AI buy-in is the wrong problem
Your team doesn't need clever words, they need proof AI works in your business
Hi there,
If you’re new here, I’m Brennan McDonald and I write about the people side of AI transformation. This newsletter grows through word of mouth and your recommendations. If you enjoy this, please share it with a friend today, it’s always appreciated. If you have any feedback, you can reply to this email.
- Brennan
In today’s newsletter:
The buy-in problem is misdiagnosed
Evidence creates buy-in, clever words don’t
How to apply this to your business
The buy-in problem is misdiagnosed
There’s a standard change management playbook. It’s tempting to roll it out when you’re doing an AI transformation.
However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last year and throughout my corporate career, it’s that you need to tailor your approach to the situation you’re actually facing.
A lot of the standard change management collateral can be easily generated with the help of AI. You can make a stakeholder map. Prepare a comms plan, prepare the training course content, draft emails and communications with stakeholders and sponsors.
It doesn’t mean you should. In fact, one trend I’m starting to see is a lot of AI-generated content working its way into corporate change program collateral and being exposed as soon as the problems begin.
As a discipline, change management has learned an awful lot and incorporates a lot of the lessons of program management, project management, systems engineering, and general business practice.
It was built to solve the challenge of getting people to do new things in new ways when they would much prefer to keep doing things the old way. When it comes to AI transformation, I think the buy-in problem is getting misdiagnosed. That is one reason why I worked on the 5C framework and shared it in this newsletter.
All of this change around AI in the workplace is happening when we have unresolved policy problems to solve in the personal domain. If your worker doesn’t want an AI data centre built in their neighbourhood and buys into a lot of anti-AI rhetoric, they’re not going to lean into working on an AI transformation of how they do their daily tasks, are they?
A lot of the pushback around AI in the workplace is in regard to things like compliance with regulations, the quality of outputs, or what things mean for job security. A lot of these are reasonable issues for employees to raise.
It doesn’t help when you have a global group of corporate leaders who have turned AI job layoffs into a mantra. Whether the reason is because an AI automation workflow was deployed or because they hired too many people during the pandemic doesn’t really matter.
There’s an enormous amount of fear. When you add it to the fact that a lot of this is going to impact knowledge work jobs that have already suffered from enormous amounts of both disclosed and undisclosed offshoring and de-skilling, the scale of the challenge from the change management side is clearly apparent.
There is a difference between irrational resistance to change and rational threat detection to your own well-being and safety. In this article, I’m going to argue that you have to show how AI works and improves your team’s experience in the workplace instead of rerunning played-out persuasion and communications playbooks from the pre-AI era.
