and the next day. Good morning and welcome and thank you so much for joining us this Thursday morning at least here in the European time zone. We are excited to get started with this small webinar on change management. But we'll start out a little bit with a quick introduction to ourselves. Marie? Yes, my name is Marie and I'm heading up the digital change area together with Kim at a daily basis. Besides that, I've been working with change management and the human aspect of digital transformation for the last 13 years, especially within the context of AI. And I have seen how trust is a key driver when it comes to driving successful change. So that's what I'm going to zoom in on today. And my name is Kim. I've worked with change management in digital transformations also for quite a long time. So a lot of practical experience will come into this. And then, of course, some of the background from our research we did together with the University of Oxford. And I'll just briefly touch upon it first before we get into the to the real topics. So we have our book. If you haven't read it, we can highly recommend it, of course. And the research behind the book was that we read more than 1800 articles actually and condensed that. Then we interviewed more than 250 practitioners, people interested in and working with change management. Then we spent a long time, took four years, I think, to collect data from a lot of IT projects, 155 to be exact, and conducted more than 200 hours of interviews with those projects. All of that we condensed into a lot of knowledge about change management. And we see it as sort of the first really hardcore data driven change management research that we found out there. This slide is four years of research trying to get that into one thing. So bear with me for a little while. What you see on the top, the clear reason, the communication, early involvement, et cetera. Those are what we found from those 1800 articles that are the key levers and talking with people. And if you work with change management, I'm pretty sure you will recognize most of these seven different levers because that is sort of the gist of what everyone says. What we then try to do is look at those 155 IT projects and see how did they succeed. And success was not only in terms of time and budget, but also in perception among users, perception among managers, perception from the project team. So try to see were they a success as such. Did people actually use the system as intended? Did they get the benefits and so on? So we correlated that with how well they did it within the different seven levers? And the steeper the curve on the blue line, the clearer a correlation between success and doing this part. So, for instance, communication, quite clear alignment between success and doing communication. Of course, there's a lot of underlying facts to this and a lot of underlying details. But in general, you can say all seven levers are somewhat correlated with success, but some of them are even stronger, the correlation. Some of you out there right now may have a lot of questions because that usually happens when this pops in. So, feel free to ask those questions in the chat. Today, we will zoom in on two different. We will zoom in on training and trust. And I think, Marie, maybe you will start with trust. Yes, of course. Thank you. And I will start with trust. And whereas Kim, he mentioned the six levers, especially being communication and also engaging people, having a clear reason and so on. These six levers are all things that we know that are related to project management activities or change activities. But trust can somehow be a little bit more intangible. It relates to the interpersonal perception. How do I actually perceive the activities going on? How do I believe in the transformation to come? And that is trust. And it somehow becomes a little bit more difficult to tackle. And before giving you a few hacks on what you actually can do, then I would like to deep in or deep dive on a few of the pitfalls when it comes to trust. So, first of all, it seems that it's more tangible and less complicated to build trust within a small group of individuals over larger groups and end users. And often we find lack of time to do this. And also that the skills that we work with at a larger scale. However, in fact, it's way more important to build long term trust towards the end users. So, to say you can say no trust, no adoption. If you look at the next one here, we often are very good at measuring KPIs and also are we on track with our project. However, we miss out on quite an important data point being the emotions and also being the end users, which actually could leave us with an occasion for rebuilding trust or also understanding how to handle the distrust. If we go to the third one, as you can see, it's a submarine. And that's also what we have been written about in the book. It tends to be when we drive digital transformations that we end up with being this submarine approach where we focus a lot on actually creating excitement in the beginning, having this big kickoff seminar involving key stakeholders. And then for a long time in the middle period, the end users hear nothing. And then we pop up again when we are close to to go live. And that leaves or can leave at least the employees in the dark. And then we miss out on actually the in-between period. Then we miss out on another good occasion for building trust. That was a little bit about the typical pitfalls. If I go to the next, this is more about what can we actually do then to build trust. And linking to to my first point here, why is it so hard to build trust also towards end