Adopting Technology — How to Get Your Team On Board

Mitch (00:05):

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Make Others Successful podcast, where we share strategies, stories and insights about how to build a better workplace and make others successful. I'm joined with Emma and Matt here today. Hey. Hey. Welcome guys. Hey, I feel like it's been a while since Mike's been on this, but he's up in taking vacation and he's enjoying his time. So without him, we're going to tackle this next episode. We're sort of taking a little bit of a diversion from the past few that we've been in, which is sort of our guidebook focus area, conversations and how to think about technology in your workplace, all those good things. This is related to it, but we felt desire to talk a little bit about what happens with technology after the rollout at an organization. How should you think about adoption and how people make use out of these things?

(01:04):

How should you attack governance and what rules should you put in place for your team? And then how should leadership play a part in this process? And I like to usually make the distinction that this is core to what we do. A lot of people ask us, are you guys like it because we do Microsoft 365 stuff? And the answer is no. It typically looks at these things as a, I'm not going to speak for all it, but from some of our experience, a checkbox to say, oh, yep, everyone has an account. Everyone has a Microsoft team account, and everyone can log in and go push you out on the nest and go fly and do your thing. But there's so much more that comes after that that is so important to actually having these things be fostered and cared for and really have success with those things. So we want to dive into that conversation today. Does that cover it? I think so. Any other thoughts? Okay. So we're going to kick it off with adoption. So why is adoption so important? Maybe let's add some clarification around what exactly we mean by adoption and how it relates to technology.

Matt D. (02:16):

Sure. So the word adoption in the context of this kind of skips over one piece of it that we're kind of making an assumption that I think everybody has, but it's probably good to just say it and be there. Technology changes, it's going to change no matter what. We've done some podcasts about it in the past, it's a given, it's going to change. So we know change is going to happen. We know you're going to get new technology adoption deals with, cool, I'm going to go do this. I have this new technology that's going to get rolled out. How do I get people to use it? How do I make the way that people use it be effective? How do I have their usage changed from maybe what the old system was to the new system, et cetera, et cetera. So adoption is all to do about that process of getting people, enabling people to use the tools.

(03:07):

I think the only other thing that I'll mention is that a lot of times people think of adoption and they think about what cool prizes can I give away to make somebody want to use this thing because I need them to, because my numbers are all about how many people use it. And I would say that there is a component of that, but that's not really what it's about. That's a means to an end adoption is way more holistic about just getting people to use the tool. And one of the ways to do that is to provide incentives for people to want to do it, but then it also is making sure that when they do use it, they love it and they just want to use it.

Mitch (03:45):

Right? I feel like you guys have talked about this in the past where you've rolled out an intranet or some similar tool and then you are done with that project and you come back years later and you say, how's it going? And they say, oh, we don't use that thing. And it gives almost zero value to the organization, and that's not good at

Matt D. (04:03):

All. Yeah, it's one of the biggest problems with many, many, many technology projects is much like you said about the way that many places look at it is they check the box that everybody's got an account, everybody's using it, but if people hate it and can't do what they want to do with it, they're going to find another way to do it. It's just the way it is.

Emma (04:22):

So here's a question. When you guys think about adoption, do you feel it's the same thing synonymous with change management or in what ways would you differentiate adoption from change management?

Mitch (04:33):

Yeah, I feel like change management, it's easy to correlate with the whole idea of herding cats like the leadership teams, the C-suite, we need to figure out change at a high level. Typically it doesn't trickle down to the end user level from my experience. So there's maybe a little bit of a line there that I would draw. Do you have any others

Matt D. (04:57):

If change management is being done? Well, they are not synonymous, but adoption is a part of change management. If you could even think of it as a metric of change management. If you're doing well with change management, then the people are naturally starting to use this tool and the adoption just works, the adoptions happening. So you would still watch the adoption numbers and do feedback and watch what's going on with that adoption to try to improve it. But the change management would be kind of the precursor to say, we know how this aligns to the business goals. We have a message about this. We have talked to all the stakeholders. We know even before you start deploying the technology, you've got all of this pre-work done. So the adoption is like a no-brainer, right? It just kind of happens because it's clear to everybody what's going on, how this fits and how I can use it. That's a great question and distinction,

