Most technology rollouts get announced as a transformation. Torrence Smith makes the case that the word itself is doing quiet damage, because for the people in the field, most of the job stays exactly the same. He joined host Justin Lake on Frontline Innovators to talk about what actually moves adoption, and almost none of it happens at go-live.
Failed adoption costs credibility before it costs money
Ask what a bad rollout costs and most leaders reach for the budget line. Torrence starts elsewhere. Trust in a workforce, he says, ebbs and flows like a politician's approval rating. Make a good call and it rises. Execute a good idea badly and it drops. The financial damage is real, and ERP projects are the obvious example where an organization spends enormous sums and ends up worse off than when it started. But the credibility hit is what lingers. It lingers because organizations remember. The next time you walk in with an initiative, operators and middle managers have already priced in the last one. Different leadership team, different project lead, but in their minds those are equivalent. As Torrence puts it, the best way to have a successful implementation is to succeed in the implementation that happened before it. Middle managers in particular are running a quieter calculation: if I back this and it fails, what does that cost my career?
Have the meeting before the meeting
Torrence offers a Japanese term for the antidote: nemawashi, literally preparing a tree's root ball before planting, and in Japanese industry the meeting before the meeting. It means low-stakes conversations with machine operators, field technicians, dispatchers, and middle managers before anyone sits down in a conference room. Not a formal review. Just talking. Do that, and the formal meeting changes character. It stops being a debate about the current situation and becomes a discussion of what to do about it. The point is to surface resistance while it is still cheap to address. The cost of a mistake is lowest at the very beginning, when it is two people in a room with an idea. Once you have paid for design, hired consultants, and signed up the executive team, the burn rate can run into millions a month. That reframes the people usually written off as blockers. If someone tells you your plan will never work, Torrence treats that as a sign of trust, not obstruction. The follow-up question is simply why.
Change the few levers that matter and leave the rest alone
Torrence describes wanting a hybrid car when you already own a minivan the kids like. The instinct is to sell and buy new. The overlooked option is a hybrid kit: retrofit what you have, and everyone keeps the vehicle they know. Applied to transformation, he argues there are usually only four or five levers that genuinely decide whether a program works. Much of the rest is bells and whistles. Change those, hold everything else steady, and change management gets easier because most people's daily experience barely moves. He tells of yard crews who tracked orders in spreadsheets and asked what would happen to them. His answer: they would get a different spreadsheet. That was the change.
Say tweak, not transformation
Here the conversation turns on the people running the project. Teams live inside an implementation for months, get genuinely excited, and then oversell its size to the field. Justin admits catching himself doing it with the phrase digital transformation, which he mostly dislikes but uses anyway. When everything is said to be changing, it becomes overwhelming, and people fear what they cannot picture. In most field service rollouts, roughly eighty percent of the work is unchanged. You still check the morning list, pick parts for a work order, track time and mileage. Naming the small real change, and being specific about what stays the same, shrinks the unknown where the anxiety actually lives. Torrence adds an assumption worth carrying into every rollout: most people are already carrying more worry than they let on. Mortgages, kids, a sick pet. Then someone arrives to announce that everything is going to be different.
Aim for commitment, not compliance
Alignment is a word that hides things. Sometimes, Torrence notes, what leaders mean by aligned is whether people will do what they were told. That gets you to go-live. It does not survive your attention moving to the next project. Involve people early, let the design reflect some of what they told you, and momentum carries itself. He compares it to a kite with enough height to stay up on its own. His closing advice is deliberately analog. Buy a five by eight notebook. Put your schedule, to-do lists, and meeting notes in it. He has notebooks going back twelve years, and as he says, nobody has figured out how to send email to paper.
About Torrence Smith
Torrence Smith is an operating executive and enterprise operational excellence consultant who helps organizations improve supply chain performance, ERP implementations, and operational excellence. He works at the intersection of technology, business transformation, and the people responsible for making change succeed on the frontlines.
Thanks to Torrence Smith for a conversation full of ideas a project team can use immediately. The reframe that stuck with us: if you have a problem in the third act, it is because of something you did wrong in the first act. Change management is a first-act discipline.
