9 Excuses Organizations Use to Avoid Change

What they often say to avoid change:

1) Our audience is loyal, we don’t need change.

2) The tech upgrade is “virtually the same” as the previous one, and that vendor charging us for something that’s not much different is not worth the cost.

3) Upgrading or changing is a dumb hype.

4) Our customer already understands this design flow.

5) We already tried that!

6) People don’t like change. Look at all those logo redesigns gone wrong!

7) If we change how we do X function, then we’ll potentially hurt a coworker’s employment.

8) The difference in ROI doesn’t seem to be enough.

9) I don’t see it sucking. This looks perfectly fine to me.

What you know about their excuses (feel free to skip since this part is more philosophical than tactical):

1. Customer’s Loyalty? Competitive landscapes are always changing. The only constant in life is change. No audience is loyal enough to ignore a competitor that is engaging with them in fresh, relevant, and often cheaper ways. This is only achieved by brands that are constantly on their toes. There’s thousands of little learnings and shifts that need to happen throughout a long period of time for a brand to not lose this. A brand that waits long enough (and too long can sometimes be as short as a year) can find themselves in a customer exodus. It can be triggered by a bad tweet, a documentary, a reporter, a change in design language, a new tool, or technology shift. Maybe what your product does in an hour, a competitor’s product can do in one click. Maybe your competitor got the right sponsor, and that’s it for you. What will you do if you stopped trying to understand your customer beyond their interaction with your current product?

2. Tech upgrade feels the same? Yes, maybe THIS upgrade is the same, but you’ll be able to troubleshoot and adjust your platform better through small increments. If you wait to adopt change several upgrades in, your business will find itself in a tangled mess, beyond fixing. The way you handle your data is no longer compatible at all between version 3 and version 5. It might seem superfluous, but in the long run, it will save the business. This technology update is a great opportunity for designers and creatives to improve the appearances of the product, because each upgrade creates participation from Design, and the new tech features tend to bring more creative control in a shorter amount of time. What your bosses chose to ignore, can now be done with tools that are designer friendly, reducing the cost of brand improvements. You can piggyback your agenda, in someone else’s project.

3. It might be a dumb hype, but it is a bridge all companies need to cross. And you want to cross it when everyone else is crossing it. You cannot ignore one bridge to get to the next. All bridges contain micro-learnings that reveal answers to future markets and technologies. A company that chooses to “skip” the hype, it a company that will end up skipping profits in the long run. All the big brands that have survived decades of changes know this by heart. Geoffrey A. Moore talks about the technology adoption lifecycle in his book “Crossing the Chasm.” This book has been described as the bible for entrepreneurial marketing, and even though the primary focus is about the diffusion of innovation and adoption cycle in technology products, it can also be applied to the challenges of getting your teammates to understand the value of moving forward and not taking markets for granted (which is what happens when you grow stale and don’t find the value in aiming towards your best creative output).

4. Customers like your design? Maybe recurrent customers like it, but no business can be made without acquiring new ones. Those new customers will be what will sustain your profit, and they’ll only come after they study your competition. They might not be experts, but they are younger than you and they are picking for small cues that generate trust. Is your social presence solid? Are you engaging users in the right channels? Does your design look a year old? Unfortunately a year old is old enough in Internet years. Small intangible elements will affect your customers who are growing old themselves. Doesn’t matter who your users are, you better find ways to remain relevant in a world fueled by hype.

5. You already tried that? Well, it is not about the “what” sometimes, but about the “when” and “how.” Certain tactics might have been tried, but was the tactic implemented too soon or not implemented the right way? Other companies tried to be Pixar or Apple before them, but they didn’t meet the same success. Everything in a way has happened before, but there’s plenty of variations (including externalities) that can influence the success or failure of a venture. Sure, the past should influence your decisions, but nothing should be left off the table.

6. You don’t like change because others have failed? Success is built on change and small failures. Reading pop “business” wisdom type of books can often give you small anecdotes to help you build a case, specially as you are recruiting people to join your cause. Those books are easy to read and come with examples that can apply to all business situations. Sure, in reality a lot of that data is compromised and modified to fit the narration, but this is about building concepts people can believe in… and stories can sway anyone because our brains are wired to learn this way. I would recommend reading: Jonah Lehrer’s “IMAGINE: How Creativity Works,” and pretty much most of Malcolm Gladwell’s books: “David & Goliath,” “Outliers: The Story of Success,” “The Tipping Point,” and “Blink.” These books celebrate failure as part of success, and they all place value in what’s often seen as the “intangible value” creativity.

7. Will X lose their job if we make this update? The answer is very likely a “No.” Businesses restructure all the time and constantly have to train people to be able to operate the new systems the company adopts. Keeping an old system or process for the sake of keeping it often leads to stagnation and ultimately loss in profit.

8. Is the ROI (Return Of Investment) there? Yes it is! If you are able to optimize 100 small things, and each one improves your business by 1%, while you feel the confidence that you are moving forward, you end up making gigantic changes to the business’ bottom line. Ultimately, companies find that “soft touch points” such as blogs and social posts, generate larger profits. Please talk with your analytics team about attribution platforms that measure the effectiveness of soft initiatives. VisualIQ is a popular tool that measures the value of marketing experiences—specially important for the initiatives that don’t enjoy being the last touch point before the sale.

9. It looks fine to you? Honestly, if is hard to find tools to argue with that, because it is hard to explain that all experiences are pulsating through all brains differently. One thing is for sure, you are losing the high value costumers when you get sloppy with your creative execution, since those costumers often engage with experiences and products that have a more nuanced positioning and execution.