Mitch (05:51):

Which leadership for sure plays a part where actually we have a section all about that later, so we'll dig into that more. But I think I just want to echo the fact that adoption is not just using the tool, it's about what you're getting out of using the tool. And I wanted to call out one of these points that we have for this conversation is it's not just an option to think about these things and try to do these things. It's almost a necessity because if you don't, you're going to be left in the dust. Everything is moving so fast, and I'm not trying to fear monger or anything, but it is a serious topic of you need to get your people on new tools, using them well, integrating them into your business and considering that a high priority.

Emma (06:40):

And can you think of, I mean the two of you have worked on so many of these projects for tech adoption. Can you think of an example where you felt a company did a really good job doing this or maybe an example of where even from afar, you watched as a company decided not to focus on adoption and what happened? So

Matt D. (07:00):

What Mitch said, I think is mentioned. There's definitely some intranet projects. There's definitely some custom app dev projects that I've been a part of where it's gone both ways. The outcomes that you see from these projects is heavily dependent on the intent, the change management piece that you talked about before. Because when somebody receives this thing, a lot of people use a couple different methods to try to make adoption happen. One is, I would call it the iron fist approach, which is like, I'm going to take all the other toys away. This is the only one you have, so you got to use it. I don't care if you don't like it, I don't care if it doesn't work for you, it doesn't matter. This is what you got. That's it, right? There's other models where it seems like leadership is like, because I've said it will happen, I just assume it will happen.

(07:46):

And in that, so I think the thing that I'm trying to get at is even in the cases where you do see adoption go well, I would still not consider it not well, because in the case of the iron fist, you're just forcing people to use it and they don't like it. That's not good adoption. That's not what you want. On the other end of the spectrum, we have projects where somebody, especially with intranet projects where the stated goal from the stakeholder is, I need a way to not send emails. I need a way to communicate this information, but I'm not going to involve anybody else. I'm just going to tell you what I want. You're going to make this thing and I'm going to put my stuff there and I'm going to expect people to go to it. And you come back six months a year later and they've given up on it because nobody was paying attention because there was no launch plan, there was no engagement with anyone else to try to do that. And they didn't do the iron fist thing where they were like, I'm not going to communicate with you any other way because you can't. It's really hard in that way. Yeah, I mean it's really a range, but

Mitch (08:44):

I think you're making a nice distinction there is that at the extreme ends, both are bad from the really structured to the loosey goosey, let's use technology better. And so oftentimes it's somewhere in the middle where you're saying, we want to make this better. We think this is the best way. Let's try it. Let's evaluate it as we go, and not be either too hard about it or too soft about it.

Matt D. (09:09):

To be clear, the best people are ones that have a holistic process within the entire organization about adoption. So not we're rolling out this new tech, let's figure out how to get people to adopt it. No, as an organization, we roll out change this way. This is how it works, and whether it's technology, whether it's whatever, it doesn't matter what it is, this is how we do it, it's expected that everyone's going to understand what's going on. This is how we get feedback from end users. This is how we approach that. The more it's just part of your business and not this new tech is making you have to do this extra stuff. And it's more, this is just how we work as a company, the better off you're going to be.

Mitch (09:54):

On the flip side of the good, I'll say one of our projects that we did was an intranet based project, and originally we struggled to get some buy-in from some of the stakeholders, and it was a little bit reserved, but our stakeholder there was pushing for it and she really, really pushed it along. And after it got launched and people started to see what it could be, they started to say, Ooh, can we get in on that? And they started to really make it seep into their organization where everyone was using it, everyone wanted to use it, and it became this self-fulfilling prophecy where people wanted to build on it and add new things. And so people wanted to go there, and so people, they wanted to add on it, and it just kept going in more and more. And so we're excited to see that cycle.

Emma (10:43):

And a concrete example from that particular case, I believe they ended up making a company-wide leadership change. Whether it was the company was bought out or at the top, they made that announcement through this tech that everyone had adopted. I think it was through a video message, and I felt like that really was the bow on top of the whole project of, wow, everyone in the company is actually able to communicate through this tool. They were confident enough that enough of the company had adopted that intranet that they made a huge announcement like that through it and it was successful, right? It's good engagement.

