organizational-change on S Anand

Workshops help AI adoption

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:08:46 +0800

To teach a mindshift change like AI adoption, I’ve tried to:

Workshop: get them to do it. “Let’s try something. Can you share your screen?”
Live-code: show them how. “I’ll share screens and tyep this.”
Demo: show what’s possible. “Here’s what I built.”
Talk: explain it. “Here’s something we can build.”
Interview: ask them about it. “What do you think?”
Listen: let them yap.

The most effective are on top.

But there is one intervention I didn’t evaluate:

Exercise: give them a problem to solve.

This takes more time and patience on my part, but might have the highest value.

What this means for me is:

Don’t live-code. Workshop it. “Can you share your screen and try that?” Preferably as an open-ended problem.
Don’t demo/talk. Live-code it. “Let me share my screen and try that.”
Prepare micro-experiments. Keep a ready catalog if things to try.

Visualisation - activities to centralise

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Surely we don’t have many activities to centralise? We already have a central hub for processing operations!

We heard that from a fair section of our client organisation. They initially had operations spread across their branches. Some years ago, they had established a central hub and many regional hubs. Yet,

Only a few prominent operations were centralised. Others were just regionalised.
Regionalisation was inconsistent. Some branches still did these at their own premises.
Branches still did the bulk of the work.

We made a list of activities, surveyed all their branches and hubs, and got a good sense of which activities were happening at branches vs regionally vs centrally.

Rather than make a list of these activities (they numbered over 300), we put the variwide chart to an unorthodox use. The chart below shows the activities on the x-axis, and the extent of centralisation on the y-axis.

The graph actually consists of thin vertical lines, one for each activity. The height represents the number of branches for which the activity is happening regionally. For the activities on the right, they’re happening at branches. Dark blue lines are happening centrally. Light blue lines are regionalised.

You can see at a glance that about 55% of activities are at branches, 35% are regionalised and 10% are centralised. Clearly there’s a big potential to centralise. Once we showed this slide, most of the objections went away.

Comments

Sudheer 21 Sep 2006 5:01 am: Hi Anand, Without taking the credit away from analysis, te most amazing part of your analysis is the representation. I guess the simplicity and the novelty of the picture. One thing which you could elaborate a little more is to tell us how you identified the list of activities so that they are of similar significance/effort etc. Given that branches are the last mile in terms of delivery there will be a lot more of smaller activties compared to the HO.
S Anand 21 Sep 2006 7:07 am: You’re right, Sudheer – that’s an important question. We assumed that the size of activities is proportional to the size of assets at the operations. So the vertical axis is not the number of branches, actually. It’s the asset size. This is not a perfect assumption, but for a homogenous bank like ours, a fairly good one. That takes care of the size of activities.

Change management

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Change management can be analytic, as opposed to touchy-feely.

Our client’s operating margin was falling. The bosses wanted to offshore their back office. Others weren’t convinced. To manage this change, we needed three questions answered:

Who’s not convinced?
Why aren’t they convinced?
What’ll convince them?

Who’s not convinced?

We plotted the level of support and importance of key people on the stakeholder support matrix. This split people into 4 groups (below). Then we showed it around to people and had them move people around on the matrix.

Minor sceptics. We largely ignored them
Change facilitators. We tasked them with roles in the project
Change agents. We made them influence the others
People to convince. The ones we needed to focus on

This is a simple concept, actually. The insight is, putting names on such a matrix, and getting people to move them around, is a robust way to get everyone on the board and at the right spot.

Why aren’t they convinced?

We sent everyone a list of benefits and issues in outsourcing. They rated them. We grouped the results and plotted them. Here’s the result for Uli.

Uli saw more issues than benefits. Quality and possible better service were benefits. But he was afraid the company wasn’t ready, and vendors wouldn’t understand their operations.

The advantage of these charts is that you can put them side by side, and compare where different people stand. It gives you a great view of why they’re objecting, and whom you can use to counter that.

