Large enterprises hate risk. Change is inherently risky. Therefore enterprises hate change. Which would be simple, were it not for the fact that in today’s environment not changing is beyond risky; it is suicidal. Many companies solve this contradiction by moving with change, but doing so while kicking and screaming every inch of the way. Which is where we Change Agents come in, and which is why we have an interesting life.

This may explain why adoption of new, enabling IT capabilities is slower in most corporations than among, say, teenagers – despite the fact that a corporation has so much more at stake, and has so many processes in place to plan the best future course of action. Teenagers just “get it”; in a large company, only two kinds of people “get it” at first – Early Adopters and Technology Evangelists. For the former, it’s relatively easy: you forgo tech support and start using what you know is right, often flying under the radar. An evangelist’s task is harder, since we are not content until we make the organization accept the change and adopt it as mainstream; we fly in plain view of the radar, intentionally exposed to the flak…

The strength of the opposition to new technology is independent of its details. Whether it’s Wikis, Blogs, Instant Messaging, even the World Wide Web itself, at first the corporate knee jerks violently, and you see policies that attempt to ignore, or prohibit, or over-regulate usage by employees. After all, these technologies are RISKY! Who knows what havoc they may wreak?!

Yes, powerful new technology has risks; if it didn’t it wouldn’t be powerful. Can you imagine where we’d be today, if our ancestors had heeded those Clan Elders who pointed out – quite correctly – that taming Fire was fraught with danger? I mean, seriously, we’ve all seen the red devil burn down entire forests, and now Oog wants to bring it into the cave??! Does he think we’re mad, to allow such recklessness?

But into the cave it went, and here we are today, the descendants of those clans that did allow Oog to take the risk (not before giving him a hard time, no doubt). And this goes to the point I want to make. There are two approaches management can take to new technology: try to fight it, ban it, regulate it – and fail miserably while nature, assisted by those early adopters, takes it inevitable course; or embrace it early on, thereby earning the right to somewhat influence its course. To my mind, this last shows the best way to go about enabling a change: you focus on facilitating the embrace. You start by convincing management to charter you to investigate the new technology’s potential opportunities and risks, then you recruit the early adopters to help you figure out how it may be put to use with such minimal regulation as will prevent any major disasters while empowering the exuberant exploration of the new possibilities that open ahead. Then you package the conclusions into a policy and training package that can help the late adopters embark on a faster learning curve, for the benefit of the entire organization. This way the change happens, as it would have in any case, but it happens faster and more smoothly. Been there, done that, seen it work.

What are your experiences, then?

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