Viral Change
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
Holistic Low-Code Enablement - Blog structure and navigation — EmPOWER Your World
I’ve mentioned the concept of Viral Change in previous posts - This is a way of leveraging ‘peer to peer’ networks and the fact that people often copy people like them to drive adoption.
Let’s have a look at how it might look different in an organisation through a scribble!
On the left is a ‘top-down’ change which is cascaded down through change champions and / or leadership layers. Perhaps there’s a pilot initially, lessons are learned, plans are refined, and the approach is scaled through the organisation.
On the right is a Viral Change approach where relationships across the organisation are the method of propagation. People who have a good experience tell their friends or colleagues, or who’s success has been shared, inspires others to investigate, to experiment, to follow their path and recreate the success they’ve had… to learn! And to tell, encourage, and support, others!
We’re going to dig into this a bit more and think about how this works across an organisation and how we can use it in the context of Power Platform adoption and enablement but first I’m going to show you Viral Change in action in 3 minutes with a great video I stumbled across!
This video brings to life what we’re trying to do by using Viral Change to create pull and attract people to the Power Platform! We want people to see what’s being done, how someone is doing it, recognise the value in doing it, join in and become part of something, and to call to their friends and colleagues to encourage them to join too, and where possible to have fun doing it too! But how?
Let’s start by looking at how change is often performed where we’re pushing something out across an organisation. A change of process perhaps, or a replacement system?
We’ll set a vision and strategy for what we’re doing, why we’re doing it. We’ll work out a roadmap of activities for how we’ll do it. We’ll identify change agents in various target groups through the organisation and explain what we’re doing and get their input and ideas. We’ll train and educate them on the change so they’re ‘experts’ and can help others. We might run some pilots on our roll out approach and get some learnings and amend our approach… We may then scale across the organisation using our network of change agents.
We’ll measure our progress and impact across different areas, collate it, report on it at SteerCo or Project governance meeting, and we’ll deliver that change with varying level of success until the project comes to an end.
We’ve seen the shirtless dancing guy strutting his funky moves and others joining in and getting the same value… But how might that translate into an organisation?
Well we still need that same vision, and a strategy. We still need to understand our KPIs to measure our success. We still need OKRs to make sure we’re working on things in our roadmap that align to the objectives we’re trying to achieve. But we might do something different after that…
In many organisations I’ve worked with there are already people using the Power Platform (even when they say ‘no, there’s no-one using Power Platform yet because we’ve not rolled it out…’) These people are important! They’re our explorers! Our Innovators! People who have learned about the platform and gone investigating and experimenting! We want more of them!
Viral Change says that we want to find the most highly connected people across the organisation to be our influencers, to talk to people, tell them about our change and show them how to copy and follow. But what if those people aren’t Power Platform whizzes? Or don’t want to be? Well then we need to MAKE our explorers and innovators into highly connected people in our org!
We can make them highly connected by making them famous in their organisation. By telling their story, by shouting about their achievements, by posting about the solutions they’ve created and problems they’ve solved, by chatting about the leaders they are… By sharing their message and story of how they’ve started to a wide audience but especially to forums, meetings, communities of ‘people like then’ - similar roles, levels of org, part of the organisation.
From this story telling we want people to see the kudos and recognition that they’re getting, and how they’re enjoying their role more, how they’re learning new skills, how they’re disrupting how things are done in their area… and inspire people to find out more and to follow their trail of breadcrumbs and start their own journey but also to bring these people together through the community to help each other and answer each other’s questions and help each other solve problems, build solutions, learn, teach, support, and share!
Through these behaviours and creating that culture of sharing and supporting and lowering the barrier to entry our number of people in our community grows, our number of makers grows, the number of solutions and problems solved grows … and our vision is delivered as our impact spreads through the organisation! This is how we can use viral change!
