Empower Your Leadership with Adoption Science
John Boochever
Executive Director, Clarendon Partners
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Introduction
This is the final article in a three-part series making the argument for a more rigorous, in fact a scientific-based approach, to change in business transformation. Whether motivated by external market conditions and business strategy, regulatory developments and directives, or technology modernization, change is ubiquitous – and the gating factor is employees’ willingness and readiness to adopt it into their working lives. Other sectors, such as healthcare, and facets of business, such as quality control, have made adoption – and the factors that lead up to it – mission-critical, backed up by evidence-based operations and behavioral science. Why not the same for business and technology change?
Proposition 3: The Case for Implementation Science for Business?
Even the most skeptical leaders accept the need for change management (sometimes begrudgingly) to guide their organizations through major transitions, like adopting a new system or operating model. They don’t always love it because it seems squishy and often falls short of delivering the outcomes they were promised. And they’re not wrong. Traditional change management has often relied on anecdotal evidence, best practices, and gut instinct1, which help but do not guarantee success, rather than hard science. The reason implementation science in medicine is so successful is that it offers a systematic, evidence-based method for executing and evaluating change, overcoming resistance, and achieving health breakthroughs.
Senior business leaders recognize they and major stakeholders play a key role in fostering a culture around adoption rather than mandating it top-down, which ultimately means motivating their people to achieve desired outcomes from the use of the new system or process. To get the value out of their change initiatives, they must define clear objectives and OKRs that align to their business goals and targets and then maintain a pulse on them going forward. Evaluation is key. To fully reap the benefits from change, leaders have to commit to ongoing evaluation, ensure their strategies are grounded in evidence, and continuously adjust them to their specific business context. That’s the science. As researcher Jonathan Scaccia writes: “[E]valuation is not just a tool in the…toolkit; it’s the engine that drives the whole process forward.” 2
Once the change has been deployed, leaders should assess whether intended business outcomes are being achieved, and if not – determine the root causes and how to mitigate them. Traditional point-in-time training often falls short when it comes to adoption; employees have limited bandwidth to acquire new skills. They require creative approaches to connect them with the know-how to achieve the value from change. Leaders typically focus on ROI at the outset of a change investment but can lose sight of this during deployment. To ensure realization of benefits, it’s essential to keep the focus on the enablers of business value and track progress toward that goal.
So, having embarked on a major multi-year technology implementation and setting one’s sights on full adoption, what should you do next? Given that 35% of the potential value from change may be lost during implementation (and 20% after on average),3 here is a checklist leaders can ask of their organizations to flip the odds on implementation success:
Are your leaders prepped and equipped to drive the business change?
Have you defined what success looks like for each user cohort?
Are the technology’s functions and features aligned to business practices? (Alternatively, have you re-engineered business practices to take advantage of the new technology?)
Have you designed customized learning/coaching to help users unlock the full power of the technology? Is it sustained (or one-off)?
Do you have the right evidence-gathering and evaluation system system in place?
If the answers to these are ‘yes,’ you are most likely in good shape and well on your way to achieving full value from technology adoption. If however the answer to any of these is ‘no,’ we have the science to help you change your culture around technology adoption, and unleash its potential.
Business Transformation at Clarendon Partners
Clarendon Partners brings a ‘front-to-back’ operations approach to help organizations scale efficiently, reduce risk, manage change, and improve strategic results through digital and operating model transformation.
Our people-centric services deepen our transformation offering by focusing on employee behaviors, specifically how to structure and manage business operations and IT modernization to maximize take-up and adoption. We do this using proven change techniques, such as ‘voice of the customer,’ journey- or value-mapping, and human-centered design.
In transformations driven by regulatory reform and changes to risk culture (e.g., ESG, Cyber, FHFA, OCC), Clarendon Partners helps promote adoption, increase compliance, and avoid regulatory rework through awareness campaigns, learning and development, and culture assessments.
Contact us at evolve@clarendonptrs.com to discuss how we can help.
REFERENCES
REFERENCES & FURTHER READING
[1] Leveraging Implementation Science for Business Success,” Jonathan P. Scaccia, Jun 27, 2023.
[2] Leveraging Implementation Science for Successful Data Strategy Adoption, Data Driven Daily, April 13, 2023.
[3] Losing from day one: Why even successful transformations fall short,” McKinsey & Company, December 2021.
[4] Executing Successful Change Management – Digital Collection – MITSloan Management Review, May 18, 2021.
[5] Operating model transformations: Not all elements are created equal, McKinsey & Company, September 20, 2021.
[6] The Hard Side of Change Management, Harold L. Sirkin, Perry Keenan, and Alan Jackson, Harvard Business Review, October 2005.
