It has become a necessity for organizations to implement technologies in their work. The evolution of technologies has started with technical needs, but nowadays, every sphere of expertise needs technologies to survive and stay in the long-term game.
We have implemented technologies in the finance processes as a traditional add-on to manufacturing. We use them in medical and pharmaceutical areas, train people, analyze masses of data, and help ourselves make the best in class decisions. Technologies are even affecting our jobs. Many jobs have been transformed, with the need to introduce technologies and complicate the process. Jobs are constantly evolving, and technologies take an immense amount of guilt for that.
While it has become a norm to use technologies in organizational structure, there has been created a new constant in time to guarantee change will happen successfully. While in a constant state of evolution, jobs need more than ever technology if people want to survive in them and deliver results in time.
After that lyric deflection, the most common question is identifying the best technology to help yourself and the business change and grow exponentially.
As usual, there are many lists to help you understand what you as a leader and your organization need to implement the best in class technology to guarantee your and your organization’s future.
Analyzing more than two hundred examples of lists on what to do to ensure that I will only spend my company’s money after upgrading the current state of jobs and results, I have found a simple pattern that flows through all of them. With colleagues and fellow organizational psychologists from seven other countries, we have collected information about the list leaders create before choosing the best technology to help them and their teams and organizations move forward. But, again, the pattern was the same(except for one country in Asia).
Here is what we found out. First, the repeat of the primary milestones lowers long lists to four different categories:
Identification of issues and challenges
Only some companies have the same challenge as others around them. No matter the similarities in the environment, the challenges every company or organization faces are structured toward the internal culture and organizational design, unique for them. Issues and challenges are the milestones that help companies step on high ground and start implementing the best technology for themselves. Without getting to the root of the issues, there is no promising future for the solutions you may choose as a leader after that. The list of issues and challenges may be short or longer than you expected, but the real value for the leader and the organization is created only after the most comprehensive list of both. This list is a prerequisite for making the right decisions and investing resources in the right path.
Evidence for issues and challenges
Often, what inexperienced employees and leaders do is see some reason and start searching for a solution at first sight. What may look like an issue or a challenge can be only the first step or the first element of a much different topic. The fundamental nature of the casque or the accurate description of the challenge may be other than what the leader and the people around them have expected. However, great problem solvers have one common thing that connects them. Everyone searches for the most comprehensive list of evidence to prove the issue’s nature and the challenge’s essence before working on how to solve it.
For example, I recently identified an issue between two teams in a vast company from the FMCG industry. They look like two different companies living under the roof of the third company. Leaders of the company have easily labeled that as a cultural discrepancy. Half of both team members were “confirmed” as negative, non-cooperative, and lacking communication skills and fundamental values that the company has introduced. But going deeper showed that the only missing thing was a straightforward process and role mapping to help both teams work together with no or less stress. After creating that simple tool, things have turned in a different, more positive direction.
And I only collected more evidence on what was happening to help me create a working solution.
Without enough evidence to prove or reject what is happening, there must be no next step if the leader wants to avoid creating other issues and building on challenges.
Implications of new skills for the future
You have the issues, challenges, and evidence you could have collected, and now you are ready to move on. Many leaders have failed because they have focused too much on the past and have forgotten about the future. If a leader plans to introduce a new system, tool, process, or something else and relies on what has happened, they only create an outdated solution. The third group of questions must focus on what this solution will add to the s value in the future. How to predict that value? Well, as a leader, you need to work with a crystal ball or analyze the current state, identify what needs to be changed (issues and challenges), collect enough evidence to prove that you are correct, and add your vision of the future how the new job profile of each role will look, and how this new look will affect productivity, efficiency, and organizations results as a whole. That creates the framework for the future skills people will need and a specific place for the technology to support that turnaround in the best way. The new abilities define the circle of possible technical and other solutions. Without that analysis in place, no matter the nature of the technology to be presented, it will hurt more than create value.
Choice based on logical win
Here is where the leader dives into the sea of technical solutions. Every solution creates excellent value, so how to choose? Having all the other analyses and information before that step is the best way to develop a logical win-win step for everyone. With the list of all elements collected up to now, the leader only needs to make one last comparison – if the choice is a winner or will take the company and the team to the next big challenge and won’t solve any of the issues identified and confirmed.
Have a positive outcome in mind? – Then what are you waiting for? Grab the new technology, implement it, and enjoy the positives in the future. The logical win defines how the leader must act when bringing new technology in-house. Winning logically in the head of the leader, the future for the decision is much brighter. Then, convinced that the decision is correct, the leader may start selling it to others.
IN CONCLUSION:
Selling a new technology to an organization is always a tuff task. No matter if the organization is embracing change or is playing rigid toward it, the outcome is defined by how much the leader believes in the new technology. The truth is that not feeling the new and people easily spot the change, and what may be considered a positive move may turn into a minor disaster. Having the right attitude, being prepared, and planning are prerequisites for a positive outcome with the change leaders want to introduce in their teams and organization.
The Human place 