It’s One Thing to Learn AI … It’s Another to Be a Change Leader

Not news!  AI is the dominating change force. Not news unless you’re living under a rock.  But have you heard what “change experts” say leaders must now pay particular attention to? I made a little list of what’s popping up.  Ask yourself: Is any of this news to me? 

Regarding organizations …

• Managing change must be an organizational capability.
• Managing change must be embedded in how work gets done.
• Adaptive organizations are the ones that will succeed.
• Silos are out, cross-functional teams are in to handle/optimize change.         

Regarding leadership…                                                          

• All leaders are change leaders.
• Leaders are now freed up to coach and mentor.
• Leadership ethics and judgment are key.    
• Trust is key during the change process.
• Communication is key during the change process. 
• Leaders need to empathize with their team’s experience of change. 
• Change fatigue is real. 

Regarding process…

• Integrating processes at the enterprise level is essential.   
• Automating workflows calls for integrating teams and distributed team leadership.
• Continuous change is in — ‘unfreeze-change-refreeze’ is out.
• Change must be results-oriented, not “activity” oriented.

Tell me something I don’t know!  Is there anyone out there who hasn’t already heard this stuff – a lot?  This list is change management litany — like a prayer we know by heart but whose meaning we’ve lost track of.  We say the words when prompted … worried … or challenged.  And in all-hands meetings.  Otherwise, well … it’s: Train. Deploy.  Adopt. Make it stick.  Move on.  Oops.  Another change.  This time faster.

Spoiler Alert! These imperatives are proliferating as if they’re new — even revelatory. They are not.  They’re “change management 101.” They’ve always been true.  Ahem. How to get people to change?  That hasn’t changed.  How people feel about change?  Hasn’t changed.  How to plan and implement change? Engage stakeholders?  Also, not new.  Why?  Because these are about how people “are” — not just about what people “do.”  Because we are “being” humans while we are “doing” things.   And because the “being” piece is deep and complex — in real life, nevermind in organizational life — it’s easier — and way understandable — to stay surface and just worry about the doing part.  The tasks.  The milestones and dashboards.  The metrics and reports and next steps, for example.    

What’s missing??  It’s the learning component. How we learn — or that we choose to learn — is wrapped up in who we are — each of us, as an individual.  To do what this list calls for, we need to pay attention to how people take things in, chew on them, internalize them or not, and then act (behave) as a result. And a reminder, learning is more than “training.” We talk a LOT about culture: Learning’s the door that opens into the room we call culture change.

What change leaders aren’t being asked to learn. Right now, incentives and bonuses and performance measures are about how quickly change leaders can mobilize teams to learn and use AI tools. But NOT about how to be a change leader.  Or what it means to become an adaptive organization.  Or how to assemble, sustain, or disband an IPT — an integrated product/project team. Or what it takes to push leadership capability down and into front line teams where make-or-break is all about delivering coordinated and meaningful customer experience.   

It’s not resistance — it’s learning. Consider this: You’re asked to stop doing/thinking/being what you’ve learned to do/think/be and now learn a new way of doing and/or thinking and/or being. You must re-calibrate: Ok, here’s what I know — or knew.  Here’s what’s different.  But, how different?  Is what I knew wrong now?  Or …?  It isn’t “just” the relinquishing of what “is” that may cause resistance — it is how daunting I as an individual may see the learning ahead that is required of me — to keep pace, to keep my job, to remain relevant.  That doesn’t happen by flipping a switch or sending a memo.

Then there’s the people part.  It’s big too.  I might have to “do” what I do with different people, maybe a different boss or team.  Who ARE these people?  Will I like them?  Will they like me?  How will this all work?  What are the new rules?  Expectations?  Etc.  This is about learning too. And acculturation.  And it’s this new way until the next change and things re-align again. The AI change roadmap isn’t designed with “rest stops” to aid the change traveler. It’s get on-board and let’s roll — now.  There’s your train-and-deploy in a nutshell.

Learning and behavior. We KNOW communicating is key.  We KNOW building trust is essential. We KNOW change is a capability (not a project).  So, if we know these things, why do we still have to work so hard at them?  Because these elements are behavioral. And behavior’s one of the hardest things in the world to change. It won’t be “doing the work“ that challenges change leaders — it will be being the person who can lead others through the learning that change requires.  Learning is, after all, the process by which things actually change.  

Don’t we have this down by now?  No.  We don’t.  There was Agile.  DevOps.  MBSE.  And now AI.  More’s coming — different is coming.  These are the mechanics.  We’re good mechanics.  But the real variables are human.  These are the dynamics of change. We will always need to be working on these – they are where learning and leading make the difference.  For all of us.

 Nina Kern is principal of InterrogativesWork, LLC, a change advisory service dedicated to helping clients and consultants plan and implement organizational change. She has supported a wide variety of organizational change efforts — from digital transformations and functional re-alignments to the stand-up of enterprise risk management programs, PMOs, performance improvement initiatives, org-wide policy and culture change, and more. She has an MS in Organization Development, an MA in Communications, graduated from both the Johns Hopkins Fellows in Change Management Program and Georgetown University’s McDonough School’s Change Management Advanced Practitioner Program (CMAP), and is ProSci trained.  More of Nina’s writings on organizational change can be found on GovLoop, Change Management Review and Government Executive.

Photo Credit: Jorge Urosa, Pexels