Matt D. (11:20):

So that particular scenario highlights probably the biggest challenge for organizations that are trying to improve adoption, and that is with tech especially, people don't know what it means to them until it means something to them. It's very difficult to take a technology that's going to be an integral part of your life, get feedback on what you think that means to you or how we should improve that before we launch it. If I'm not using it, you just don't know. But then how do you do that? Do you spend thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars getting focus groups and having people try beta tests? And especially if you're a smaller organization that just doesn't work. But at the same time, just launching it to somebody and then finding out that it's absolutely horrible can be a very costly choice too.

Mitch (12:14):

Even from our perspective bulb as a business, when we're trying to tell people, you should have an intranet, it can be challenging to figure out the right examples and the right context to actually show them. In order to flip that switch of, oh, suddenly I think about my organization in a totally different way and how I share information than I did before because I'm able to connect those dots. And it has been really challenging, honestly. Do we want to create a demo? Do we want to create video walkthroughs? How far do we want to go?

Matt D. (12:49):

And we have very similar things with custom dev. I can think of one particular customer that wanted us to move from one technology, new technology. Their goal was simply, I can't find any. This thing is going out of date. I can't do anything. I need to be on the new one. And trying to explain the possibilities once they move the thing that it could be, it was very, very challenging. We ended up basically converting it very close to what it was originally, getting them to use it for a month and be like, okay, now let's start talking about these other things. Because it's so difficult for people to really make that mental leap. It's very, very hard.

Mitch (13:27):

I've been watching a lot of psychic scam artists on YouTube. How do we not make it feel like they're a psychic scam artist and you guys, you just don't get this yet, but it's going to be great and buy into this and I promise it'll be better.

Matt D. (13:43):

So quite frankly, a lot of this has to do with we're a consulting agency. So for us, a lot of it has to do with having a partner on the other side that can help translate from the business to us or engaging in engagements with us from a consulting purpose where we are on a roadmap, we're going to understand your business better to do that. So from a consultancy, that's what it is from a company perspective, it's creating a culture of it and business being in partnership. If your IT is currently a third party help desk location, you're going to struggle because you likely don't have any internal technology experts that understand both the businesses and the technology. That can be the rea reassurance that can say, yeah, this vendor who came in, they're speaking truth. And yes, I can see how this can be helpful. That doesn't mean that they're the only voice in the room, but that is the key

Mitch (14:40):

To someone listening. Think about a time where you imagined something was going to be so great and you got this idea and you wanted to share it and get people to use it, and you brought it to someone and you wanted to pitch them and convince them, and maybe it didn't go as well as you had hoped, but you know that it's there. It's playing this constant game of faith that something will be better on the other end.

Emma (15:04):

I mean, I think we could all look back in our personal lives or work lives and think through, oh, I never thought I would be walking around with a touchscreen advanced technological.

Matt D. (15:16):

I never thought I'd be doing podcasts or YouTube

Emma (15:17):

Videos. You can think of a lot of things in your life that it's kind of like, oh, I never really thought that would change my life the way it did, and well, you've been proven wrong by whatever the technology is. We've all experienced that. So both

Mitch (15:29):

Good and bad. Yeah, good

Emma (15:30):

And bad. So reminding yourself of that mentality of you may not know what could be on the other side. Yeah. Okay. So really the big things we took away from adoption is you've got to do it. It's not an option. It's definitely an essential within this tech landscape that we're in. We talked through some examples about how to be proactive and really ensure that from leadership all the way down, you are talking through your holistic adoption strategy, and if you don't do it, there are huge risks to not having an adoption strategy. So setting adoption aside, when you're thinking about, okay, new technology, new process, whatever it is that you're going to try to adopt at your company, how do you think about the governance that you put place

Mitch (16:16):

Around that? Let's define governance first or no, Emma, you had a decent, simple,

Emma (16:23):

So description. How I think about governance is it's the structure, the rules, oftentimes the limitations that you're going to put around a technology. I'm looking at Matt, he'll correct me if I'm wrong about this, but it's really the structure that is meant to be in place to help guide on how you want to use that technology, what you can do, what you can't do. And in some cases, it might even be like you're getting an error message. You're not allowed to do what you're trying to do with the technology. So that in my mind is governance.

