IT departments can change. Really!

People hardly embrace change unless they believe in the opportunity. The emotional side of our brain has a mind of its own, hardly responding to the fact-zone. In the ground braking book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’ this side is called the Elephant. Managers have to fire-up the Elephant by breaking through to feelings.

Do you like pizza? Probably yes, but how about Dominos pizzas, the world largest pizza chain? The number one reaction to ‘why not,’ is that the crust tastes like cardboard. The classic marketing response would be to launch a campaign to emphasis ‘grandmother’s recipe crust’ with mouth-watering ads. Dominos didn’t do that, they fully embraced the criticism. Brutally and in the face.

They faced their (ex-)customers and fired up change within the company. How? With a publicly distributed video ‘Domino’s Pizza Turnaround’ of a focus group stating comments like ‘worst excuse for a pizza I ever had’. The management saw the footage live in a room next door. They took the punches. This was message any Elephant understands. Is it really that bad? Yes! We can’t accept this! No, so let’s do something about it.

The Elephant’s Rider is the rational side of our brain. The Rider is an analyzer, deep-thinker and sometimes even a navel-gazer. We tend to focus on the Rider in the way we sell change within our companies. Managers use tons of PowerPoint slides and impressive spreadsheets. Great for accountants, yet we tend to forget the Elephant. The Elephant doesn’t feel anything by the way we sell change.

The IT department is full of people addressing Riders. We have many – often valid – reasons why projects fail or infrastructure services are not on par. OK, we measure user satisfaction – as a tick in the box – but do we really care about them? We ourselves have to feel why too many users hate us. Admitting that ‘we blew it,’ like Domino’s to their customers, is the power that you need to be able to start with a clean slate. Our customers have to experience our care for them. You can’t fake that.

Break into the feelings of your staff with video’s like Domino’s. Create customer arenas to see users in person and install a complaint process (why on earth isn’t that an obligatory part of ITIL). Only when CIOs inflame the Elephant part of their IT departments, they will be able to create actual change.