users? Trust needs to be seen as a multidimensional action. So you need to focus, of course, on the key sponsors, but also on the end users as well. Then secondly, leadership is a contact sport. And what do I mean with that? I mean that leadership cannot be done via mail or just without investing time for actually having contact. It relates a little bit to creating that psychological safe room. So be curious about the sense making in the organization. Then the last one, continuous and open dialogues. It relates a little bit to the other one, but it's more actually there. You can say the value you invest in the dialogues that you have. Do more listening than talking. Think out loud and have this end user first approach. And create transparency among the users. So these are the three, you can say, key factors when you're building trust. I would like to go a little bit deeper here. And I would like to go deeper in that way than I want to focus on trust in the context of AI. I've been working with AI over the last years. And I have seen how trust is especially challenged when it comes to AI. And this is because it's a new arena for many. Leaderships are not used to driving AI transformation. There may pop up ethical dilemmas as well. What should we choose? So one of the key, you can say, things is to actually make it a lot more tangible when you work with trust. So the first one being, instead of big go lives, do ongoing experimentations. Select a diverse set of ambassadors. We have this tendency to take only the super users, but forgetting about the late ambassadors. That also actually reflects, you can say, among the level of experience among the employees. Then the next one is that you need to make it tangible to also build trust. Especially within AI, then AI is a little bit intangible. It's a lot of aspiration slides or wouldn't it be great if we have this? Make it tangible. If you just have a little bit of a concrete, I don't know, code or something within a feature shared as you go along. It creates trust towards the users and it also makes it a lot more tangible. Then the next one is equip leaders to actually also have an AI understanding. What we have been doing on a lot of projects is to also train leaders, not necessarily in all the tools from A to Z, but also inviting them in for dilemma talks or maybe leader simulations on how they should actually lead in the era of AI. Then the next one, remember that AI is context unique. What we have been doing also from implement side is that whenever we have, you can say, a mini go live or a big go live on specific AI tools, leave room for the different departments to also translate it into their context. So how are we impacted and also how do we want to work with AI in that context? And then, of course, AI is also a decision making for an organization. AI is also forming the strategy. It's giving new roles. It's impacting the way we do leadership. And often we tend to focus on the tool only. So we share here is the tool and here is the training. But rolling out and it could be any digital transformation is also a choice making or strategy. How do we want to work with our organization? What do we believe in? So remember also to share those choices with the users. I hope you could feel my passion out here. And this was what I had on Trust today. If you have any questions, then feel free to write or contact me and then I'm happy to answer. Another one who has a really good, great passion for another topic training is Kim. So I would love you to come up here, Kim, and then share a little bit. So, yes, Marie is certainly super passionate about trust. And based on our research from the book and the collaboration with the University of Oxford, I was positively surprised to see how important trust is. And to me, there's actually something there that we need to get even better at. And as Marie was very good at pointing out, it's not just about trust between you and me. It's also creating trust in the new tools and in the project and in the transformation team. So those are some of the things that we found out. It's super strange what I'm going to be passionate about. But I am truly passionate about training in IT systems because I think we can do so much better. So I'll take you into some of the stuff we found in the research and from the book and then based a little bit on a lot of great experience, what actually works out there. So for me, I'll talk about how important it is to build learning and not talk about training. And for me, that means very much that we think of learning as an iterative process. We really don't just do it as a one-off. That's quite clear in our research findings. We need to redo things. And repetition is a great tool for learning. I think everyone knows that. So really think of that when you design the learning and not just design a training session. Secondly, we all learn in different ways. And that's probably not a big surprise to all of you. But that requires you to then think of different learning formats. So classroom, that can be one learning format. Me talking now is another learning format. And we can use that to some extent. If I talked for two hours, you would either drop off or fall asleep. So I'm not going to do that. But think about e-learnings, small video snippets, self-paced learning materials, etc. To cater for different learning needs. That works really well. We can see it from the research that there's not one method that beats all others. So use different methods. Thirdly, we can see that you really need to involve people. There's a tendency, at least in IT projects that I see, that we are busy. So we close ourselves around what we