Change Management is all you need; Attention is already there.

Gen AI is at the edge to disrupt the organizations and there will hardly be anyone who will ignore this fact. The PoCs and explorations are converted into real-time implementations, though in a constrained manner but in a very promising way. It is not far from when this technology will be a part of our daily work enabling creativity to the next level. Looking at the ongoing adoption of known Gen AI and rapid exploration of unknown Gen AI, I believe now we are at the tipping point to see the readiness of the organization for the Change Management perspective.

As we understand it is time to provide enough attention to change management as attention is already there in Gen AI technology where even sky is not the limit so how well the organization is prepared for different stages of change management can only bring the stated benefits from Gen AI in an alignment to the vision and mission of an organization.

Organizations should plan the introduction of change at the “contact stage” only once they have complete guidelines designed to address the change in a positive mode. This will help to give some sense of direction and will not create any unnecessary shock.

Once the technological changes are briefed, we should be holding an “awareness and understanding” session where the organization can understand how it applies to them and what the changes it will bring to their work culture. Awareness should be planned to look at the organizational style of working and should be tailored to different roles as applicable in an organization. This is very important to customize the awareness session to a role/hierarchy so that the message should not get distorted in the process of communicating the change. In this process, we should also be identifying the change agents who can champion the objectives behind the change in an empathetic way and can address the sentiment behind denial, frustration, and depression in an organization while connecting, and collaborating to understand each sentiment to provide not only the data-based response but have clear understanding to navigate the facts emphatically. At this stage, the organization should also publish the FAQs in a central place so anyone can access them and can contact change agents for the required clarifications.

Once the awareness is established in an organization, the organization should assess and identify the functions to experiment with the technology in a “trial” manner, each learning from the exploration should be well documented and communicated to respective stakeholders so that the organization is aware of what and how to adopt cautiously. If the right use cases are not identified and the scope of experiments is not defined, then it is very difficult to get the right output from the change. It has been said at this stage 70% of the change fails at this stage, so a balance of optimism and pessimism needs to be exercised at this stage.

We need not rush even after knowing the fitment of technology, each “adoption” should follow the contact, awareness, and understanding cycle in an iterative before moving to full adoption of the change. This will help you to weave the fabric with each incremental change without disrupting the overall organizational values.

All the best for your Gen AI endeavors, keep the rigor, and reap the benefits but remember creativity and content both are human-centric so be thoughtful about your organizational change management plan.