Lesson 4

Table of Contents

1. Understanding the “Cognitive Load” of Change
2. How to Make Your Launch Plan
3. Build Your Support System
4. Assignment 4: Negative Visualization

In the last lesson, you created your success statement to define your goal and how you’ll measure it. But having an intention is only the first step. Now, you need a plan to achieve it. 

“It’s not just enough to create an initiative,” says Lauren Erera, Principal at Weber Associates. “It has to be woven into management, training, performance metrics, compensation, systems, technology—everything.” 

And you have to prepare for resistance. Not the malicious kind—just the human kind. 

“Often teams are moving so fast they struggle to slow down to think about this,” says Anya Macleod, Principal Consultant at Loopio. “They might recognize that what they’ve been doing is very imperfect, but it’s the devil they know.”

To overcome this natural inertia, you need to be very deliberate in your approach. That means having a concrete rollout plan in place, building the necessary supports, and anticipating the ways your team is going to resist adopting your new process—because in all likelihood, they will. In today’s lesson, we’ll explore how to do exactly that. 

How to Make Your Launch Plan

Instead of flipping a switch and expecting your team to adapt overnight, think about how you can ease your team into the change. There are a few ways you can do this. Below, we’ll break down two popular approaches using the team at OneAdvanced and their RFP software adoption process as a case study. 

Option 1: Run a Pilot Program

A pilot program is a small-scale test run with a limited number of participants. Depending on your change, this may be a good way to trial whether the action you want to take will work, without overhauling your entire process. While a pilot program can help reduce risk, it’s not a great fit for all programs—as Claire and the team at OneAdvanced experienced. 

“Our goal was to reduce the amount of admin time that the bid team needed to spend on a response,” says Claire Walker, Head of Solutions at OneAdvanced. After considering their options, they decided that RFP software was going to be the best way for them to do this. “So, we started with 15 licenses to try it out.”

However, Claire and her team realized very quickly that the number of software users wasn’t large enough to make a dent in the problem they were trying to solve. “The take-up wasn’t great at first because there wasn’t enough content in the library to make a difference,” she says. “People were using it, but they were saying, ‘it’s not changing my world.’ SMEs were still being asked to provide the same kinds of answers. That made us realize we needed to build our library to get the gains out of it.” 

It’s totally normal to run into roadblocks as you’re testing—that’s what the test is for. But in this case, it was a sign that opting for a pilot program wasn’t a good fit for their rollout. It’s hard to reach the full efficiency gains of software if only a small subsection of the team is using it, whereas something like trying out a new go/no-go matrix or piloting a new AI-assisted writing process might work better with a smaller group of beta testers. 

It’s worth asking what category your change falls into. Is it feasible to test with a smaller group? Or will you need broader adoption to see meaningful results? If you’re dealing with a change that’s more in the latter category, you might have better luck with the next approach. 

Option 2: Try a Phased Rollout

In a phased rollout, you focus on working towards specific milestones to prove success before moving to the next phase. This could actually include a pilot program, but doesn’t necessarily have to. After the initial pilot program at OneAdvanced failed to bring about the changes they wanted to see, they decided that expanding to the broader team was necessary. 

In the first phase of this new plan, they focused primarily on increasing the number of entries in their content library. This was in order to make the software more usable to their team so they would consult the tool first, rather than always tapping their favorite subject matter expert.

Once they had reached a critical mass of entries, they stopped needing to track the total number (which was starting to fluctuate anyway, as they had begun deleting duplicates and outdated answers). They were ready to move on to the next phase, which focused on improving their automation rate. 

That’s when Natalie Giles-Grant joined the team as Head of Bid Management. “We wanted to see whether people were using the software to automatically populate their bids. Now, as we look at the data, we can see those automation rates creeping up,” she says. They were able to get much better adoption once the library was populated because it made using the software worth everyone’s while. 

This all goes to show that your rollout may not be as smooth or as fast as you imagine—it takes time and readjustments. You can do your best to anticipate what challenges you may face (which we’ll do in today’s exercise), but some unexpected surprises are inevitable. Just be gentle with yourself when they happen.

Build Your Support System

No matter which methodology you choose for your rollout, you’ll also want to think about what support systems you can build into your plan. 

Change can be hard, and people need constant reinforcement. If they’re not sure how to use a new tool or process, they’re just going to default to what’s familiar. The team at OneAdvanced can attest to that. 

“When I started, the bid team wasn’t using RFP software for every project,” says Natalie. “There was a perception that it was too complicated when, in reality, it wasn’t. We had to do a lot of work to get over the hurdles of those misconceptions, to show the team why we were doing this, and to explain the benefits of our approach.”

That’s why you should do some strategizing now around the kinds of support you think folks will need and where that fits into your overall adoption plan.    

These supports might include: 

• Training sessions: If you’re adopting a new tool or process, it’s not enough to just walk people through how to use it. Studies show people learn best through “active learning”—i.e. learning by doing. Give them a task to accomplish as part of their training so they start to build skills and confidence.

• On-demand resources: People won’t retain everything they’ve learned in their training. It’s a good idea to provide quick-reference materials, like short videos or one-pagers that folks can use to refresh their memories. They’ll be more likely to stick with the new process and not default to old habits if they can quickly get help. It’s a good idea to make these resources as easy to access as possible: Put them at the top of a shared folder, pin them in Slack, or encourage folks to save them to their desktops. 
• Measure managers based on adoption: As we discussed in the previous lesson, feedback and measurement are a key part of change. It’s critical to get managers on board so they can be aware of the change that their direct reports are supposed to be adopting, and provide performance feedback and coaching accordingly. 
• A content cleanup in the age of AI: Having a strong content base is key to a more efficient RFP response process. If you’re not able to access and effectively reuse accurate, up-to-date answers, you’ll end up wasting a lot of time. This is true even if you’re using generative AI to support your writing—actually, it’s even more critical. While LLMs can help you generate answers, they need context. If you don’t give it quality raw material to work with, you’re going to get a lot of hallucinations and inaccuracies in the output, and ultimately waste more time on editing and cleanup. What you feed your system matters.
• A bit of healthy competition: You can help incentivize your team to commit to your change by gamifying it. Set up clear metrics for success and track individuals or teams based on how well they’re doing. (A leaderboard doesn’t hurt.) Get a few nice gift cards as prizes or plan a fun team outing if you reach your goals in a set timeframe.

Now that you’ve started to think about your plan, we’re going to use today’s assignment to poke it full of holes (in order to make it stronger). Let’s begin.