Change agility at the speed of disruption

Episode 166: Change agility at the speed of disruption

“If we think of change management, it’s like classical music. We have the conductor, everyone has their set role. We have the sheet music in front of us. There has been rehearsal upon rehearsal. Come the day of performance, everyone knows exactly what they are doing and it will unfold. Yes, there will be emotion and adrenaline and all the rest of it, but everyone knows what they’re doing more or less. Change agility is jazz. It’s having stil You may have rehearsed, you have the skills, you know your craft, but in the moment you’re responding to each other. You’re listening, you’re sensing, you’re responding. You’re creating something in the moment.”  Shimrit Janes, DWG Consultant and Researcher

Nancy Goebel
In this episode of Digital Workplace Impact, Shimrit Janes, DWG consultant and researcher, shares key insights from DWG’s latest research entitled Change agility for digital workplace teams: How to thrive in disruptive times. Whether you’re investigating generative AI, organizational restructurings, or evolving ways of working, insights from this research will equip you with strategies to move from surviving disruption to actually thriving within it. And our conversation by extension draws upon insights from that research, including leading theories, practical frameworks and award-winning case studies that we share with you as part of this.

This is Nancy Goebel, DWG’s Chief Executive and host for this conversation. Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by Digital Workplace Group. Join me now in conversation with Shimrit. Happy listening!

Well, hello, everyone. As part of today’s conversation, it is a real joy for me to be able to help bring to life Shimrit’s research on building change agility in the enterprise. And so Shimrit, welcome, welcome to the studio once again.

Shimrit Janes
Hi, Nancy. It’s so lovely to be back and to be able to talk about this research together. I know it’s a topic that you care deeply about and I care deeply about as well. So I’m really looking forward to it and to sharing the findings.

Nancy
This piece of research is near and dear to my heart for many reasons, one of which I’ll signpost. And that is that two years ago, as part of the predictions, I signalled that change agility would become the new social currency of the enterprise. And we started to build a conversation around that topic from there. And, of course, you passionately championed this research and I think it’s always important to set context. And so that’s one bit of context, but I think it’s also important to frame for our audience, what is change agility to start – and then we can branch out from there.

Shimrit
Yeah, absolutely. And again, I’m just so happy to be here and to talk about this together. We’ve had so many kind of private conversations about it and to bring that into this space is lovely.

And so that first question, ‘What is change agility?’, I’m going to challenge it and say there’s an underlying question beneath that, which is ‘What is change?’. I think it’s such an important question for these times, in particular. And you’ve heard me say this many a time, but change is just a natural part of life. It’s kind of woven into the fabric of life. It’s a constant, it always has been. It’s that kind of natural part of what it means to be alive. We change as humans, the environment around us changes, things naturally break down, disintegrate, decay, including technology – as we all know, anyone who has been a practitioner having to deal with tech. Things evolve and grow, the earth turns. I’m in London in the UK and we’re on the cusp of spring and I can see little shoots coming out as winter kind of relinquishes its hold on us. So that idea of change is such a natural part of life. It’s not something you can escape. It’s a given. What is different for these times is we’re in the 21st century is the heartbeat of it is quickening. The pace of change is speeding up. We know that, for example, new technologies, that whole life cycle of new tech and emergent tech is like breakneck speed, like it gives you whiplash almost, the speed at which things are changing. And then we have, you know, the news cycle and how fast that is, we have economic, political, societal shifts and instability. We’ve got ecological instability as well. There are so many things happening at the same time.

Nancy
I guess that just begs the question, if that’s the baseline, then let’s bring it to ‘What is change ability ?’ and then it would be helpful to even dig a little bit deeper and put it in the context of why this idea is so critical for digital workplace leaders and their teams in the now.

Shimrit
Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is the question because in amongst all that change, what is our response? Do we speed up? And I think our stress response can be so naturally we need to go fast as well. And so, for digital workplace teams, they really sit at that intersection of people, technology, business – and they’re exposed to that volatility in a way that I think some others possibly aren’t just because of that technology aspect. And so their ability to adapt to change and kind of experiment and not just have linear hard plans is becoming more and more important.

