Many of us are still fearful of technology. We like the shiny toy aspect of it and the feeling of being one of the ‘cool kids’ that it generates within us. However, we still fear it as we don’t really understand it. We don’t know how it works, what things are and are not important. It feels too complicated and complex. So we tend to become nervous, fearful or we simply check out and delegate it to others.

When people say, ‘the tech is the easy part’, few believe it. Therefore, we spend a huge amount of time on the technology solution and a lot less on the non-technology aspects of change (or marketing) required to embed the solution in our organisations. If an analysis of time and effort spent would be done, it would look something like this:

We often expend an enormous amount of energy at the technology stage that we ‘run out of gas’ in the stages that follow.

However, the amount of time we spend on building or selecting digital solutions should be, at minimum, inversely proportional to the amount of time we spend on the change process of embedding it in our organisations. The triangle needs to be flipped to look something like:

The technology is the easy part in comparison to the organisational changes required to enable the solution to be embedded and adopted by the organisation. Most of us instinctively know this, however we still behave in ways that look like the first triangle. We know it in our heads, but not in our hearts. We know it to be true, but don’t believe it to be so. Thus, we, like children, tend to respond to the shimmer of the shiny toy, and our fear of the unknown. Instead of focusing on where the change actually happens.

While this is understandable, it is not helpful.

Photo by ryota nagasaka