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PODCAST
Listen to Episode #145: Sell the Tweak, Not the Transformation
Operating executive and operational excellence consultant Torrence Smith joins host Justin Lake to explain why most rollouts are sold as transformations when the daily work barely changes, and what that framing costs frontline teams.
Episode Transcript
Justin Lake: Welcome to the Frontline Innovators Podcast. I'm your host, Justin Lake, and super excited about today's episode. Today's guest is an operating executive and enterprise operational excellence consultant who helps organizations improve supply chain performance, ERP implementations, and operational excellence. Throughout his career, he's worked at the intersection of technology, business transformation, and the people responsible for making change successful on the frontlines. He's joining us today to share his perspective on what it really takes. drive lasting operational change. Please welcome to the show, Torrance Smith. Hello, sir. How are you today?
Torrence Smith: Fantastic. How you doing, Justin?
Justin Lake: I'm well and I'm super excited for our conversation today. And we're gonna get started, as we've talked about, with getting your take on what you think is the biggest operational consequence of poor technology adoption on the front lines. How would you position that from a business impact standpoint?
Torrence Smith: Yeah, I I think there's actually more than one. even though kind of depending who you talk to, they'll focus on one of three. as far as the people involved in the enterprise, I think there's a a huge hit that you take as far as credibility when the adoption goes badly. we assume that we have all this trust in the workforce. And the truth is, you know, almost like a politician, it ebbs and flows. you make a good decision that has you know high positive impact and it goes up. And maybe you make a bad decision or or you made a great decision but didn't execute well and it goes down. I mean, that's you know, that's just kind of the reality, you know, of human nature. on a business standpoint, you know, you probably said, during this year we're gonna do a transformation and it's gonna be great and then we're gonna have all these all these benefits and the reality is with the core adoption you might actually go backwards. And then of course last but not least, there's a financial impact. Right. So especially you mentioned in the introduction things like you know ERP implementations, those are a prime example where you could spend you know hundreds of millions of dollars and actually end up worse off than you were when you started.
Justin Lake: Let's let's go. Yes, I agree with that. And I want to come back to that piece on the ERP implementation and ending up worse. But I also want to go back to the your first answer, which is really about losing credibility in the organization. Because I do see this happening often and I'm curious to hear how you think that actually plays itself out. Like, okay, so leadership team lost a few credibility points, but like so what? How does that actually impact the organization?
Torrence Smith: So the next time that you show up with an initiative, they're less likely to be enthusiastic. I think any one of us who's involved in transformation, change management, we're used to showing up someplace and having the operators say, or middle managers say, Yeah, you know, the last implementation didn't go well, so we don't have a lot of hope for this one. Now, it could have been a completely different management team, it could have been a completely different you know project leader, but nevertheless, in their minds, they're they're equivalent. So so the best way to you know have a successful implementation is to succeed in the implementation that happened before it. Some of which you can't control, right? if there's been a management change over whatever. So but yeah they have a long memory. And some have seen even you know leadership change because of you know failed implementations. So then especially say a middle manager, they're wondering if by supporting what you want to do, is it gonna cost them their career?
Justin Lake: I think that's a really interesting point about the success of this implementation, whatever it is we're working on now, being impacted by the last implementation. I I think that's a a perfect statement. That's very accurate. And yet you're right, the the people that are involved in this program may not have been the same people that were involved in that last program, but we still have to carry the baggage. from those previous experiences, it it kind of affects the culture around the teams that are going to be impacted by this change. So what would your advice be to kind of overcome having some of that baggage on a project today because of things that happened in quarters and years past? How would you advise that we overcome that?