Mitch (16:56):

So I think big organization probably has lots of governance, lots of rules, lots of process, something has to go through versus smaller, maybe not as much more flexible. How do we balance that? It's a big topic, but

Matt D. (17:08):

Yeah, I mean the most important thing to realize is that there are governance tools and there is governance, and they are different things. One allows you to help manage, implement, maintain the governance that is not tool-based, right? As you said, governance is rules. If I say as a business owner, this is how we should use this technology. I have provided some governance over that. I may choose then to use a tool that will help me enforce those rules. But the governance is the governance. Probably the best way to effectively talk about this is firewalls and filters, web filters, everybody knows what a web filter is. Everybody, if you're at an organization, you probably are, but sitting behind a web filter, the rules around web filters are regardless of whether or not the filter that you have tells you that you can't go there.

Mitch (18:04):

It reminds me of the office episode where suddenly they can't go to what YouTube, all the fun sites that they used to spend so much time on.

Matt D. (18:13):

YouTube is a perfect example. Most organizations today don't block YouTube, but have a policy that says you should be using YouTube or using these tools for business purposes, which means you shouldn't be watching episodes of the office

Mitch (18:27):

On YouTube or psychic scam artists or

Matt D. (18:28):

Psychic scam artists. You should be using it for business purpose. Although now you talked to here, so now it's business purpose, so you're okay, right? Yes,

Mitch (18:36):

Strictly research,

Emma (18:38):

But how many employees are actually going to read the guidelines, correct, and all of that. So then you have to use the governance tools to actually make sure that

Matt D. (18:45):

You as a business need to decide whether or not you need that. Adding tools adds complexity, adds challenges, adds hurdles for people, ads, management adds cost. So you have to make your call on a case by case what that is. But regardless of what that is, there's always governance

Emma (19:03):

And governance and security

Matt D. (19:06):

Hand in hand. Governance is usually your governance is supporting a level of security that you're trying to achieve, right? So you have decided that we deal with p i because we deal with p i heavily as an example. I'm a healthcare organization because of those things in my entire tenant, I'm not going to allow us to share with external parties. Period. You could make that call. The reason you chose that governance policy and tool that you're going to implement is because of the level of security that you're trying to achieve. They are very tightly coupled. Coupled they're not exactly the same.

Mitch (19:42):

And let's just zoom out for a second. The purpose of governance is to mitigate risk.

Matt D. (19:47):

Yes, mitigate risk or provide a outcome that is beneficial to the business. So I can have a governance policy that says all of the names of my shared mailboxes have to follow this format. That doesn't necessarily mitigate risk. It might depending on what you're trying to

Emma (20:05):

Do. Oh man. But does it make for a more organized file sharing experience?

Matt D. (20:08):

Experience, but that's what it's right. Someone has decided that we're a big enough organization that we have enough of these things, we have some reason that that's beneficial, so I'm going to implement that governance. I'm going to say, Hey, this is how this is going to happen. So

Emma (20:23):

Really what you're saying, you're really highlighting the importance of aligning technological decisions and governance decisions with business objectives,

Matt D. (20:32):

Correct? Yeah. Which those business objectives could be security, it could be performance, it could be lots of things, but if you have a business

Emma (20:42):

Reason, organized file sharing system,

Matt D. (20:43):

If you have business reason to do something, you can choose to apply the governance. And that governance can be just verbal, just written an agreement. Obviously in that case, you're having faith that they're going to do something, which in some cases is probably more than adequate. You don't have to micro and control everything, but in some cases the risk is, as you said, the risk isn't worth it. Or for my naming convention thing, teams is a perfect example. I'm going to say we should have this naming convention, but if I let people create it manually themselves, I do self-service and let 'em do it by themselves and they get it wrong, it kind of sucks. It's not that it's risky, but they made an honest mistake. I should use tooling to make it so that they don't make an honest mistake. Help the people out, don't make them have to know all of this stuff. So there's lots of different reasons you would do it, but it's all under that same kind of big umbrella

Mitch (21:42):

And maybe should we talk about our workplace? The governance in our workplace as an example, is almost none. Very, very loose. We have accounts, sometimes it's integrated into the login of the computer, sometimes not. We don't enforce specific tools, but our business is based on using technology better at your workplace. So we inherently do okay at this stuff. I'll say, right, there are certain things that I can't do that Matt won't give me access to that I don't know if he'll ever give me access to. So there is that level, but underneath in the day-to-day is relatively loose. That might not work if we grow, right?