And there’s this beautiful saying, which is a Yoruba saying, wisdom from Africa, being popularized by a philosopher called Báyò  Akómoláfé. I’ve mentioned this many times in DWG circles, but it’s this saying “The times are urgent, let us slow down” and that ability to take a breath. And so, when we think about change agility, there’s this kind of flow of change that happens. And it’s what I’m about to describe has always been this way, but the pace of things is what makes it so different and it’s how we sense and respond to change.

As you know, there’s a current status quo; there’s how things are right now – the current environment, our knowledge, our capabilities. In theory, it should be relatively stable because it’s how things are right now. And we have this capability of sensing and you know, how are we monitoring and learning from different environments? How are we horizon scanning, seeing what’s coming up while we’re in that status quo?

And then something happens. And in storytelling, there’s this idea of an ‘inciting incident’. It’s this call to action. It’s kind of the crash between the before and after that characters have to respond to. If I think of a couple of examples, you’ve got Katniss in the Hunger Games when her sister gets chosen and it’s kind of like, ‘I volunteer as tribute’. That’s an inciting incident that is begging for something to happen in response. The same in Star Wars: R2D2 with his hallucinate, the holographic message from Princess Leia. It’s a call to action. Something has to change as a result of that moment.

For digital workplace teams, you know, we talk about COVID as the classic one that was an inciting incident that asked for change. But at the same time, it might be budgets changing, it might be organizational change, it might be an emerging new technology like AI that is just begging something to be like a response.

And so when it comes to change, what is our response? How are we assessing what has happened? Do we choose no response? Do we choose a reactive response? Do we choose to be proactive if we have enough time? Even generative? So, if something is far, far on the horizon and we see it coming, do we choose to change things ourselves before we need to? And all of that is impacted by our mindset, our resource, our capability. And in theory, that then eventually leads to a new status quo and a new state. And alongside that, you have this whole emotional journey of change because we’re humans, we’re individuals – and the way that we respond to things is so dependent on so many different things.

And so that question of change agility, which you asked right at the beginning: previously we had episodic change, we had these prolonged periods of stability between those inciting incidents where things were nice and settled. Now we have constant change. We have everything everywhere all at once, overlapping cycles, overlapping flows. One change hasn’t even finished before the next one starts – and it’s constant.

So change agility is in amongst all of that. Do we have the capacity and this ongoing state of readiness for sensing change and then being able to respond flexibly, and adapting as needed, without burning out because we can’t constantly be in this stress-responsive change. So how in amongst all of that, going back to the Yoruba quote, do we take a breath so that we’re not constantly in urgent mode, but slow down just enough to then go fast. And when I think of even, however many years ago, a good few years ago now, when AI was just emerging, I remember EY as an example of sharing that they were able to take a breath, slow down just enough to assess – and then went fast. And it means they’re now in an amazing mature state with their AI.

So, agility doesn’t necessarily mean speed, but it means that adaptivity to be able to adapt and sense what is coming and then decide to move.

Nancy
And one of the things we talked about at that time was sometimes you have to go slow to go fast.

Shimrit
Exactly.

Nancy
That ties up that concept with a little bow! And so there might be some amongst us who are thinking, ‘Hmm, change agility? What, happened to change management?’

And I remember when we were first talking about the prediction I referred to earlier, we talked about the fact that change management was episodic, as you described it, and, you know, when we think about the transformation that IT organizations have gone through and how technology gets deployed in organizations, it used to be that the heavy-lifting had to do with the actual effort required to design, build and deploy. And so it was not uncommon for teams to disappear for a year, 18 months, two years. And then suddenly on the other side, there was a big ‘Tada’, a huge moment when a new piece of software was released into the corporate wild and change management rode off the back of that. So, it was big bang; it was a moment in time where there was concentrated communication and training and a big push until the next wave hit.

And then of course we saw the birth of Agile as a methodology. And suddenly we moved into a world of minimum viable products and spinning change or a spiral of change going from one moment to the next, to the next. You know, that was our frame of reference. But in the research you also talk about traditional change management just not being enough anymore. So let’s talk a little bit about what’s breaking down, what needs to evolve with that in mind.

