Top Down vs Bottom Up Enablement

Welcome everyone! This post is part of my wider series on how to implement low-code not just from a technology and process perspective, but also for a people enablement and adoption perspective to truly maximise value from the platform - This post gives an overview of the structured approach I’ve defined and how I’m breaking down my blog posts
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Organisational Change Management is a important topic and one which is often overlooked, underestimated, and / or undervalued! I don’t have a formal background in this but we have had some great conversations with some amazing colleagues sharing our experience of how we’ve considered it when enabling makers and growing adoption of the Power Platform.

Citizen Development is an optional change. We’re using the vision we set to inspire and excite people to want to make this change, and using our strategy, and roadmap activities, to tell stories to show the organisation that there are ‘people like me’ in similar roles to them, similar levels of the organisation, similar length of career, similar capabilities who have made this change and are benefitting from it personally.

Through recognising some of the challenges, and opportunities, in growing an optional change, like Power Platform adoption, and using them to your advantages will help you be successful.

In this post we’re going to compare a top down and bottom up approach to this change.

Top Down

In the left picture we’ve got a top down approach - At the top of the organisation triangle a vision has been set and sponsor(s) identified at a senior level. Our leaders exhibit transformational leadership where they recognise that to transform the organisation they need to share the direction, why it’s important to the organisation in the context of their part of the org, define desired Outcomes… and then get out of the way of their people to do their best work and work out how to deliver it, being there to unblock issues and challenges and support their teams to be successful as required - A servant leader..

This approach to leadership will help to provide psychological safety - creating an environment where people are encouraged to experiment with the recognisiton that not all experiments will be successful in delivering the outcome but will provide learnings. An environment of innovation

If we’ve got an organisation like this where leaders at all levels understand the why of Power Platform, what it is and the opportunities it brings, are bought into it’s adoption and what it means to them and their teams in terms of transforming their processes and people, and how they can empower them to learn, have the space and safety to experiment, and to unblock issues and get out of their way, then we have an easy job! Our adoption and enablement is going to be simple! However… this isn’t often the case.

Instead we might have a vision of Citizen Development from the top where they recognise the opportunity, what it could mean to the people and the organisation, but perhaps that isn’t understood or connected to as we go down through the organisation so it isn’t reinforced.

Or we might have pockets of people who have found the platform and started experimenting but they’re not backed up by leaders who understand whether people in their teams should be making apps, or automating processes so are unclear whether they should be encouraging and supporting them or not. This leads us to the Bottom Up view…

Bottom Up

If we’ve got people, some experimenters, who have discovered Power Platform by chance, perhaps they’ve read about it, perhaps they’ve noticed some of the bottoms to build Apps or Flows from within SharePoint? We may or may not have governance and guardrails in place but let’s assume for now that we have…

Some of these experimenters will have show their colleagues, their friends, their manager and had a positive reaction - Recognition of the value that they’ve delivered, the skills that they’ve learned… One person who had this response was my friend Samit Saini, a former security guard at Heathrow Airport whose first experiment changed Heathrow airport, and his career and life - See Samit’s story here

If, like Samit, those initial experiments were successful then that’s great and our manager’s eyes will light up!! However if they weren’t on that occasion there was still value. Through that experimentation there was learning and innovation! Better knowledge of where Power Platform might fit, how to go about problem solving and creating solutions.

Our manager has seen and felt value. They recognise the opportunity the platform could bring to their processes, their people, the organisation…. They encourage others in their team to also experiment, and work together to share their knowledge. Adoption grows.

That manager also tells their colleagues, their peers, their manager… There’s kudos, interest, curiousness, perhaps even the ‘motivation of envy’ (as one of my favourite customers I’ve worked with described it as) that they want to get that happening in their team, or their org, or they want to do it themselves…

The cycle then continues as that adoption spreads through pockets of the organisation and climbs through the organisation organically, through word of mouth and through real value not just to the processes, or the organisation, but to people themselves as we spoke about in my post on Value.

The Reality

The reality is often actually somewhere between the two - We often see that there’s interest to explore Citizen Development from the top of an organisation and recognition of how this empowered innovation can unlock value and digitally transform process, the organisation, parts of the IT organisation, and also digitally transform the people.

There are often people who have already started experimenting (with or without CoE, Governance and Guardrails in place) and unlocking value and feeling like intrepid explorers finding their own path.

It’s the middle where there is the most variability. Some transformational leaders who recognise how the Power Platform can transform the world and deliver value will encourage adoption and even experiment themselves. Others who feel uncertainty. Who may have got to their position through being the expert in that business area or process and don’t understand the platform, don’t understand whether their team should be creating digital solutions.

So what do we do?

Well… As most consultants say… “It depends” 😁

The first step is to recognise that both of these are likely to happen in parallel and acknowledge them, plan for them, and actively look for these superstars / heroes / champion makers and leaders to celebrate them and what they’re doing. Reinforce the behaviours they’re showing and share these stories and the impact they’re having.

We’ll delve into the detail of how we do this through using the Maker Movement and Viral Change in the upcoming posts!