Supercharge your OCM abilities with AI
OCM Professionals will soon realize that if they’re not leveraging artificial intelligence as a powerful assistant, they may not be able to keep up. This applies to the entire organizational change management delivery lifecycle from strategy to execution. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be defined as computer systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. There’s a lot of buzz about AI so we recently met with Marcos Goldstein, the founder of FosterWe, an experienced team of change makers and storytellers, to explore how he, as a change manager and early adopter, is using artificial intelligence to his advantage.
Benefits of AI for organizational change management professionals
Eliminate Writer’s Block. AI can be used as an accelerator to create a first draft. If you need to write a communication for an executive, a blog, a thought piece, do some research, or anything related to content creation, AI’s available tools can substantially accelerate the process. You can use AI to create an outline, find sources that support arguments, or create a hypothesis. All of these things take a lot of time for our human brains to process but are instant for AI.
Proactively Prepare for Resistance. Have you ever tried to anticipate pushback or questions you’ll receive from your client? Marcos recently used AI to come up with variables that he hadn’t considered. He told AI that he wanted to effectively influence people that have a variety of personality traits, such as analytical engineers. The AI tool gave him a breakdown of each personality type and what to incentivize them with to adopt a change—an incentive profile for each personality trait. In theory, AI has read everything on the internet and every book written about personality traits and can essentially regurgitate and assemble all of this information to shape alternative arguments. OCM consultants should be critical about the data, of course, but should be leveraging AI as an incredibly powerful tool to manage resistance and increase adoption.
Create Personas. Change management professionals can use GPT, an AI tool, to create draft stakeholder personas. Simply provide GPT with relevant project and stakeholder parameters, such as you’re supporting a merger for cross-functional teams like finance, accounting, and design, and then ask GPT to create user personas for a communication plan and it will outline them. Data provided by AI can include: Who are they? What do they want? What are they motivated by? What is their job like? This is especially helpful for roles that not everyone is familiar with, like a Procurement Analyst. GPT can give you a starting point on tasks of roles that we may not be familiar with. AI bases the data on all available job descriptions and profiles on the entire internet. From a creative lens, AI can generate images for personas to support communications or other change management deliverables. Stock image providers, like Shutterstock, are potentially at risk because AI can create realistic photos based on a scenario that you may not be able to tell was generated by AI. In fact, Marcos recently provided an animated image and AI made it look more realistic, created 3D animations, and even produced script and video content.
Customize messaging by audience. You can simply ask GPT to tailor communications for any impacted group—a doctor, nurse, facilities person, or executive—and have it be in the voice of the company’s CEO, or voice of your liking. AI can then write custom communications for each persona.
Change managers should…
Challenge yourselves to use AI. GPT is a free tool and when you open it, it’s simply a chat. Try leaving it open and asking it questions throughout the day to familiarize yourself with the functionality that it can provide. AI will challenge people and some will be left behind; make sure that it isn’t you.
Be critical of the content. Some content from AI isn’t accurate so be sure to check for sources. Additionally, depending on the type of AI you’re using, you forfeit the rights of the content so be leery of the content that you’re sharing, especially with free AI tools.
Help people feel connected. As the use of AI increases in the workplace, change managers must lead the charge on making people feel a sense of belonging, connection, and support. If you think there's a lot of content out there now, imagine how much more will be introduced with AI.
Mediocre won’t fly with the introduction of AI. Artificial intelligence will challenge corporate America—jobs, quality of work, and sometimes it will threaten human connectedness. Change managers can use AI to their advantage and ensure people feel a sense of belonging, connection, and support as the use of AI increases. Explore the possibilities of artificial intelligence and see how you can best incorporate them with your current role. Leave a comment and let us know how you’ve used artificial intelligence to your advantage.
Contact ChangeStaffing to learn more about artificial intelligence and how change management practitioners can be prepared for the changes to come!
A very special thank you to Marcos Goldstein from FosterWe for his thought leadership and for collaborating with us on this blog.
Written by Kylette Harrison