Matt D. (22:26):

It's really interesting. We went to a conference recently that had a talk about this. We have specifically related to Netflix's and Netflix and how they build their business model. I would say from a technology perspective in particular, we have an organization where we explain what the goals are and the objectives are. We put some very rigid but wide guardrails in and everyone is supposed to follow that. I'll give you a perfect example. Timeout for logins. Our timeout is pretty long. It's not super long. We do have something that says, Hey, it needs to auto log out after a certain amount of time, but it's pretty short. But we also have a rule that people have created in the office at least, is that if you leave your computer unlocked and somebody goes and types in chat in a donuts channel, donuts, you owe the company donuts tomorrow or sometime in the near future, which is

Mitch (23:20):

All a

Matt D. (23:21):

Security objective. It's a way to hold ourselves accountable.

Mitch (23:26):

I'll say the new people learn quick because they get got and they bring in donuts and they don't do it again.

Matt D. (23:34):

That's a case where we have guidelines and we have rules, but if you walk away from computer and go to the bathroom really quick, chances are if you didn't manually lock it, you're going to get got because somebody's going to walk by and see it.

Emma (23:47):

And my understanding is you're really trying to create a good habit within employees so that if they're at an airport, for example, and they decided to walk away from their laptop or a coffee shop or something. Everywhere. Anywhere, yeah.

Matt D. (23:59):

Because the reality is the data that is on our computers is important. It is valuable to our organization and to our customers. It is important for us to secure it. Other organizations have different rules about that. You can have lots of different ways to try to make that happen. Some of the worst from a user perspective is two minutes inactive for two minutes box. It's like I am on a meeting with someone and I am not touching my computer for a little bit, and all of a sudden it locks. Right?

Emma (24:28):

So what you're getting at Matt is this distinction between how do you set up governance that still promotes innovation, still promotes flexibility and all of these tenets that you want for your employees, but then also is able to meet the different security measures you want. So how do you do that?

Matt D. (24:48):

The truth of the matter is just with adoption, just like with some of the other things, it's saying it's important and spending the time on it, it is important to us. So we are going to spend time on it, and when we spend time on it using our change management philosophy and all of these other tools that we have, it's going to get better. Whatever better is for us because every organization, it's different. The Department of Defense has a very different level of requirement for this.

Mitch (25:14):

You don't say,

Emma (25:16):

I,

Matt D. (25:17):

Healthcare facility has a very different requirement for this. They have a very different workspace. Even when you think about that healthcare location, even if you're talking about not patient information, et cetera, you're in an open space where customers are walking by all the time. I would say Best Buy has a different, and Walmart have a different way of doing this because again, you're interacting all the time with customers who should have no access to this information. So your place of business needs the only one that can really identify what those requirements are. But the most important thing is to say it does matter to me and we are going to say something about it. The last thing I'll say about it too is that it's really, really, really, really, really expensive to come up with a purely technological way to stop someone from doing all of these things, or it's hugely inconvenient and costly to the business in regards to effort it takes to do it. For example, if it locked me out every two minutes,

Mitch (26:18):

Well, we had someone ask us that, can we do this where no one can ever access the thing?

Matt D. (26:22):

Yeah, can ever, ever, and the answer is sure, you can disconnect yourself from the internet, but that will be very painful for you to do a Google search, right? Don't, there's a cost benefit to this whole thing. But my point is that the spectrum of what you're trying to do is really a matter of if you choose to do it based on alone, your only choices are these. Your best option is sensible differentiation between yes, this is easy to implement. For example, from a technology perspective, it's easy to implement and isn't inconvenience to my users. You should probably do that a hundred percent. It's really difficult to implement and is not core to our business.