What’ll convince them?

Once we knew why people objected, it was easy to manage.

For example, to counter Uli’s fear of organisational readiness, we got people who felt this was not an issue to put forward their counterpoints.

To counter fears of vendor ability, we got a bunch of them to visit BPOs in India, and spread their confidence to others.

We arranged workshops, making sure that each group had people to convince and change agents.

This did require a lot of soft skills. But the success was largely because of the structured ground-work. Change management can be quite analytic.

Comments

ravi 1 May 2006 4:12 pm: cool work..something similar to stakeholder mapping rite.but how did u achieve the moving around of people within the matrix .was it a group exercise.is there any chance of a bias entering the analysis ? how did u arrive at the final stakeholder map? i did a study for scorttish power on wind power..we didnt exactly conclude the arguement as i didnot know how to achieve the support of the stkeholders or the OR way of achieving it..this could have surely helped if it had come 10 days ago anand..really cool
Sai 1 May 2006 11:36 pm: Excellent. Soft-skills help a lot, but this kind of effort goes a long way in assuaging skeptics. Thanks for sharing.
Arun 2 May 2006 6:16 am: Very neat. I am going to try and use this if the opportunity presents itself. Thanks! Btw, can you share a little more info on the company that’s using the wiki?
S Anand 3 May 2006 7:13 am: Arun, I’m afraid I don’t know much more about them myself. Just that there are examples that my colleague vouches for. Infosys is going for an internal wiki initiative as well.
Sumeet 3 May 2006 2:51 pm: The octagonal chart is confusing at first. Isn’t there a better way of plotting the issues/benefits poll results ?
S Anand 3 May 2006 5:58 pm: Definitely! Variants of the bar chart could have done the job much better. We were pressed for time, though, and we felt cool showing spider graphs to the client… :-)
Arun 4 May 2006 5:29 am: Ah, alright. Wipro had tried blogs for a while, i think it died out pretty soon. Interesting, infy going for a wiki initiative. Hope you guys fare better! :-)
Jayant 4 May 2006 1:41 pm: Honestly, I dont have numbers to prove but I feel this outsourcing is breaking into other’s “rice bowl”…but change is change..
Sumeet 4 May 2006 3:21 pm: What strategy did u use for the people on the middle ground. In your e.g Jim K and Mark L can go either way (People to convince or change agents) ?
S Anand 4 May 2006 8:21 pm: Jayant, you’re right. When we were working on this case, we went out to lunch at a restaurant. Behind us were 5 people who’d been laid off by this client 6 months ago. I overheard their conversation. They still hadn’t found a job. Even daily living was proving tough. There’s no doubt: outsourcing hits a lot of people directly, and hard.
S Anand 4 May 2006 8:21 pm: Sumeet, Jim H and Jim K were the top people in the company. We didn’t want to “counter” them with anyone having strong opinions. It was vital not to THRUST anything on these two. We asked them for their initial reactions and questions, went back, spent a LOT of time preparing answers, and had conversations with them. We moved gently, and gave them a lot of time. And that’s where the soft stuff comes in.
jayant 6 May 2006 2:41 pm: Actually there is interesting parallel to what happened to Indian textile industry in early 1900. Powerloom’s shirts were cheaper than handloom’s. So, Indian weavers were losing jobs to English powerloom workers. Not that powerloom workers were well off. You may want to read Autobiography of Gandhi for that. Interestingly, then there was Swadeshi movement etc and Indian business community infact had said that it does not make sense to stop imports as it cheaper and people will buy what is cheap and good. Lot of parallels actually. Anyway, guess people who moved to West and probably toiled are probably better off. Hell for one generation, probably heaven for next!
S Anand 6 May 2006 3:42 pm: Hey, that’s an interesting perspective!
damand draft 11 Dec 2006 3:57 am: deamand draft

B2E

Wed, 06 Jun 2001 12:00:00 +0000

After B2C and B2B, is it now going to be B2E?