just went horribly, you remember that week where we had to do so much work just because somebody didn't consider this or that the change was bad and we rolled back, yeah, everybody remembers that. So having a good track record of a, we know how this works, previous version was rolled out fine, saved some time, remember that, right, now we're just going to do it again, right, but if you don't have that track record, it just becomes a little bit harder to convince people to why this is worth it, because if it doesn't work out, changes fail, you know, might be more reluctant to go along with it. Yeah, and unfortunately this leads us to a last point on our list, which is that sometimes the threat is and really can be real, you know, if you introduce changes, people might indeed lose jobs, people might be fired, someone might be blamed for previous inefficiencies. While we are trying to always say that it creates opportunities, it may also disease the old jobs, the old assignment that you had, because if you have a tool that takes or just can do so many things at once, while previously you probably had five tools to do these things, do you even need the tools now, do you need the people who are managing them, do you need the people who are owning them? That's always a question for management and I think being aware of this and it's coming back to this ripple effect, like what kind of an impact it can create for organization can prepare you better for these changes to go in action. Yeah, I mean, I can't really think of anything worse than, I mean, if you're hired as a systems expert for something, you've been in the organization for 20 years and know it and all of a sudden management says, yeah, by the way, we're getting rid of this tool now and then that's why you were hired, that's the reason you're there. What happens to you, right? That's a real threat, right? What are you going to do? So that, you know, obviously, I think we both have been there where things like that have happened and I don't think, I mean, I might be misremembering, but I don't think anyone has lost their job because of something like that yet that I have witnessed. Or maybe I misremember, I don't know, but it really, really happened a lot of times. Very selective memory Patrick. My point is that, you know, usually, you know, the knowledge that somebody has gained in even in the tool that's being just gotten rid of, you know, they know how the organization works and the things that surround them and everything and that knowledge is always useful, right? So it's, I don't think companies are just looking to, you know, nobody wants the lay of people with left and right, right? So, but, you know, as you said, it can happen and that threat, you know, is ingrained in people because rightly so, it could happen. Yeah, and not necessarily the first input that you create is positive. While introducing some new change, it might start with people screaming and yelling that they're losing their job. And we don't have to go that far or, you know, that's specific to imagine this scenario. Just look at what has been happening over the years, you know, you create internet, people lose jobs, people are. If you go very back into the history, you know, first industrial revolution where people just go from working all day long, going to feel to actually into factories and now it's going to be happening again with the new technologies, AI, you know, the vehicles that drive themselves and everything, it's just amazing and it will definitely create tension. But ultimately, I think we all can agree and especially people who are listening to a technical podcast about new technology are probably resonating with this idea that ultimately and hopefully it will just create a better world for all of us. Yeah, I mean, I hope so. I did listen to a podcast about this innovation, this, you know, because back in the day, like 90% of people were working in the fields and then we found a way to automate the manual labor, right? But with this new age of AI, we're finding ways to automate thinking itself. So if the human cannot provide manual labor or like the thinking labor, like the mental labor, then what can they provide? Emotional labor? I have no idea. But we're going to have to find our place if we're even thinking as outsourced to a machine then what are we good for? Yeah. So better get used to the change. Exactly. We're warning you right now. It's just something we're used to. Yeah. Let's go to the solution mode, Patrick? Absolutely. I mean, we have talked about why people are resistant to changing in the first place and a lot of these are warranted. We have felt them ourselves, but there are things that you can do if you're the person or the organization introducing the change that will soften a lot of these symptoms, right? So number one, I think is one of the most important is clarifying the goal, the overarching like goal that you're trying to achieve with this change, right? That playly goes into the motivation behind why this is done in the first place, outlining the goal. What we're trying to achieve and why, right? Giving more context, because as I said before, people don't know why these things happen in the first place, why it doesn't even affect me, right? This isn't even my problem, but I need to change because of something else. If you outline the reason why you stick people in the room together and say, well, you need to change because then I can do my job better. It gives a lot more empathy as to why you need to do this in the first place, right? So laying this out there and identifying what the benefits of this are is incredibly important. Yeah, I will actually mention here another thought I read in another book where they were urging managers and people in charge to scream about everything that's going on on going basis because it's not enough if you communicate something once or twice. You know, unless everybody is already fed up with your message, well, you're doing things wrong because only at the point where everybody already is fed up and people are actually talking about and knowing about the change, that's where you clearly communicated the idea that the thing that is supposed to change and why are you potentially even doing that? Because if you just send one memo on email, oh, by the way, from next week on, we are using a new ERP system, not that this happened in other case, but you probably create more questions than answers and everybody just gets scared. So if you are about to introduce some new way of working, well, people should know about it. And you should be very clear on the goals, keep mentioning them, bringing them up in every opportunity you get because there's always a chance that