Torrence Smith: you know, probably there's three things that come to mind. the first one being as you're building a project, you don't want the change management part, which is involving the people. don't save that for the end. You know, you could save yourself a lot of suffering by having kind of like a people-centered change management plan. In other words, you involve them from the beginning. in the design of what you're hoping to do. And you kind of give them the broad outlines like here's the things that we're trying to accomplish, here's the problems that we're trying to solve. And so as you as you bring them along, as you're building the plan and they're giving they're giving their input into the plan, now they have ownership. So it's not here's this thing that management is doing to us. It's Here's this thing that we're doing together. And so I think that that goes a long way. The other is when you show up with your bright, shiny idea, right? Which you got wherever you got it, right? It came from senior management, you read it in a book, you completed a course, and now you're like, this is what we need to do. probably a good idea to just ask them, what have you already tried? And then just get it out of their system. Let them tell you about all the initiatives, you know, which ones went well, you know, which ones failed, which ones didn't fail, but didn't necessarily succeed. because I think we make the mistake of showing up and just talking about today as if it's a blank sheet of paper. And the reality is, you know, it's it's not. And the longer an organization has been around. then the more organizational memory you're gonna have to deal with.
Justin Lake: That's a great term, the organizational memory. And I had this play out in an experience this week. I was on site with a client and I I won't share details about the client because I I certainly wouldn't want them to think that I I'm talking of the story in any negative way. But there was a a bit of a healthy debate even amongst the team where their project has been kicked out by about a quarter from the original plan, which is actually not too bad. There's some concern it may get kicked out a little bit further. And then there some debate ensued about when the change management communication plan should begin for the majority of people who are going to be affected by this. And the debate was one faction was saying, no, let's just wait. The application's far down the road. We're having delays. We really don't have time to deal with that now. And the other side was saying, Years ago when we implemented SAP, that's the approach that we took. And we all knew how we all know how well that went, right? With a little bit of sarcasm. And
Torrence Smith: Mm-hmm.
Justin Lake: so to this point, to the point you're making, this wasn't even it hadn't even gotten to the organizational memory of the frontline team members that were impacted last time. But this was a stakeholder who was sitting in the planning room who was saying, Let's not forget that last time we tried to do it that way and it didn't work so well. And so, how can we learn from those lessons, you know, learn the lessons that we should have learned from last time and change the trajectory today? And what he was advocating for was actually still starting sooner rather than later, even though the implementation
Torrence Smith: Yes. Yes.
Justin Lake: that go live data has been pushed out to the right by several months at this point. But
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: let's not waste the time that we have now beginning that communication. And so You know, it I I was actually becoming a bit of a bystander to this conversation. It was their company, it was two stakeholders,
Torrence Smith: Yeah.
Justin Lake: you know, inside their company. And so I just, you know, kind of sat back and let them talk through through that a little bit. But it is interesting. And I I see both sides of it. I, you know, the the person who is advocating for delaying is the project manager who's on s on some level, his hair's on fire right now, trying to keep all of the other scaffolding of this project in place right now. And so dealing with something that feels like it's so far out feels like it's something that can be kicked down the road a little bit, you know. But this other person who's not involved in the scaffolding of the project is just thinking about the impact of the operations, the impact of the field. In this case, it's a bunch of field service technicians and delivery guys in the field that are going to be ultimately impacted by this change. And so he's saying, let's let's get this thing started absolutely as soon as we can so that go live becomes a non-event. Right. Instead of making it this like big
Torrence Smith: Yes, yes.
Justin Lake: cliff thing. What are your thoughts on that? That that that had a you gave me a big
Torrence Smith: so yeah.
Justin Lake: response to that statement, so I wanna hear what you're thinking about.
Torrence Smith: So this is the only Japanese term I'm gonna throw at you during this conversation, I promise. I mostly promise. It's it's called
Justin Lake: Okay. Okay.
Torrence Smith: Nimawashi, which is I don't know if you've heard it, like all the Japanese
Justin Lake: Okay. I have not.