Emma (27:05):

I think twice. I don't know

Matt D. (27:06):

That you need to worry about that, right? You got to make those calls.

Mitch (27:11):

It's kind of like that matrix of urgent versus not versus important versus not. You should only care about, did I get it right? No, I think

Emma (27:19):

You got it right. I wanted to say we'll create this graph. We should create that.

Mitch (27:25):

That's a good idea. But I would tag onto what you said in that talking about governance is sort of talking about security, like we said, but we labeled security as a gradient. It is not black, it's not white, it's gray. And so everyone's a little bit different, and so forgive us if it's a little bit challenging to say this is exactly what you should do in your workplace. Establishing it's important is the best thing

Emma (27:50):

First. Yeah, and the key theme I think I'm hearing from both of you is just the importance of aligning the governance structure you're going to put into place with the business objectives, whatever those may be for your specific business. So it's not a one size fits all. Well, everyone should set this up within their governance system. Yeah. So the fun part, where does leadership come in on all of this? How does leadership play a role in both adoption and governance? I mean, I think the first bit is we've talked about both need to be built into the culture. So how does a leader actually build these things into their culture?

Mitch (28:30):

One of my favorite examples is when a leader would typically say, we're rolling out an intranet. This is a common example that we give, and the leader needs to send news or a document or something to their team instead of going along with their old ways and emailing it to them, email a link, send a link to the news, the internal news article that the end user, their team can then see their leader adopting that and start to recognize that as the defacto standard way to share those things. Because if the top down is saying, Hey, use these things and they don't see the leadership using those things, it's not going to happen.

Emma (29:10):

And from a governance standpoint, going on that example, I've been in places before where leaders have said, don't email documents such as these with signatures. And then I get an email with a document like that attached, and it is very difficult then to understand, well, what's the precedent? If you can do it, then we all do it. Is it really that big of a deal to be emailing it, right?

Mitch (29:30):

Be prepared to eat your own dog food, right?

Matt D. (29:33):

Both of you just talked a little bit around some of the two pieces, which is leadership needs to be involved in direction and adoption and direction is all about, we talked about governance should be based on your business objectives. Well, who should be setting the business objectives? We talked about adoption and we talked about the need to change from one technology to another, who should be helping to decide whether or not leadership should be involved in that. All of that stuff that's happening ahead of time, either should be directly coming from leadership or they should be providing super clear goals and objectives for the business that either tech people or other maybe not at the same level of leadership, but that can transcribe that into this is the way I'm going forward. And the second is in adoption, supporting those decisions in a couple of different ways.

(30:28):

One is exactly what you both described, which is like eat your own dog food. Like you said, this is the direction, the IT team or the business users, whoever decided that this is the path that they need to go down, they started to go down that way. Give it a shot. Don't just give up on it. That's one thing. And second, if you do try it and it's not working, engage with everyone about what it's not doing, what you defined as your business outcomes and business goals that this is not doing. That is a challenge. You need to be a partner in that, but your partnership should be focused on the business outcome and not on the details. The other thing I see people get involved in way too often from a business leader perspective is they will come in and say, this is how I work best. And so that's how I want it to work. You shouldn't care how you work. It should not matter how you work with the system. If you're building a new sales system, it should matter how the salespeople work with this system and how it supports your business goals and focus on that and focus on that perfect

Mitch (31:29):

Example. I despise tracking our time, but guess who tracks his time every week? And I lay it down and I bear the burden of tracking my time every week. Yep, yep.

Matt D. (31:41):

Yes, you do. Yes you do. But it's truthfully, we've seen it a lot of different ways Customers come to us and the leadership is either not focused on the right thing or they don't really have a business objective that's clearly articulated that relates to this thing. You come and say, a leader says, we need an intranet. Okay, why?

Mitch (32:03):

What that example we were talking about earlier where it kind of caught on after the fact of it launching is how did that leader, that was the advocate for it, lead in that when you feel like you're alone, push that through. I guess you have to have some level of authority in order to iron fist like you were saying. But how should you say you're feeling a little bit alone and you want to push this along, get the other leaders to join into?

