Change is hard - but not always risky

If you make everybody change the side of the road they drive on overnight, how risky is the change?

There are plenty of surveys and other evidence that say the biggest barriers to successful digital transformation is change management, and organisational culture, rather than lack of IT capacity or capability. And in the education sector especially, that is compounded by a risk aversion that often makes it easier to not change things, rather than risk change and the potential hiccups on the way.

The risk averse attitude can lead to things staying they way they are for too long. It might lead to adverse outcomes, but at least it's nobody's fault! And often the fear of adverse outcomes will lead to slow change, even when people recognise that reaching the other side of the change process will lead to big improvements.

One way of handling this is prototyping new ideas, rather than leaping straight to a big bang approach. We do a lot of this internally through hackathons, including a company-wide Microsoft One Week Hackathon that anybody can take part in, on any project idea. And a permanent setup, called Microsoft Garage, to let employees prototype ideas. Externally we do this supporting hackathons (like this one for educators) and also by allowing users to opt-in to pilot or beta products, services or projects (like Office Insiders). They accept a small degree of risk in order to get ahead of other people and organisations. And for many of these services, you can manage risk by running two systems side by side - like having 10 million Windows Insiders using the next version of Windows, whilst the other billion us today's version

How do you handle risk aversion?

But some changes can't be done gradually. If you consider the question from the top of this article - you can't gradually introduce a change to the side of the road everybody drives on. And it is such a big change, with such dire consequences for failure, that risk aversion could stop it ever happening.

If you work in IT, I bet you've got projects like that! And the reporting on digital transformation says that the organisational culture, including risk aversion, is the biggest barrier in universities. Not the tech capacity or capability itself.

JISC, which supports higher education digital transformation, produced a detailed report in March 2019:

JISC reports that IT leaders say that 'organisational culture' is the biggest barrier to successful digital delivery.

Counter-intuitive stories of change

When Sweden changed to drive on the right overnight, the change reduced road accidents overnight.

That might seem counter-intuitive, but it's true. Sweden used to drive on the left hand side of the road, whilst their neighbours in Norway and Finland drove on the right. So on the night of 3 September 1967, they changed the whole country. When Swedes went to sleep on Saturday night, everybody was still driving on the left. And when everybody woke up on Sunday morning, they had to drive on the right. But rather than causing accidents, it actually reduced road accidents. On the Monday morning following the change, road accidents fell by a quarter, and motor insurance claims dropped by 40% afterwards.

Accident rates stayed lower for six weeks

The whole story of H Day is here, when Sweden swapped from driving on the left to driving on the right. And they got 1,500,000 drivers to change overnight.

Supporting change with counter-intuitive stories

So next time somebody is listing the reasons why digital change can't happen because it's too risky, and the approach of pilots and prototypes isn't an effective way to reduce risk, then perhaps the Swedish story is a way to unblock risk aversion - and promote some out of the box thinking. It's not a silver bullet for change, but it is a story that might help support different thinking, and the journey of cultural change.