Shimrit
You know, you spoke about, as you say the ‘old way’ of doing things – that waterfall method of technology development, where it was very step change, it was very planned. You had a beautiful Gantt chart with everything in rows and it was coloured, and you might have a line alongside that said change management was a very lovely planned thing. And you knew when it started and you knew when it ended. And yes, wisdom said that it maybe wasn’t that simple and real life was never that simple because we’re humans. But that was kind of how it worked in practice. I remember when I was a practitioner, that’s how we saw things. It’s how we dealt with things.

And that change model, as so many of the change models that so many of us know, is rooted in a model from 1947 by a guy called Kurt Lewin. Whether this language was exactly his or not, but there’s this whole idea of ‘Unfreeze, change, refreeze’, which underpins so many of those traditional change models where those moments of status quo are when things are frozen. And then when it is time for change that you have planned beautifully, you unfreeze, and you have a nice period of managed change and then you freeze again. And it fits that flow of change that I just described beautifully, because you have a lovely linear path through change in theory.

What has changed is everything that we’ve just said, that everything or everything all at once, where you just don’t have the time to plan in that way. You do sometimes, depending on what is happening, but a lot of the time it’s not enough. And if I think of, you know, so we had like the PDSA cycle, the ADKAR model, Kotter’s 8 steps – these are all things I learned – I was going to say growing up, but as a practitioner – these are the models that I was pointed towards when I asked about change. They all have their own variations, but at the heart of them is this idea of ‘Unfreeze, change, refreeze.’

But I think if I think of an example from real life or an analogy or a metaphor, that I know will appeal to you as well, Nancy, is if we think of change management, it’s like classical music. We have the conductor. Everyone has their set role. We have the sheet music in front of us. There has been rehearsal upon rehearsal. Come the day of performance, everyone knows exactly what they are doing and it will unfold. Yes, there will be emotion and adrenaline and all the rest of it, but everyone knows what they’re doing, more or less. Change agility is jazz. It’s having still, you may have rehearsed, you have the skills, you know your craft. But in the moment, you’re responding to each other. You’re listening, you’re sensing, you’re responding. You’re creating something in the moment. And I think a lot of this conversation, we have a tendency to go binary with our thinking. Is it change management or change agility? Is it one or the other? Is change agility an evolution from change management? Does it replace it?

And I think again, this is almost like a symptom of our times, this either or thinking, whereas the reality is we can have both. There are going to be some projects, digital workplace projects, where we know exactly what we’re doing. It needs that change management approach with a structured rollout where we have our ADKAR in place and all the rest. And at the same time, it’s not enough because of all the reasons that we’ve said. And so how do we that muscle, that change agility, to be able to respond quickly and to be able to flex and to be able to experiment and iterate and not hold the reins of change so tightly to ourselves as well.

If I think of another analogy that I make in the research, it’s going to be a sporting analogy, with apologies. But if you think about sports, you have the game plan, you know exactly what the plan for the field is. You’ve done the plays, the drills, all the rest of it. All of that is meaningless if your body isn’t ready to run, if your body isn’t ready to adapt and be flexible in the moment and respond to things on the field. You need both.

So, the answer is our times need more than managed change. They need that agile responsiveness of sensing and responding as well.

Nancy
So what you’re telling me is this is a ‘yes and’ moment.

Shimrit
Always!

Nancy
One of my favourite expressions, right? And so, it’s art meets science, it’s form meets function. And figuring out the balance that’s needed across one and the other, based on the moment.

Shimrit
Precisely that, exactly. I’m a big fan of the yes and as well instead of the either or.

Nancy
As part of this research, you also talk about three dimensions that are part of this change agility paradigm: personal, relational and strategic. Can you take us through these and how they work together?

Shimrit
Yeah, absolutely. Our Director of Research, Elizabeth Marsh, will know this well because she and I have spoken about it many times – when you are doing research, there is the rabbit hole of research. You get pulled in to all the ways and all the things that you are finding, and the question as a researcher is how to make sense of what you’re finding, how to give it structure and meaning. And so, as I was going through the research and the various studies and the case studies and all the things that I was finding, one of the things that did emerge was this idea of different dimensions of change agility that comes through in some of the studies, the research, the kind of practitioner side of things as well. And so, what I have done in the research is bucket the different dimensions of change agility, because there are so many, but categorize them into those three buckets: personal, relational and strategic.

