Selling change when there’s no obvious ROI
And how to get time with the C-suite
👋 Welcome to The Navigator. A newsletter about people, psychology and design for business leaders who want to make meaningful change. I’m Sarah Ronald, and I write this newsletter with the Nile team. If this email was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here to receive it in your inbox every couple of weeks. And if this newsletter helps you navigate change, do press that little heart button to let me know.
Changing a business is a paradox.
Business leaders see change as necessary for growth, innovation and adapting to new challenges. And yet, entrenched ways of doing things and cultural hangups make it difficult to implement those much-needed new ideas. This results in a frustrating loop: a need for change that conflicts with the difficulty of actually bringing it about.
Or, to put it another way, we all know the saying about how you can only change yourself and not others. And yet when it comes to organisational transformation, that’s pretty much exactly what we’re trying to do: take others along the change journey.
So what do we do? Well, usually we make a business case. We lay out how change is good for the bottom line. We’re seeing this happen right now with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Proponents of introducing robust DE&I programmes are able to point to research like McKinsey’s, which found that a substantial differential likelihood of outperformance – 48 percent – separates the most from the least gender-diverse companies.
That’s a compelling figure to show to a leadership team.
But what happens when there is no business case for change? How do you sell an executive team on change without an obvious ROI?
That’s the thorny topic we’re tackling into in this edition of The Navigator. Let’s get into it.
In this issue
Q&A with Lucy Selby, Senior Technical Consultant at Fidelity International, on the challenges of selling internally
Guerilla strategies for getting time in with the executive team
The love-hate relationship between technology and service delivery
Wishing you a productive week,
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Lucy Selby is a self-described ‘corporate troublemaker’
As a Senior Technical Consultant, she’s Fidelity International’s in-house changemaker. We worked with Lucy and her team to make their employees lives easier. We used research and experience design to conceptualise optimal use of the power of technology self-service.
Here’s my conversation with Lucy about selling change internally.
Sarah: Lucy, thank you for sharing your insights with our Navigator readers. Please can tell us what you do at Fidelity?
Lucy: On paper, I'm a product owner. But really, what I do is integrate and implement change in a guerilla fashion.
“Guerilla changemaker” sounds like a brilliant job title – what does that look like in practice?
I own our self-service technology tool and our onboarding automation, both of which are heavily used within the business by non-technology folks. So I'm sort of like the human face of our technology offerings. I'm in a really nice central position, which allows me to have a broad range of influence across a number of departments within the business.
For the benefit of the readers, will you summarise how we know each other?
I worked with Nile to research how our internal customers interface with our technology offerings; we wanted to feed this insight to shape how best to configure ServiceNow for global colleagues. I gave you an incredibly broad and vague brief which you took on with extreme enthusiasm. Working with Nile gave us the language we needed to have a deeper conversation not only with our executive layer, but also with our customers about how they feel about our services. We've never been able to have that conversation before. It’s opened doors for us all over.
The “how” of conversations is something I want to come back to, but first, can you tell me what are your biggest challenges when it comes to actually making change happen?
I would say winning hearts and minds is always a really good obstacle to have in your rearview. Getting people on board with the concepts of what you're trying to do is always quite challenging. Anything that requires a cultural or mindset change are big challenges – and some pretty big obstacles that I enjoy laughing at as I go past them.
OK, let’s get into it. The big challenge so many of us are facing right now is selling internally. As someone doing this on a regular basis, what insights can you share?
You really have to know your audience at all times if you're trying to win hearts and minds. If you're talking to a very heavily technical, third-level or infrastructure group, you want to switch your content to make sure that you're relatable to them. It will be a completely different conversation if you were to talk to a business unit or an HR department – each of those areas is going to have a slightly different slant on its own agenda. You can't just turn up with very generic content if you really want to win people over.
Another challenge is something as basic as getting people's time. Everyone's super busy, especially if you want to have conversations with the executive layer. Getting those people in a room to really sit down and listen to what you have to say can be incredibly challenging.
What are some key lessons that you've learned about making change go smoothly? How do you make those obstacles appear in that rearview mirror?
One of the things that I learned from working with Nile was not to be afraid to talk about the “softer” side of what you're doing. So not to be afraid to talk about the emotional side of things, not to be afraid to address technical or data issues from a human perspective. Those are the things that really make your message relatable.
What might that look like in practice? What strategies do you have for approaching conversations about change?
I always start with the positive. For me, that has always been the best way to get people to open up. If you go in asking, “What are people most afraid of?”, you're probably not going to get an honest answer. Instead, I go in with a positive and say, “What really matters to Fidelity's community?” Make your language as positive, warm and human as possible. That will help people feel comfortable to open up and then you're on a reasonable footing to start probing a little deeper.
Getting time with the C-suite
Lucy shared her top three guerilla tactics, as she calls them, on bending the executive team’s ear.
Always have an elevator pitch in your back pocket. You never know when you might literally be in an elevator with somebody. Another way to approach this is to think of a compelling and memorable way to answer the question: “What are you working on right now?”
And then be prepared with the 10-minute summary. Don’t stop at the elevator pitch, figure out in advance what you’ll say to any follow-ups!
Cold call your colleagues. Lucy says that when she’s working on something interesting, she sends out an email blast with key bullet points to colleagues who might be interested. Just keep it to the point. Or as Lucy put it, “Somebody I work with has a great saying which is ‘Be bright, be brief, be gone.’ I think that works really well with the executive layer particularly – that's what they want from you.”
One change-making action to take this week
Lucy left us with a practical suggestion for anyone who’s struggling to sell change internally to take right now:
Find what's relatable. If it's a technology group, what do they most relate to? If it's a really mixed group, what kind of human experience can you connect with? Recently, with a very mixed group, I used music as an analogy for some data. Music is universal. It's human and something most people understand. Everyone has a personal experience of it. So I was able to use that as a leveller in a very mixed group. Find an inroad. And that might be specific to the group or it might be something really general. Look at your audience. What are they into? And then how can you use that to start your conversation?
How are you navigating internal change?
I want to hear from you. What are your challenges when it comes to selling change to the executive team? Do you have any proven guerilla tactics to share? And if you’re the decision-maker yourself, what sells you on change when there’s no obvious ROI?
Let me know by dropping a comment below or replying directly to this email. Your messages come straight into my inbox and I will reply.
Links we ♥️ this week
The Nile team has been sharing lots of links on AI lately. This post in particular from the School of Good Services on the love-hate relationship between technology and service delivery really got us thinking.
Senior Service Designer, Katherine Snow, has been dipping in and out of this whopper of an open access paper on the role of art in developing new futures and our relationship with imagination. It raises some really interesting point about the use to technology to help us imagine from new perspectives (like being a tree using VR 😳 ). It also summaries the history of imagination which is utterly fascinating.
ICYMI: In the previous issue of The Navigator,
wrote about the design research tech that lets you read customers' minds.
Get in touch
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It's really helpful to think of an elevator pitch as the answer to the question, "what are you working on?" – simple but v powerful framing!