do. But if we really want effective training, then co-design it together with the end users. And actually, especially those frontline managers that we don't utilize enough is also a big finding from the research. So try to bring them in and experiment together with them. That will also build the trust, which Marie talked so greatly about right before. So get them in there and co-design it together and co-plan it. Those are some of the things that we found from the research. Now I'll just quickly go through some of the things that we also saw when we worked with it. So there's some things. And based on other research and science, one is ensure relevance. And I say this because I've seen so many times where we call 200 people in to a two or three day learning classroom session where they have to learn the new SAP system and what buttons to press. And maybe they only need to register time. Maybe they only need to be able to buy small things. So it was that half an hour during day two that was actually relevant for them. So do it role-based, ensure relevance. And when I say relevance, one thing is what parts of the system do you actually learn. But even more importantly is make it relevant to their daily lives. So training in IT is not about pushing systems. We can all do that, pushing buttons in a system. And everyone can learn that pretty much. However, it's how do I work with this? How does that relate to the processes I am part of? How does this interfere with my daily life? Make sure you get that sort of relevance. And to do that, one hack is to involve the users, as I said, so they can actually speak that language of making it relevant. Often we use super users also for that. So that is super important, the relevance. Because if it's relevant, it sticks much better. Second point is plan for learning over time. Learning takes time. It's an iterative process. Way too often we see projects say, let's do learning the last two weeks before go live. And then people won't forget after go live. Sorry, that's not how it works. If you learn it quickly, you forget it quickly. A classic example for me is when I was at a university, I was mostly a pretty good student. However, there were also times where I wasn't so ambitious during the course of the semester. And then when exam time came, I was really ambitious. And I studied and studied and studied for two weeks. I learned it. I did fairly well on the exam, maybe. And then I forgot it. And that's sort of the same mechanism that your brain has. So plan for learning over time. Don't fall into the trap of learning the users everything in the last two weeks. I'll come back a little bit to how you can do that. Third point is make it fun. And now you're thinking, Kim, you're talking about IT training. How do you make that fun? That's like a contradiction in terms. But it can be made fun. And just the background for doing that is if something is fun, if there's strong emotions connected to something, research shows very, very clearly that your retention, your memory of it is much stronger. That also entails you can actually scare people into learning, but we certainly don't recommend that. So make it fun and engaging. And again, try different learning formats. We trained more than 5,000 people in a new IT system. Zero slides. So we had small games. We had, they had to reteach to each other some of the things to make it engaging. We had quizzes. We had so many different things in that session that it was actually fun because something new was happening pretty much every 15, 20 minutes. That's what most adults can, how long they can keep their attention. So I'm actually stretching a little bit with how far I'm talking right now. But that's a key point. Make it fun. Make it engaging. Switch things up every 15, 20 minutes. All right. Learning over time. Let me dive a little bit into that. So you should start early. As I said, we see way too many projects which close down for a long time, as Marie mentioned, the submarine approach and then come up two weeks before GoLive and say, hey, now you have to learn the new system. And that's not a good way to do it. So what this graph shows is the competency level versus the time. And if you can use small nuggets, small elements to increase the learning until, and it's very deliberate. We haven't written GoLive. We've written first use because there's also something about we as a project think that first use is when it's actually really important to have the learning catered towards. And that can be if you're in finance, you know that closing the quarter or end of year, that's super important. And some functionalities will be used there. So then let's try to target towards that. And you may say, but Kim, we can't start that early because the system's not ready. We don't know everything. True. But you can start if it's a brand new SAP system or similar. You can start with basic introduction. You can start with explaining the logic of that system. What does a screen look like, et cetera. Then further down the chain, you can go into what are the key changes in the processes and ways of working. Then you can do all the classroom-based stuff. And then you are ready for building the next part. And just to go a little bit deeper into the simulation, I brought this board with me. This is how we would normally try to teach people new ways of working, as we call it. So this is a classic procure-to-pay process. For those who don't know it, it's something about buying something from a vendor, receiving it, getting it into maybe a warehouse or into the office, and then actually paying the bills. And every company pretty much has a process like this. So what we