Stop me if this sounds familiar.
You know you have to change. Complexity is hitting you from every angle, impacting every corner of your business. Every fiber of your being screams out, "Do something!"
And you just ... can't.
Recognizing that things are changing is one thing. Doing something about it is another.
Why is it so hard?
Geoffrey Moore says it's all about inertia.
"Our resources are trapped in the pull of the past. They want to stay where they are," Moore, best-selling author of Escape Velocity: Free Your Company's Future from the Pull of the Past, told the crowd at the 2012 DigitalNow Conference in Orlando. "The challenge is moving them in times of great change."
Think about it: We know we need to be doing something about social media, and mobile, and the cloud, and communities, and on-demand learning, and a ton of other things. And yet we can't break free of old, reliable, outdated habits like e-mail, and attached files, and PCs, and landlines, and classrooms. We've always done those things; we can't stop now, can we?
We'd better.
Doing so means "crossing the chasm" -- that gaping space that separates the early adopters on our teams from the status-quo crowd. That takes persistence. Keep applying resources to your change effort, said Moore, and eventually you'll hit a tipping point that will bring the rest of your team on board.
Think of it this way: Keep dancing, and eventually others will dance with you.
It all comes down to engagement: Is your team on board with the change effort? Getting them to that point, says Moore, isn't about shiny new gadgets or cool new strategies. Sometimes, it's about convincing them that your organization's mission might be in peril if you don't change.
Isn't that the case for all of us?
Download the slides from Moore's presentation here, then tell us: How are you promoting change in your organization?