somebody's not listening. But if you tell it five times to a person, well, maybe on the fifth time, the person actually starts understanding. Yeah, this is actually so good that you mentioned that because I've witnessed this live while working at Airbus, there was a new way of working introduced and my God, you saw it everywhere. It was plastered on your news feeds on the brochures that you got. It was plastered on the bus stops internally. It was plastered on the cafeteria. It was everywhere. You could not avoid it. Everyone was talking about it because they just invested so much resources into getting that message out there. It was huge. I mean, if this is what it takes, then let's do it because if you're a large organization, there's always a decent chance that somebody's not listening or is busy or just has another meeting or just does something else, it's how we are programmed. So if you're not screaming, if you're doing it wrong, yeah, it also depends very much on scale and who this thing is really affecting because I mean, what I was just mentioning really affected everybody. But if you're talking about something that only affects your department, you don't need to go print flyers in a cafeteria for 10,000 people, they don't even know who you are. So it can depend on the scale and what you're trying to achieve, right? Clearly internal marketing doesn't tell you anything but rig. No. All right, let's move to the next point and that is design a clearly defined and organized plan. So it's not only clarification and communication, but it's also about doing the actual work. If you are responsible for the change, you have to sit down on your butt and actually write down a plan, a plan. How does it going to affect you? What is necessary? What are the resources? What is the schedule? What are the milestones you want to reach? Everything is important because you will probably the beginning will even fight for, you know, with other stakeholders with their own ideas for implementing a change in the first place. And when you finally get the keys from your, you know, from the car, which is your they're presented by organization, well, then you pretty much need to know what you want to do, how you want to do it and what is your approach towards change. This is a good point, but I think in the previous episode, we also outlined that regardless of how good your plan is, things can go wrong, right? Exactly. This is something that you also always need to take into account, like regardless if you've have everything detailed to like the last minute of and every single presentation and milestones and everything that you try to achieve, you know, allowing yourself for that flexibility and allowing yourself to say, okay, this is what we're trying to get to. We'll come back after this quality gate and we'll just reassess that everything's going to plan and then we'll can re-plan and all these things. So it's a very good point to plan in the first place and not just loosely say, okay, newer ERP, Sims, all of them and we got it, no, no, no, like we need a detailed step-by-step guide on how you plan to achieve this because if it doesn't even remotely sound feasible, then, you know, again, how do you get people to go along with it? Yeah. Onto what you said, it's, you know, it's pretty clear, you have a point A and point B where you want to get, but you have to assume that the road you will take will be bumpy and it might take you off the road for significant amounts of time even where something's just going wrong. But ultimately, you still want to get to the point B which you aligned or which you created for yourself, but it just might take a little longer than you anticipated. And coming back to the point B, you know, the end goal is not just to roll out the change. I would even argue that rolling out the change is significantly easier than everything that happens after. Take an implementation of a new tool, for instance. I mean, that's also the whole reason why we are doing these episodes about change management. You know, the longer that there is some new technology or the tool on the market, the easier it gets to implement because there are companies such as ourselves who have been doing it over and over again. And we can do a pretty decent job to get you going. We do a fantastic job. Yeah. Exactly. However, you know, you have to think about what happens after we do our fantastic job and create this tool for you because then it just creates so many other questions that need to be answered for the sole reason that suddenly it's you who have the change and what do you do with it? What is your plan? And now, did you plan for the resources you will be needed? Did you plan for the company plan that you will utilize the moment that you have everything in place? These targets are as important as knowing what is it that you want to achieve. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you need an analogy, it's like we can build a car, but at some point someone's going to need to drive it. Yeah. And the driving part, I think, is the biggest part of a car's life cycle, right? Is where you drive it, how you drive it, how you get its service, everything that comes along with it is way after the production of it. The production of it is just a small thing. And, you know, companies have gotten pretty good at it. Like you said, you know, new technology has been around longer. They know how to do it and everything's fine. But it's the part that comes after that has the legs and determines if this has been a successful failure. Yeah. It has to do a lot with our next point, which is a creation of a solid management structure. They will have to be the driver of the car, of the change. So knowing who it is and knowing the responsibility of the person and who does the person answer to who or what is the person delivering is vital for any change to take place, especially after the change actually takes place. And, you know, you are now challenged with what the change actually brings to your company. And we already mentioned in our previous pain points that we had this ripple effect that has an impact of your organization. And with having a solid management structures where people are actually talking to one another and are aware of the changes and are no all about the overarching issues, well, they can probably prefer them in a way better and organized fashion. Yeah. I mean, it's such a good point because there's nothing worse than having a change and then you ask yourself, okay, well, something's going wrong. Who do I go to? You know, who's my go-to guy, you know, or who's the person that I complained about that this thing doesn't work? Or, you know, generally, who do you address in this