do is we bring different parts of the organization together. That can be the procurement team, the warehouse team, the finance team. Bring them together, and we play our way through this new process. Because that makes the user super confident, super capable of working, not just pushing the right buttons in the new system, but actually working and collaborating together. So this is how we would usually use a game board to design a full-day game or a half-day game to do that. So those are some of the things that we do. And then a final point to me, super important. Learning does not end with Go Live. You can actually sometimes say it starts there. All the other things we do, that's a build-up. I can use myself as an example. We got a new system, an upgrade for the system where we register our time here and implement. I was not taking all the great things that we could do before it was the last day of the month, and I had to register my time. And then I really needed it. I was super motivated to figure out how to do that when it was 5 o'clock in the afternoon. And then it was really good that I had many different options to go with. I could look into an FAQ. There was a small video, and our finance team had even set up a support that I could call because they knew that there were a lot of people like me who then were motivated to learn. So those are some of the things that we'll do. This is some of the things from the learning part. I already now see a lot of great questions in the chat, so I think we'll jump to them. And I'll invite you back, Marie. Thank you. So if we read maybe out loud. When you talk about trust and the submarine approach, are you referring to Rick Maher's three levels of resistance? Actually, you could relate those two. There's something around the submarine approach is what we see projects going in, making a big bang about a new project, and then diving to the bottom and not coming up to the surface for a long time. And that could definitely be related to that whole circle of change. So yes, in some way. Then I also saw a question, Kim, that was we have done quite a lot of research here. Are there anything that we find particularly interesting or like standing out? And I would like to share one. Yes. I guess you also have one. But the point is, for example, if you look at involvement, that the early involvement, we all know from change theory that that's very important. But actually, we saw in the research that it's not only early involvement. It's not that important. It's actually more the way you're involved rather than early involvement. So be more mindful about how do we actually involve people than more focused on the early involvement. So for me, at least, that was quite a nice finding that I'm also changing my way to do change management at the moment. Super good point. And there are a lot of things we could dive into also from the different areas. I would say in the trust arena, to me, the key point, which I also think you were good at pointing out, is how important it is to create trust from the transformation towards the organization, not only towards leadership, but towards the organization. And working very specifically with how to do that. So that can be implementing that the project team has a day in the life of a warehouse worker, if that's where we are implementing something new. Getting closer to that organization. I think that's at least something that's a key sort of finding for me in some of them. Then I see, Jonas, you've written about sort of transitioning from training to enablement. And I fully agree with that. And I like the term. And there is definitely something about looking broader than just, you know, pushing those buttons and being able to actually work and being what we sometimes refer to as a confident and capable employee in all matters, in all ways of working, rather than just in the new system. So I really like that point. Thank you, Jonas. So I think that's a good point. Then there's a big, big follow up from Jonas. And we are running a little bit out of time. Jonas, I love the question. And we can talk a long time about that. So maybe I'll reach out if that's OK. Then an interesting AI question. And I think it will be the last one we do, Erik. Is AI leveling off the difference between board and shop floor? Do you see anything there? It's a big question. It is. And it's also a new arena. In a way, you can say it is because it's at least what we see now. There is a tendency that AI impacts the whole way our organization is interconnected. So, yes, you will see that it will be impacting it somehow. But I wouldn't say directly. But, yeah, I would love to have a talk with you and discuss that further offline. And maybe I'll just do... We have 30 seconds. So I'll do... John, you have a question regarding involvement approach. I'm not sure I actually fully agree with it taking more resources. But, yes, it requires careful planning to involve in the right way. And selling the whole change management and the whole stakeholder management thing. I think some of the stuff is in the book about how important change management actually is. And if you're part of this webinar, most of you probably know. We also do have some data on how important it is. And we try to use that to sell the idea to people who are not as engaged in change management as you clearly are. So many great questions. I think we'll need to follow up on them. We will follow up on all of them. Cool. Thank you all so much for joining and asking questions. We hope you got a little inspiration on this Thursday morning. And we will be following up with you. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.