So, when we think of personal change agility, this is all about the individual. This is like me as a person, as a digital workplace leader, as a digital workplace team member, as a C-suite person, as a user who is trying to get my head around AI or this new tool, or hearing that there’s going to be a new tool implemented. To what extent do I have that muscle for change agility within me and nurtured?

We often talk about growth mindset versus fixed mindset is something that’s spoken about a lot within kind of behavioural science. And when we are faced with something, do we have an expansive approach of like, what are the opportunities or do we close down and constrict and go, no, nothing can change, things must stay as they are. So how, on a personal level – again this is a mixture of both digital workplace teams themselves so that they can foster this within them. And also to what extent can you help your users foster this through digital dexterity learning and all that kind of stuff. So there are different parts of what make up your own personal change agility. There’s seven that I identified. I can’t go through every single one, but they are in the paper, which can be downloaded. But, just really quickly, these are: flexibility, speed, adaptability, continuous learning, resilience, tolerance of ambiguity and proactiveness. All of these can be fostered in different ways. There are ways of building that muscle, testing yourself, being brave, being safe as well, and doing it in kind of lab environments so that you’re able to do it without feeling at risk.

But one that I really wanted to focus on was tolerance of ambiguity. Because one of the challenges of living in this VUCA world, this volatile, uncertain world that we have, is that we’re often being asked to act without having all the answers, without having all the information at our fingertips. And depending on your tolerance and your kind of resilience for ambiguity, some people feel comfortable and safe and like they can make decisions once they have all the answers laid out in front of them – and I’m a researcher, I understand that tendency, you want to gather all the information, you want to make sure you’ve done all the analysis, you’ve planned everything, thought about every eventuality and you can make an informed decision. Change agility and our current state of things means you don’t always have that luxury. And so how are we fostering that tolerance of ambiguity within ourselves? It becomes a superpower to be able to act without necessarily having all the information. And it’s such a fine line between acting before you have what you need and actually being stupidly risky and you need to wait just that little bit more, going back to that idea of urgency and speed. And then that sweet spot of like, ‘Okay, I have enough, I can act now’.

And so, for example, it interacts with some of the others, like experimentation and psychological safety, but starting to test yourself in ways as a team to say do we have enough information to make a decision now, is a way of fostering that and to start doing it in small places and small decisions where maybe the risk isn’t as high, the consequences of it going wrong aren’t as high, you can start to build that muscle.

So that’s an example of personal change agility – and I know it’s something that you foster within yourself. You and I, when we speak about AI – I’ve seen you, we’ve spoken about you fostering it within yourself. It’s like, I might not have all the answers, but let’s get enough just to be able to act. And you have that spirit of experimentation and resilience and continuous learning, even when it feels uncomfortable. It’s something that you’ve encouraged in me as well. So, I think at the personal change agility level, they’re some of the things to think about.

Nancy
Yeah, I was just thinking about the idea of sometimes you need to balance progress over perfection and have the right feedback loops along the way across your stakeholder set so that you can keep things moving forward. So that was just my one ‘yes and’ moment.

Shimrit
Exactly. The progress over perfection, think, is a huge thing. It’s something that’s come up again and again in our conversations and in the research as well.

And then, if we go from the individual, we then have a relational change agility. And, if personal change agility is all about that inner experience of change, then relational is all about how others are being engaged and empowered by change and what happens in the space between us when we think about change. So, for example, is trust being nurtured and maintained in amongst all the kind of wildness of what is happening? Is leadership capability being distributed and decentralized rather than hoarded within just a few people’s hands?

So, it’s really about kind of loosening the reins of who has the power to act and the agency to act in amongst change happening. If you think again about that change management role model, it’s top-down, people know what they’re doing, but with change agility and that sensing and responding, the signals of something changing can come from anywhere across the organization. And so do we have that power and empowerment and agency to help people be part of the change itself and to signal when something is happening?

