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In order to adapt to changes in your environment, the management team plays a prominent role in envisioning and driving change. Kotter’s eight-step model is useful for overcoming organizational resistance and managing your digital transformation projects based on artificial intelligence. This model begins with creating a sense of urgency and emphasizes forming a guiding coalition, clearly communicating your vision, and embedding these transformations into your corporate culture. Considering ethical issues will help avoid “digital luddites” who will fight against the potentially negative impacts of AI integration into your processes.
E. Krieger
Généré par DALL-E / Generated by DALL-E
Companies are living organisms constantly evolving to adapt to their competitive environment, as well as to more or less rapid and profound changes in political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, ecological, and legal contexts.
The management team’s role is to drive this change. This process is fueled by field surveys and the analysis of various indicators, allowing them to stay aligned with the aphorism by Francis Blanche that encourages us to « think about change rather than changing the bandage. »
When strategic and operational shifts are clearly defined, the hardest part is often conveying both the need for evolution and the way to achieve it. I therefore propose using a highly useful model to analyze and guide the key steps of change.
Kotter’s 8 Steps of Change
This transformation process is described in eight key steps by John Paul Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of the bestseller Leading Change.
The Kotter Model
This model explains the art of getting an organization moving when silo mentalities and resistance to change are embedded in a company’s DNA.
While ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) issues are at the top of many companies’ agendas, the need to innovate and digitize operations also prevails.
The Digital Transformation of Companies: A High-Risk Project
The digitalization of technical, administrative, and commercial processes is a critical issue for many business leaders. These projects, which benefit Digital Services Companies (DSC), mobilize various internal and external actors and skills to mitigate the risk of large-scale digital projects becoming bogged down.
The excitement around artificial intelligence (AI) is unprecedented, especially due to the accelerated progress in image recognition and natural language understanding.
Kotter’s model is particularly insightful in this context of technological revolution. The first step, « creating a sense of urgency, » helps counter the tendency to wait, echoing the aphorism of Henri Queuille, a former French Prime Minister during the Fourth Republic, who said, « There is no problem so great that the absence of a solution won’t solve it. »
Developing a Culture of Learning and Innovation
The integration of AI at different levels of your value chain is a highly fertile yet complex undertaking, which requires:
- Understanding of AI’s challenges at all levels of your company, including within the board of directors, to grasp its capabilities and limitations.
- Expertise in data science to collect, clean, and analyze the data needed to fuel your AI systems.
- Skills in software engineering, to design, build, and maintain systems that rely on relevant programming languages and development environments.
- Know-how in designing intuitive, user-friendly, ethical, and inclusive interfaces. Your users, designers, and AI developers will need to work together.
- Expertise in managing complex projects to oversee the deployment of AI systems with multidisciplinary teams, while adhering to standards, deadlines, and budgets.
- Talents in communication (information and training) to explain the benefits of AI to your employees, customers, and other stakeholders.
From Initial Impetus to Embedding in Corporate Culture
Applying Kotter’s model to AI-driven digital transformation projects highlights the following issues:
- Creating a sense of urgency is crucial for prioritizing these projects, for example, to better serve your customers and avoid falling behind competitors.
- Forming a guiding team helps gather the right internal and external profiles to create a pool of « empathetic talents » capable of successfully leading this transformation.
- Forging a vision and strategies is equally important, as urgency does not exempt you from having a clear vision of your goals and the means to achieve them.
- Communicating the vision for change: If you’re right on your own, it’s not much better than being wrong. Refine your message, channels, and internal and external communication targets.
- Empowering employees to act: If you don’t give your teams the legitimacy to act, as well as time and financial resources, you are setting them up for failure.
- Generating short-term wins: Highlight and celebrate early technical and economic results to show that the benefits of this initiative are quick and tangible.
- Consolidating and amplifying the change: Complex projects are more like marathons than sprints, which brings us back to the need for the long-term allocation of appropriate resources.
- Embedding it into the corporate culture: An organization is characterized by its rituals, myths, and taboos. The saga of this Promethean digital project will inspire your future collective challenges.
Integrating Ethics to Avoid Digital Luddites
Leaders are naturally essential to embodying the validity of these digital transformations, beyond purely economic and financial considerations, as the current context also requires giving meaning on environmental and social levels. This involves taking into account ethical considerations and implementing safeguards to avoid dystopias like Minority Report.
Poorly presented or poorly managed AI projects will lead to the emergence of digital Luddites, who will see AI as a threat to their jobs as knowledge workers.
Good luck with managing your next AI-driven digital transformation projects using this analysis framework and action guide.
