Every major change brings with it a dip in production before it swings up into an increase. This dip has two dimensions: productivity and time as you will see below.

In 1999 I led the communications effort for the total replacement of all systems in the World Bank, a global organization of 15,000 people in over sixty offices around the world.

As part of the overhaul we documented business processes and used the documentation to replace a spaghetti mess of over one hundred uncoordinated systems with a single system that would operate in real time: SAP. It was a Herculean task.

Many of our managers and leaders were not paying due attention to the importance of our work. To address this Michael Hammer - Mr. Business Process Reengineering - was brought in to speak to our organization and explain the critical nature of the effort. In a single day he did more to get our organization on the same page than any other communication activity I supervised.

He made his rounds and personally interacted with over 1,000 staff members. He lectured to two auditoriums that were standing room only while his presentation was simultaneously streamed to the desktop of staff members around the world. He met with the software development team, the change team, and our vice presidents in three independent sessions.

In each session he explained that every innovation goes through a dip. This dip impacts productivity. The dip characterizes how low productivity drops and how long it stays down before the change brings its reward and productivity increases. He showed us a graph that looked something like the one below.


He also told us the graph does not have to look like this. There is a darker version, one in which the productivity goes all the way down and stays there forever. This is called flat lining because the organization dies.

 

Hammer told me as I was escorting him from one meeting to another that his intent was, among other things, to put the fear of God in as many of us as possible so we would pay attention and get involved. He said to me, “The technology will work. The people may not. The soft stuff is the hard stuff. Communication, training, and support will determine your success. You need spend only 3-5% of your budget on these three, but they are non-negotiable.”

So, navigating the dip is mission critcal - can even be life or death. And the way through is by helping people to know what is going on, what they need to do, and helping them to get it right.