Amongst these things are things like collaboration. Do we have cross-functional collaboration, which we know for digital workplace teams can be crucial? Are you collaborating with other parts of the organization to help bring the digital workplace alive and to have those perspectives as well?

We have empowerment, responsiveness, psychological safety, which is this idea of are we free, to make mistakes together, to experiment together? Or do I feel unsafe to be able to say to experiment or even to say, ‘I don’t agree with what’s happening here’ or ‘I have a different perspective’? That ability to put a hand up and disagree with someone is such an indicator of psychological safety. So, in your digital workplace team, I come back to AI and ethics. Do you have the ability for someone to say, ‘This doesn’t feel right’, for example? And that’s an example of relational change agility. It’s just being able to have those conversations to then be able to go fast again.
I guess there’s one as well I just wanted to focus on, which was this idea of empowerment. To what extent – and again this feels like classic digital workplace knowledge – but to what extent are employees empowered during the change process and part of that co-creation? You mentioned feedback loops: how fast is that feedback loop and to what extent are you engaging employees in the process? Is change being done to them, especially with AI right now, or is their voice a part of that? And so that’s an example of relational change agility. It’s how we as a collective can move together and be agile together when there are so many moving parts amongst that, because each one of those individuals has their own personal relationship with change that you’re then blending together. And so these are ways in which you can start to kind of build that collective change agility as well.

Nancy
And so we have one more dimension to talk about – and that’s the strategic.

Shimrit
Yes, the strategic. So, personal change agility is all about the inner. Relational agility is all about interpersonal. And then you have strategic agility, which is much more that organizational level and how change is being sensed and responded at that level as well at the organizational level. And so this might be really understanding the opportunities, the threats, that are happening within the wider system, what is happening in your industry, what is happening at a global level that could be impacting the digital workplace, the organization as a whole. And so, for these, you have things like a sensing ability, that horizon scanning, that future thinking, for example, systems thinking. So what extent are you thinking about all the complex parts that fit together to make a system? Good decision making. The number of times that we have seen, I know, that governance can slow down decision-making and bottleneck it, and things become sludgy almost, that you aren’t able to move at speed. So, is decision-making supported through agile governance rather than slowed down by it?

And then we have alignment. Is the digital workplace aligned with what the organization is trying to do? We have innovative experimentation, consistent action as well. Do people do what they say they are going to do? Or if they don’t, is there transparency around why that is? All of these things help breed a culture, an organizational culture, a strategic change agility as well.

So, you know me, I love a nested model where you have the individual, the personal, and then you go out and you have the relational and then the organizational as well. And change agility works on those same three levels as well. And I think with decision-making, it’s back to what we were saying, you can have that knee jerk response where it’s decided too fast and actually you would have been served by taking a breath. But at the same time, you have decision-making that is too slow, there’s too many gates that need to be unlocked and gone through in order to get to a decision and actually maybe the person making the decision isn’t the one closest with the knowledge. So, to what extent is decision-making allowing an agile approach as well? And to what extent is it slowing down would be a really good example of that.

Nancy
So one of the things I’m thinking about is how some of these forces come into play in the real world. Very recently, I was talking to a leader at a member organization and she was sharing the fact that, you know, in an organization that’s large and complex and global, rolling out enterprise AI in the form of Copilot is a pretty significant undertaking. And one of the realities that’s come into play is that sometimes when you have a groundbreaking change, you find that leaders surface who themselves are change-blockers, either because of emotion, fear, perception about risk, etc.

I have to wonder if it’s a good time for us to start to move into some discussion around the practical enablers that help leaders and teams actually build these dimensions of agility day to day and help influence the ability for people to move through change.

Shimrit
Yes, so you have all those lovely dimensions which are like, this is how it should look, it’s what good looks like. And, as you just shared, there’s then that question of underpinning it. What are the things that actually enable that to happen?

There were kind of five rough areas that came through in the research and one of them was leadership and culture – this idea of empathetic leadership, transparent communication, a culture of experimentation. And those leaders who find that challenging, can they be supported and coached to start to evolve and shift their way of being? I think coaching probably isn’t spoken about enough within some of these circles, but when we’re asking people to build this new muscle of change agility, that’s not a switch that gets flipped on and off. It is a muscle that needs to be coached.

