Any digital change program moves from a Starting state to a Future state typically going through five stages as indicated above. When such change occurs, every impacted individual goes on their own personal, emotional journey. Some people will be instantly positive, “thank goodness, I thought we would never do this”, whilst others will be profoundly concerned, “this will wipe out my job!” In a digitally immature organisation, it would be prudent to anticipate that the average staff reaction may be negative in the first instant as shown by the broken black line above.

This contrasts with the experience of the senior leadership group who understand the strategic benefits to be realised so should have a positive view of the change from rst to last. The second point to recognise is that program leaders, in addition to seeing the big picture very clearly, will be running well ahead of the majority of staff in their personal interpretation of the program’s impact. As an example, point A on the graphic is the moment in time where there is the maximum gap between the perception of the change impact between leaders and staff. The leadership team may be running 2-3 months’ ahead of their staff on this journey. The key message here is that, when communicating, senior leadership must both cast their mind back, several months if necessary, to that stage in their own process of understanding the change and also demonstrate empathy for reasonable concerns all through the program but particularly during early announcements. Even with a good management consulting program, change management and communication disciplines in place, any project of scale is likely to encounter challenges along the way, some of which will be controllable and others not. The next part in this series will identify some of the more common pitfalls that arise in digital projects together with mitigation strategies you can draw on to stay on track.