change process, right? You have concerns. You have a potential impact that could, you know, break once this change rolls out. You know, who is the person that you speak to? So having that clearly defined is huge. Yeah. On to the next point. I love it. All right. Go on. All right. Well, communicate, listen to objections and find ways to address them. I mean, we are human beings, communication is the key. And not only in between human relations, but also in organization. You have to talk, you know, it comes back to our first point where we were saying that you have to yell and scream about the change. But you should also also listen, not only talk, because if a 95% of companies telling you that what you're doing is completely rubbish, then, well, maybe you should at least take into account their opinions and eventually allow some of these people who are actually criticizing you to allow them into planning and giving them parts of the ownership of the changes you're trying to implement, because who knows, maybe, maybe they're right. Maybe you are just a new person to a company who is trying to make its own footprint and make its own impact. But maybe you should rather listen to people who have been there for 20 years and actually know how things go. Yeah. This is such a psychological thing as well. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't care about people, some interventions. You absolutely should, they bring up valid points, like very, very much of the time. But also I think a lot of the satisfaction with new change just comes from, you know, people feel it like their concerns are heard, you know, that they are being listened to, that this is being considered at the very least, and rather than just, you know, screaming as a wall and you can't do anything, right? So I think a lot of this is psychological and needs to be taken into account. You need to give people a platform to voice their opinions and their concerns, because you know, I guess what, people are fairly smart and they probably will give you a concern or two that gives you something to think about. So, you know, listening is half a picture. Yeah. And together, hand in hand with this also comes this reassurance that you provide to eventually the people who are impacted by the change and that you give them time to adopt, that you give them enough of training, enough of educations. You create a system of mentors and generally a support system that helps them on the way to change. This is again something that cannot be overstated because having a proper time to acclimate is vital for any major change where you actually need to educate the people and create maybe even a new knowledge or that you didn't have in organization before. Yeah. And this, I think, takes us to the next point of creating an environment that does not punish a mistake, right? Because this is very much building that safe environment that illustrates to everybody that's involved in saying, hey, guys, this is new for us, this is new for you. It's going to be difficult and you're going to make mistakes. And that's okay, right? It's okay to not be good at something new and signifying the importance of that and making sure that, hey, you're not going to get punished if you mess up. No one's expecting you guys, everybody to be perfect at the beginning. I think enforcing that way of thinking and being okay with people making mistakes and figuring out a way so they can constructively learn from those mistakes. Like, hey, you mess this up. Let's go through, you need maybe training or here in the manual, you can see how to do this properly or something like that, giving them tools to figure out what from their mistakes they can learn and what they need to change in order to avoid these mistakes in future. There's nothing more than just expecting perfection from the one because it's not going to happen. At the same time, this might be a delicate topic for managers because there's always on one side giving enough time, giving enough resources for someone to adopt and to learn. And on the other hand, you have the people who have been provided with enough of resources if enough of time and still didn't adopt. And this is then, again, unfortunately, the responsibility for the manager to assess on how to move with the situation and what steps to take to get out of that. Yeah, I don't think we need to get deeper into this one. Yeah, yeah. I mean, three years of making the same mistake, you know, yeah, I think you can, we can all agree that, you know, there's a certain time where things should be learned. I mean, people learn at different rates, right? So some people pick things up easier than others. It's just important to know who these people are and give them the support that they need in order to get to where everybody else is. Yeah. Next point, welcome the opportunity for change. If you create an organization where changes are a natural part of the work, well, then maybe it will be easier to roll out something new than in an organization where things have been running the same way for 20 years. And you know, if you see these, if you blend these seats early, you will probably struggle at the beginning, as everyone always is, but as people get used to that, as people know that you are trying to stay ahead of the pack of your competition that you're trying to be this cutting edge technological company, well, the expectations are pretty high and they probably even want to change themselves. You might be attracting people who crave the change, who want to create something you rather than be cuffed by the bureaucracy and the old ways. And this is ultimately something that you are trying to create. Yeah. I mean, to think of an analogy that just came to my head. I mean, imagine moving a tree that's been growing there for like 50 years. Those roots are going to go pretty deep, actually roots don't actually go deep to kind of depends on the tree, but regardless, it's much more easy to move a tree that's been growing for a year rather than 50 years, right? And if you keep moving it, you know, it's much easier. I'm not sure how this analogy turned into deforestation, but you know, here we are. Sorry about that. Guys, plan trees, please. They didn't deforestation it to do something with our process mining ideas in one of our previous episodes. I think it might have. Yeah. It might have. Quick. How did we come up with that? I don't know. I don't know. All right. Let's let's finish the list. We have last two items on it. So the next one is to be willing to backtrack when the change does not mean these are goals. And it also comes back a little bit to this loss of face. You don't want to be the person who loses his face. You should be open to