So when we talk about empathetic leadership – and I know again it’s something that is close to your heart – to what extent is the leader standing alongside and sometimes behind people, not always out in front, and listening to what their pains are? Do they have the humility, the humbleness to be able to hear that and to communicate transparently about what is happening?

I think in the absence of communication in that vacuum, so much can happen around fear – and we haven’t gotten into it, but one of the psychological moves through change very often aligns with the grief cycle, that grief of losing the known and moving into the unknown. And that applies to leaders equally. So, to what extent are those people not being judged necessarily for being a blocker and using that language, but being understood as someone who is going through that grief cycle themselves, essentially. To what extent can leaders support each other through that? So, in the digital workplace team, if you find someone who has that – I know from my own experience the temptation can be to get frustrated – but how do you practice empathy with that person, listen to them and then start to understand their pains and start to bring them along? And if they genuinely can’t, how do you help them in that way anyway, just to sit with their grief without necessarily needing to fix it and then work out what needs to happen? That’s an example of leadership and culture.

There are so many other things around that as well. I mentioned agile governance, that was kind of part of the strategy and governance part. To what extent is your governance too rigid to allow change to happen and where can flexibility be allowed? I think we all love rules that tell us what we can and can’t do, but when can they be broken? Again, coming back to jazz, the idea that you know the rules, but you also know when they can be broken. You know enough, I think, is a really important aspect of this and when they need to start to evolve and adapt. And are we data informed? Are we using the data we have at our fingertips to help us make those decisions and have external insight as well?

And then we have some of the classics. We have, you know, digital and AI literacy when we think about people. We have champion networks, which can be a really great way of fostering agility within an organization because leadership change is rooted at the local level and so it is far more responsive than if it’s all hoarded in the middle.

Do we have structured learning pathways, reward and recognition? There are some beautiful examples – and Vodafone is an example of this that we’ll get into – of AI learning pathways that take people almost through that cycle of grief. So it helps them understand and build that ability to know, ‘Okay, it’s all right to go fast now because I have just about enough information to go fast and then to be able to respond more quickly.’

And then for technology, do we have integrated digital platforms that allow speed, that don’t always have friction, that allow us to go fast? Are we making use of AI and automation in the right ways? There’s this idea of AI as vending machine or thought partner. Do we know when we need AI as just a vending machine so that we can go fast, that it can give us the answer quickly? Do we know when we want to slow down a bit and actually have that little bit of friction where AI is our thought partner to help us check our thinking? And that can be another way of fostering agility is knowing when to flex between those different ways of thinking about AI. And we spoke about feedback loops. Do we have the right feedback loops, the right analytics in place for our digital workplace to be able to sense and respond what is happening?

And this is one of my favourites: you then have the ways of working and the enablers there and this idea of micro-change practices. And I think, for change agility, day to day in our conversations, in the way that we’re working, the way that we are with each other, when we think about the digital workplace, are we testing ourselves with little micro-changes to build our resilience to change? Are we allowing ourselves to have that experimentation to feel uncomfortable and test how we respond to it? And that can be such a brilliant way of building that muscle so that when a larger inciting incident happens, we know that we can sit with the discomfort and we can survive it. And this is kind of psychology now rather than digital workplace! But I think it’s a crucial element of making sure we’re building the muscle day to day, not just waiting for something to happen to us.

And, you know, amongst this as well is things like cross-functional collaboration that we spoke about, the scenario planning and foresight. We have a beautiful research paper looking at future thinking, which feeds into this as well. Are we constantly testing, thinking about what different scenarios can be, planning them? And they may not come to fruition, but we’ve at least done some thinking about what might happen. And then be generative or be proactive about making that future happen as well. So we’re part of the change that is happening, not just always allowing it to happen to us.

So, there are a few, I know that micro-change practices are something you’ve spoken about particularly as well.

Nancy
Certainly, within the prediction set for 2026, looking at all of the micro moves that are enabling large-scale change to happen. And you mentioned earlier coaching and that fits into that equation alongside these micro-change practices.