Matt D. (32:31):

Well, in that particular case, she was very focused on the outcomes that it would get immediately, right? Her focus was, I'm not going to have my administrative staff be answering questions all the time. They can answer the question, but their answers are going to be point you to the intranet. I'm going to have a way to communicate, and that's going to be the way to communicate going forward. She was focused on the outcomes that she wanted to get from an intranet, which is the important thing, and then we were able to deliver on it. They were able to deliver on it because we were in partnership with them. And that created an environment where people started to see the intranet happening and being used, and they could see the use cases for it. And then once they got their toe in there, they went, oh, I can see another use case. I can see another use case. How do we make this happen? So really it is a lot of it comes down to truly articulating and understanding what the outcomes and the goals and the business things are, and maybe

Mitch (33:27):

Grabbing the low hanging fruit first thing. These are the quick wins. Let's get this rolling so people see it. It makes that

Matt D. (33:34):

Click. Another challenge that you can have from business leaders is they often, many times will have a, if it can't do everything, it's not going to provide value or it's going to cost me more later. You're just going to charge me more later. But the reality is, if it takes six months to get a certain amount of features done, you should just take that as a win and worry about the next one, the next six months. Because the reality is if you make that be a year, it's just too long. Honestly, six months is too long. We always are trying to push as quickly as we can to get something that is viable and useful to people in their hands because everything changes. There are business changes, the technology changes, it all changes. And so getting from a leader perspective, getting out of the mindset of it has to do everything all the time, every time, and be day one, miraculously better, day one, maybe not. Yeah, it's

Emma (34:31):

Fostering experimentation, right?

Matt D. (34:34):

Right. And saying it's good enough. Perfect. Isn't the enemy of good enough? Yes. Yeah.

Mitch (34:39):

This is all a moving target that is moving, but also getting farther away at the same time. It's always something that has to be chased after. So get it rolling, get those quick wins and yeah, that's good. Alright. Leadership, definitely an important topic. I think we're getting close to time here, so I do want to wrap it up. There are a few more sections that we have on our notes that maybe we'll save for a future episode, but in light of time, we're going to hit pause right there. And I'm going to ask Emma, you want to recap us really quick? Just run through what we talked about today?

Emma (35:14):

Yeah. So we started with adoption and how important it is to have a holistic approach to adoption, not just for technology, but for everything and any process change. And then obviously use that process when you have a need for tech adoption. Number two, we talked through governance and what that can do depending on the size of your company and really how to create effective governance strategy. So the number one highlight was align your governance strategy with your business objectives, whatever that needs to look like for your size team and your company, and make sure you're communicating what it is, because only using technological tools to force people into following the guidance is either going to be really expensive or frankly not work. So make sure you build it into your culture. And last but not least, we talked through leadership and the role that leadership can play in both areas and really how effective leadership can either make or break what these two things will do at your organization. So adoption and governance needs to come from leadership. It needs to be clearly communicated, and the context has to be set from the top down.

(36:27):

Awesome. Or really from the bottom up for thinking about a tree example.

Matt D. (36:31):

Yeah, I mean in the tree example, it can come from everywhere. Anyone can be involved, lead from where you're, yeah, it's lead from where you are. At the same time, all of that lives under the umbrella. That is the organization that is led by, well,

Emma (36:45):

I think the trees was the roots.

Matt D. (36:47):

You're right. I

Emma (36:48):

Have to look back at that example. But yes, all of this obviously comes from what is at the center of your culture and what has the leadership decided to communicate in that sense. Yeah.

Mitch (37:01):

Cool. Alright, that's all we have for today. Thank you Matt and Emma for joining us, and we'll see you again next time. Hey, thanks for joining us today. If you haven't already subscribed to our show on your favorite podcasting app, so you'll always be up to date on the most recent episodes. This podcast is hosted by the team members of Bulb Digital and special thanks to Eric Veneman for our music tracks and producing this episode. If you have any questions for us, head to make others successful.com and you can get in touch with us there. You'll also find a lot of blogs and videos and content that will help you modernize your workplace and get the most out of Office 365. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.

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