The Plateau of Change

Regardless of your position, tenure, or role in an organization, one of the best ways to stretch yourself into new growth opportunities and demonstrate your value is to tackle a known issue (or bring to light a less known issue) in a new and innovative way. This could be an improvement to an existing business or operational process, or it could be the introduction of a new technique or tool. Regardless, no matter what solution you come up with, trying to drive change within an organization always starts with getting people to do something different than they’re used to doing.

But beware. Inertia is a powerful force to overcome.

Fortunately, the playbook for this first step is pretty well-trodden and simple: start small. Break down your larger objective into a smaller pilot that you can run with a group willing to pilot it with you. And it’s likely you’ve already identified them: you probably already have a close working relationship with them, have worked with them before, or they are already bought into your idea and are already invested in its success. For all of these reasons, it probably won’t be hard to convince them to get onboard. And, if you’re lucky, there might even be a few more groups lining up to help pilot it as soon as the initial group is done.

So, fast forward, you run your pilot, and congratulations! It’s a success! Now what?

Ideally, you’d share your results, and everyone around the organization would see it and be lining up to follow along, right? However, remember you chose your first group(s) because they were already bought into your idea. They didn’t need that much convincing. And just because you have a successful outcome from your pilot now doesn’t mean people are ready to adopt a new way of doing things just because you’ve demonstrated that it’s objectively better.

This is where many teams get stuck. The Plateau of Change.

The initial pilot was a success. The teams who were excited about it initially jumped on it immediately and helped to prove it out. Then perhaps there were even another set of groups who wanted to adopt it and who gave you even more validation and data to help make the solution even better. But now the rollout has stalled.

One solution could be to try to drive adoption from the top down. This is usually easiest in one of 3 situations:

1. You’re in an authoritative position in the organization where you can drive the prioritization of the rollout yourself

2. The clear financial and/or business benefit of adoption by all teams makes it easy to find an executive sponsor to make the case to prioritize it

3. This initiative neatly fits inside or complements another already-prioritized initiative, so this could simply become part of that work

However, most of the time, things don’t end up working out that easily. Especially when it means convincing people to do something new that may feel like it conflicts with their current goals or the way they are getting things done now. 

As an aside, this is an important point that I want to stress about feelings. Many times, these initial reactions or even decisions are not based on data. These very human responses come from the fact that change is uncomfortable. Therefore, any change management strategy should start from a place of empathy for those whom the change affects, which could and should probably be a deeper exploration in a post by itself.

So, knowing that, how do you break through that next plateau of adoption?

First, recognize that, just as you started with a pilot, you’re not going to roll out your solution to the rest of the organization all at once. So start with a few more groups to target for the next phase of the rollout. Start by thinking about your organization as a whole and also at individual teams that you need to influence through the lens of these four main questions:

• Who sets the priorities?

• What motivates them?

• What worries or concerns them?

• Who do they trust when making decisions?

Next, consider the fact that adoption of this new solution was almost certainly a cross-functional effort made by your pilot team. It probably wasn’t done by an individual; it needed coordination and group buy-in to get it done and see it through. And that’s what will be needed for every subsequent rollout. But remember: the pilot was the easy one. To help you here, you should think about your pilot team as part of your extended team. Solicit their help in this next phase. They likely speak the language of their functional counterparts on the other teams (their motivations, concerns, etc) and can be your advocates and ambassadors.

Leverage that team and every additional team who adopts the solution to help get organizational buy-in on your behalf. This will increase the odds that your solution will be adopted and result in:

• Increased credibility by hearing it from someone in similar role(s) to theirs

• Reassurance that the adoption of the solution was beneficial (or at least not detrimental to their goals/objectives)

• Internal support knowing that others have gone through the change

Once you break through that plateau, it becomes a snowball effect. More and more teams will begin to adopt your solution, and you eventually gain a critical mass of internal support to help others adopt it. Sure, there will be some stragglers who haven’t found the time or, for whatever reason, willingness — and you will simply have to find ways to bring them along. But if you’ve covered the majority of the organization and navigated the complexity of change management on that scale to solve a business problem, you have likely established a new level of organizational credibility and trust, deepened your understanding of how the company works, and maybe even started a short list of new opportunities you might want to tackle next.