Torrence Smith: companies, so Sony, Toyota, all those companies understand this idea of the meeting before the meeting. So literally it means preparing a tree, I think for planting where you Wrap up the roots and you prepare the soil and you do all these things to make sure that when you plant the tree it will grow. But in Japanese industry, it essentially means having a series of kind of low-stakes conversations, right? So it's not just progressive versus big bang project. It's also progressive versus big bang conversations. So you really have a choice of either we do some NIMAwashi where we're having these low-level meetings with decision makers, machine operators, field service technicians, middle managers, dispatchers, all those people. We're having low-stakes conversations. It might not even be in a conference room. We're we're talking to them, we're getting their input, we're kind of going back and forth. And then when we get to the conference room where we're having the formal discussion, the conversation kind of changes from what is the current situation to what are we going to do about the current situation? And it seems like a like nuance, but it it's actually a really big thing because What you're hoping to do is build consensus. So the manager that wanted to hold off, you know, he's probably kind of thinking in terms of control, right? if people find out that there's problems, then they'll they'll lose confidence in the project. but if they were involved in developing the project, then they'll want to know what the real status is. And if you've done a good job of designing the product project, then they have something at stake in its success. So I know we talk on on the podcast about like resistors, people who you know hear about the project and and push back against the project. the time to dissolve that is right at the start. And so you want to get all that negative, it seems counterintuitive. But you you want to get all of that out on the out in the open, have honest conversations, and you know when their concerns are true, address them before you're in the thick of things, or or you've quote unquote implemented, right? You've you've gone live, the system is on, but you know, people are doing workarounds, right? Or It's live, it's in the field, but it's not actually delivering the value that you thought it would. And it's because of decisions that you made all the way back at the beginning. You know. it's almost like screenwriting, right? I'm not a screenwriter, but they say that if you have a problem in the third act, it's because of something you did wrong in the first act.
Justin Lake: I it makes perfect sense.
Torrence Smith: It's it's the same thing.
Justin Lake: Yeah. Well, I think the the other thing about what you just said that I I believe and agree with you on is about sharing and letting them become part of both the problem and the solution. And I
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: I think he might be onto something. I I don't know the gentleman that that I just met this week. I don't know him in particular well enough to to know yet about that, but I've seen other people in his role. And they are very they have a very legitimate source of stress on their mind right now. They're they're frustrated about again all the the building blocks of this project and things are delayed and maybe the vendor's not performing and all the other things that go wrong, you know, in in the kind of back half of a the the build phase of a project. So it's it's very ordinary to to feel those concerns. I think what for some reason seems counterintuitive, as you called out, is Getting the people that are going to be affected by this involved sooner rather than later. And I think one of the things that maybe is human nature
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: across the board is like the things that we don't know about actually cause more fear and anxiety than things that we know about. And so when the team knows. That we're changing
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: our ERP or we're changing our field service management software, or there's new warehouse management software coming in. They know these changes are happening because they were announced at some big executive level, you know, meeting or an all-hands call or something like that. They know it's hanging out. There's just like black cloud hanging over their back. And now they're not hearing anything. Now they don't know why it's delayed. Now they don't know what's going on. It feels to me, or not feels, I've witnessed the stress rising over time. And
Torrence Smith: Yes. Yes.
Justin Lake: I I can't be certain that it's because of that, but I certainly don't think that that's helping when we keep them out of the loop. And so I I actually think I I, you know, your point is a perfect one, which is the sooner we can involve them in that is and be part of the solution, it's actually the better. I thought you were going to say something else about the Japanese with the the preparation of the root ball on the tree, because it I think it's also an old, you know, Japanese proverb. I don't know if I just saw this as a social media meme, but Like that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. you know, I I I kind of feel like that comes into this discussion
Torrence Smith: Yeah.
Justin Lake: as well. Like the sooner we can start communicating, the better. Any day, any week, month, quarter that we're dragging our feet and saying, well, let's do that later, we're probably
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: losing an opportunity to improve our outcomes down the road.
Torrence Smith: Yeah, I agree. you know, and and so the cost the cost of mistakes is is low in the beginning, right? So maybe it's just Torrance and Justin talking in a in a conference room saying, Hey, I've got this idea, here's what I think can improve the business. It's very low stakes. when you have already paid for design, already engaged a third-party vendor, already have consultants running around, already engaged, you know, senior management, executive team, and they've signed up to this, your burn rate goes up, right? So it could be millions of dollars a month, depending on on what it is. and then Obviously, the potential credibility impact goes up too.