criticism and you should be open also to failure. Not every project is a success. I hate to admit, but you know, I sometimes also have to swallow my pride and just say, okay, what I've been doing here just doesn't make any sense. Let's start over. Let's count our losses and let's start over because this just doesn't eat anywhere. And if you are creating a change, maybe sometimes you have to start considering also some restrictions constraint that you have either from budget or time perspective and just call it a day at some point and maybe have a big pool of other ideas on how to what would be the new way you're taking on how to mitigate the loss that you might have created through the change. Yeah. It's actually a good point because we talked about swallowing your pride and your ego and accepting change and putting it on the side. But that also goes vice versa, right? The person implementing the change also has to put their ego aside and say this clearly hasn't worked out. You know, roll it back saying, okay, we made a mistake. We know, hopefully, why this was a mistake and hopefully those lessons can go into a successful change further in the future. This of course needs to be kind of juggled a little bit because as you said, loss of face is pretty bad and also keeps people or has people being reluctant towards future changes so that needs to be taken into account. Hey, if we admit that this is a failure, we have these ripple effects as we said that people won't change in the future either. So it's a bit of a toss up, but I think depending on how badly the change goes, you need to close the chapter of whatever that was. Yeah. And finally, last point on our list, which is actually a topic that I would love to discuss further in details in one of our future episodes, which is a creation of community around the change. Sorry, that was the first point that you wrote with peer pressure. Is that really that positive? Well, you know, you can pressure your peers by telling them that, you know, marked up from our other accounting team, it's already using the tool, why are not you using the tool? Oh, yeah, shaming them a little bit, yeah, exactly. That's the nice community we're creating. Yeah, that's a battery that's just wrong ordering, but I always wanted to start with obviously early adopters and champions, and I'm trying to say is that I found it fascinating that different companies are having different approaches towards creating the community around certain tools, around certain way of working, and through empowering the people who are affected by the change and making them think the responsibility, you can actually speed the adoption, speed the or improve the acceptance and eventually have them, you know, create this snowball effect where people are just jumping on your bolt on the new tool by themselves, and you don't really have to create all those work shows, but because the people hear from their peers that something is actually superior to what they are doing, maybe they want to eventually do the same thing. I mean, look at the smartphones, like 20 years ago, people with smartphones were weird and started to be a thing that young people and tech savvy people were using, and today, even my grandma had a smartphone. Well, that's impressive, but yeah, you make a good point, and I think this really highlights the importance of having those people that become champions in early adopters, right? There's some people that are just super enthusiastic about some of these things, and it's important to give them the space to become champions and give them the support they need because they drive the positive change with their peers, right? There's nothing worse than having just a bunch of people that say, "Well, honestly, I'm doing my eight hours. Don't bother me. I don't care." Yeah. Those might not be the best candidates for making a champion or an early adopter, but once you find them, you know, they're dependable, they're reliable, that's a great person to championize. That's not a word. It could be. Let's go. Yeah. So, actually, here, a big shout out, and even a request from all of you, dear listeners, if you know of anyone who actually created a community around the tool, ideally about a route process mining, but can be process management in general in an organization. Just please reach out because we would love to talk such a person, and what are different approaches that they are taking? Those are the tools that they are trying to bring the people together. I mean, I've seen the teams, communities, I've seen like a full day, or a full day workshops where all the teams come together. If you remember the episode with Michael Kloppenberg from the early days, he was also talking about this where they just brought all the people from the process together and created like this huge workshop on the side. These are interesting ways on how you can bring the people together, how you can create the communities, and we would really, really love to talk about it and about what are the positive impacts, but also as usual, negative impacts. And that actually brings us to the end of today's episode where we talked about overcoming the resistance to change and what are some of the ways that people are actually resisting the change in the first place. I hope you enjoy it. I can already say that in our next episode, we finally will have a guest. We've experienced some technical issues, so the reason why we're not bringing the guests is, well, first of all, because we feel that we have something to say as well, right, Patrick? We always have something to say. We always have something to say, but I know that you guys are already eager to hear from more experts and we will be bringing you one in our next episode of Mining Your Business. Until then, please stay with us. If you didn't hear our previous episodes, just go on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or basically whatever, and whenever you're listening to your favorite show and just give it a try and listen to our previous topics, as there is a lot of knowledge and a lot of interesting guests that we have interviewed over, wow, over the years already, almost two years, Patrick. Has it almost been two years? Almost been two years in three months, I think, pretty cool. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. We need to celebrate. Anyway, if you like the show, please leave us a review. It will help us a lot, just rank us, tell about us, to your friends, to your colleagues who might get some value out of our podcast as well. If you have any question, just text us on LinkedIn or on the email [email protected]. Thank you very much for listening, Patrick and everyone, have a nice day, bye-bye. [MUSIC]