Phil Le-Brun

The most insidious way of killing a change, particularly if it involves culture, is allowing the saying-doing gap. "We're going to be a data-enabled organisations .... but as the CEO I know what customers want" guarantees others will do the same. With cultural transformations, people will be watching leaders very closely. They want to see a congruence between words and actions, and take any dissonance as a sign that the leader isn't serious. Being human, people make mistakes. Admit to these. Share how uncomfortable some of the changes are personally and how you create personal resilience. Continuously paint the picture of how the future will be better through a change, and celebrate successes on the way. Easy, but easily forgotten.

If you are making a change that matters, particularly in those buzzwordy areas such as "agility" or "becoming generative AI-driven" you will make mistakes. If you don't, you're probably not thinking big enough. Make it clear that constant experiments to find ways of improving and reaching the desired to-be state are not just important but necessary. Share your learnings from experiments that didn't work and what you will do different. Don't be that leader who wants to be seen as right all the time: good leaders aren't.

It never ceases to surprise me how many organisations think that a significant transformation can be inflicted on the majority by the minority. Large scale changes require buy in and, more importantly, need people to care and feel part of the change. I'm not a great believer in one off transformations. Orgs need to be constantly getting better and the only realistic way of doing this is to enlist as many people as possible in pursuing this goal. Create an environment where everyone knows what "better" looks like and let them experiment. Showcase what's working and scale it. Showcase what didn't work and celebrate these experiments and the lessons learned from them. Make change an organisational sport.

There's a simple test here. Ask 10 random employees what the change vision is and what it means to how they do work. Unfortunately data tells us that very, very few people will be able to answer this question in most large organisations. Why? There are a number of reasons including 1/ incomprehensible language 2/ a lack of any metrics 3/ no cascading goals 4/ a lack of simple explanation about why the change is needed and why it is positive. 30-40% of a typical org are cynical about new change initiatives: they want to see the connection between the change, the purpose of the org and their individual roles. If you can't make this clear, go back to the drawing board. Enlist a few folks from across your org to help you communicate in clearly.

"People don't resist change, they resist being changed." Not always true, but more often than not leaders characterise push back on changes as resistance: "it's not me, it's them." People push back for many reasons: fear of what this means to their value, a genuine lack of understanding about what some Dilbertesque change announcement from leadership means ("we're going to globalise our synergies ...."), or a different point of view. The majority of transformations go off the rails because of a lack of change management, so seek to understand different perspectives, explain (again, and again) what the change is, and help to make this personal, answering that often unsaid "what's in it for me" question.

A huge part of the value proposition of the cloud is the ability to experiment quickly and cost effectively, and to scale great ideas rapidly. When new to the cloud, many will need the time to understand how the cloud is different to, say, old school data centres. While training courses are useful jump starts for learning, the majority of learning happens on the job. Giving individuals sandbox environments to experiment in (e.g. the AWS Free Tier) builds confidence up, as well as partnering with those who have been on this journey before. We normally start with a hypothesis and then experiment to prove it (or not), a great way of setting the tone that much of what we do we don't yet have the answer for, so experimenting is a necessity.