The other thing that came back to me in a flash of memory is that, as you pull this thread of the jazz reference through this conversation and we’re thinking about leadership and culture as part of this paradigm, I couldn’t help but think back to, it may have been my first edition of the Diary of a She-E-O, wherein I talked about the fact that I had gone to see Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. And I was so struck by the fact that he leads that orchestra from the back row with the trumpet players, because he is one. So he’s practitioner meets leader. And I’m thinking that we need to dust off that edition of the diary and share that along with this fantastic piece of research as part of introducing those vignettes where people are exemplifying, and organizations are exemplifying, how you translate these concepts into practice.

And so that’s my lead into saying, I know that in the course of this exploration around change agility, you explored what this looks like and I would love to hear some examples of these living organizations that are helping people embrace change and adopt new ways of working. You talked earlier about EY and we know that Vodafone was an important example in our awards programme this past year. Share with us some of these examples of what good looks like.

Shimrit
Yes, and I fully, when I was thinking about jazz versus classical music idea, had that Diary of a She-E-O firmly in my head because I knew it would resonate with you as well – and it’s a great resource to point to.

And so for examples, the paper itself looks at, for example, EY, at Vodafone, at Hearst as well as another, and I think there are a few other vignettes within there as well. But one in particular I wanted to pull out was Vodafone. And Vodafone, I know, won the Digital Workplace Group Award last year. They won ‘AI Enablement at Scale’. And I remember always being blown away by their approach to things. It was always so human-rooted as well as being very smart on the technology side as well. It was a great example of how those things can be blended together. And one of the amazing things – and you mentioned Copilot – one of the amazing things about what they did is the speed and scale at which they were able to respond to Copilot becoming available and not just roll it out willy-nilly, but to make it impactful in the way that they did it.

And so, they made a really bold move in 2024. They decided to roll out 68,000 Microsoft Copilot licences, which is no small feat. Because if you think of your own experience with AI, it’s that 10 times 68,000 people. All those things that we’ve just been talking about, about personal change agility, relational change agility, all of that is suddenly in your lap. And the question is, how do you respond? How do you make that not a scary experience for people but help them be agile with the change? And they did it in such a wonderful way that it was this mixture of fully focused on helping people develop their own personal change agility. So they had, for example, wonderful ‘Ways of Working’ campaigns, they had skill labs, they had a network of more than 1,000 champions that were helping people through that process. And then, at the same time, they had good governance and cross-functional collaboration. And this might just sound like normal change management, but I think the fact that they were able to see what was coming, that sense muscle, quickly make a decision around what they wanted to be able to do, and then roll it out is the agile aspect of this. And then it’s also fostering agility amongst their people at the same time by supporting them through the change process and that kind of emotional journey of change. So, for example, they had this approach for adoption that was all those things that we said focused on enablement, focused on engaging, focused on localization as well. There was this huge emphasis on experimentation and rapid iteration as well. And so, it’s this example that agility is built through culture and building capability. It’s not just process.

And the impact was huge. They had people actually experiencing and using Copilot in a way that was impactful, not just a nice to have. So Vodafone is a really great example and we’ve got a little bit more about them on the DWG website as well that we can link to.

EY is one I come back to again and again as well. The fact that they had this agile governance in place meant when it came to AI they were able to experiment and experiment fast because they had the muscle already to fall back on they had built.

Nancy
Well, these are certainly powerful reference points and there’s certainly a lot more details in the research about each of these. I also just recently had a catchup with Carolin Lücker from Vodafone on Digital Workplace Impact. And so we’ll keep adding layers to that story and the learnings that are embedded throughout as part of that conversation as well.

I guess I’m struck by another metaphor. I know whenever we’re in conversation, I tend to think in terms of living examples. And, of course, you know I grew up in New York City. And so one of the things that you’ll see quite often in schoolyards or at the park or even on streets is people jumping rope, double-Dutch style, which is two ropes. And so, when I think about change and the first time you try to jump into two ropes moving at the same time, it’s a leap of courage. It’s something that you have to think of very strategically. You have to be in sync with those who are running the ropes in that moment. And so that’s a backdrop for me saying, for someone who’s jumping into double Dutch for the first time, where should they start?

Shimrit
Yeah. And it can be overwhelming when you suddenly feel like you need to rethink your whole relationship with change because it is so personal at the end of the day. So one of the things that we’ve suggested is all of these dimensions can be used as a self-diagnostic. And that’s not to say it’s a scorecard, but it’s a tool to really spark reflection and alignment. And it can be used on an individual level, so just you as a digital workplace leader, as someone as part of the digital workplace, to look down these and just say, ‘Okay, to what extent do I feel I have this? To what extent is this present within me? Or to what extent am I comfortable with this? And to what extent is it not present for me and is it maybe a gap that I could work on?’ And then you can do that across your team’s strengths. You can start to understand where your gaps are, that maybe some training, some coaching, some further learning, can help start to build that muscle and maybe start to run experiments as a team in safe ways where the risk isn’t too high to see how some of these things feel. I would absolutely say, as a starting point, just start with, even if it’s just a very quick rundown, all of the dimensions, just be like, ‘Okay, scale of one to five, how comfortable am I with these?’ and do that as a team. That can be a great way of doing it. And then start to build your action plan. So what is our current state? What is our desired state? What’s one simple action that we can take to improve this?

So, say for example, speed is an issue, decisions are often quite slow because authority of who can make a decision is unclear and your desired state is a clear decision-making process where you know you can make decisions quickly, maybe you can just clarify who makes the final call for something and define an escalation process. At what point can somebody just make a decision themselves and at what point does it need to be escalated? And what is that process? So that’s an example of maybe identifying a gap or something that doesn’t feel as strong as it could be, and then just defining a result that can lead to a more agile way of being.

So that is something that I would say is just get started by knowing your current state and where your gaps are, both personally and as a team.

Nancy
And because this is such a simple diagnostic, it’s something that you can come back to and take a fresh start look and see what’s needed next. And therein lies the power to my mind.

Shimrit
And if it’s overwhelming to look at all of them, have a skim and go by instinct, like which ones do you find yourself drawn to? And then be curious about that as well, I would say you don’t need to tackle and solve all of this at the same time but build your action plan.

Nancy
So, you know, I always love to cap off a discussion by saying, ‘What have we missed?’ Is there a final thought or reflection that you want to share to tie this conversation up with a little bow?

Shimrit
Yeah, I have to come back to the quote, “The times are urgent, let us slow down”. I come back to this so often. I think the feeling of urgency can cause us to kind of light the match immediately, that spark, and to kind of set things on fire before we’ve really thought about what we need to do. But, really thinking through where can we take a breath is, I think, my final message, really. There’s a beautiful poem by Alex L. called Rebirth that goes, “there will be moments when you will bloom fully and then wilt only to bloom again. If we can learn anything from flowers, it’s that resilience is born even when we feel like we’re dying.”

And I think just becoming comfortable with that cycle of change is a huge thing. So just understanding what your own current tolerance and resilience is for change and being curious about how you tend to react to different types of change can be the best first thing you as an individual can do to really start to understand where am I uncomfortable? Where do I tend to resist change? And when do I lean into it?

And then the rest will flow from there.

Nancy
Well, we end where we began and that’s a perfect loop to tie into a discussion about change. I know I’ve been in sponge mode throughout this sharing moment, Shimrit. This feels like such a powerful and supportive and enabling approach to helping people translate this concept of change agility into something approachable and navigable, and a support system for organizations at large. And while we couch it as something that is specifically for digital workplace leaders and their teams, I think it has far-reaching use even beyond that. And so, I know that this is going to be one of those research reports that people carry around with them and will pull it out in different ways to really help take these moments of change and navigate them.

So, I know we’re just about at the end of our time together and I have to extend a big thank you to you for helping to challenge our thinking and our approaches to change. Gosh, I’m looking forward to seeing how in practice, we start to see members embracing these concepts in new ways and continuing to build on the vignettes and the case studies as we go along – and, sharing begets more sharing, in other words.

Shimrit
Yes, and thank you so much for inviting me in to be able to share everything and I’m excited to be able to get their hands on the report and to really get into the detail of it. It was a fun one to do, so thank you.

Nancy
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