Justin Lake: Yes.
Torrence Smith: Yeah. So why would you wait until later? just imagine. you know, so we put in a a solution when I was at Mitsubishi Caterpillar called One Call, and it took our OEM, which which was us, connected us to 90 separate. Independently owned dealerships in 400 locations, and we were all servicing Home Depot, which was our largest client. I don't think that's a secret. So
Justin Lake: Yeah.
Torrence Smith: so Home Depot looked at all of us as being a single company, even though we were 90 separate 91 separate companies. and I just imagine if when we turned on one call, if Our independent dealers went to check in at Home Depot using the platform and it didn't work. The the blowback from 90 separate companies, independently owned companies, would probably be very high. You know, fortunately, we'd involved them from the beginning. So, you know, the functional requirements and the technical requirements, a lot of that came from field service technicians. dispatchers, independent dealership owners. It wasn't just our team. So it was a progressive gathering of requirements, and then we told them, you know, where the program was as far as progress was. And then instead of doing a big bang and launching it to everybody at the same time, we launched it at a local dealership and made sure that the whole system worked. So they got the benefit of you know, that solution without kind of any of the downside of you know, dealing with bugs, you know, technical issues, etc.
Justin Lake: Do you mean local to the project team? It was one of your dealers that was close to where you guys were.
Torrence Smith: Yeah. Yeah, one of our dealers that was located in Houston. So then that way, hey, we could just run over there and see what's going on.
Justin Lake: Yep. Proximity matters with those types of things, right? It just
Torrence Smith: Yeah.
Justin Lake: closes the physical gap a little bit. So that's great. What's something that you learned in that process, in that early phase? Like there had to be something that was discovered in that process that either didn't pan out the way you guys had whiteboarded it, that now you've got actual people in the field actually using it, like something had to not match up with what you were expecting that you learned. Anything come to mind on that?
Torrence Smith: There was something that we had planned for, but we had kind of underestimated its impact. And that's as I'm sure you're familiar, kind of this whole, I suppose you'd call it latency, where guy gets out in the field, you've built them a mobile, a mobile application, right? You put all this work into it, and you realize that there's some place that has terrible cell phone service. And so you've done all this work, all the
Justin Lake: Are you saying that the carriers are you saying the carriers don't have ubiquitous coverage everywhere all the time? Because their maps all show that they do. It is not.
Torrence Smith: That's what the map says, but the map is not the territory.
Justin Lake: So how did that play out? So so let let's I I know it probably seems strange. I want to go deep on this, but I think this is exactly the kind of area that catches people by surprise. And and I'm partly joking when I talk about the carrier maps, but we all know it's true. We see the ads on TV, they show us these maps that look like everything's red, everything's fuchsia, whatever color that is, magenta.
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: you know, all the colors are all filled in. But then we have in the real world, we get out into the field and we find out that it's not that we don't have coverage, but maybe just like you said, you've got latency. So how did this actually play out? What was the feedback that you got? How was it impacting the users? Tell me a little bit more about that story.
Torrence Smith: Well we had a field service technician servicing a Home Depot location that was kind of in the middle of nowhere. I mean, compared to you know, say the density that you have out here on the East Coast, right? so as soon as we, you know, got that complaint. I'm trying to remember if it came in as like an email or a phone call or whatever, but you know, immediately it was like, Okay, if it happened there, it can happen other places. And so, you know, we initiated a discussion with our technical team to make sure that we could store that data until they got back in you know range of a tower. But you know that fortunately we had built that kind of communicative relationship with the field from the beginning. So you know they they notified us almost right away.
Justin Lake: And was there any change in the user experience for the field level folks that were using that application? That did they need to understand anything about how their data was being stored if they were in an area where there was poor connectivity, maybe even inside the building? Like it may have worked in the parking lot, but not inside the building super well. Were were there issues that had to be addressed from a communication and training standpoint to say this is how you are going to now have to interact with this technology, or was it behind the scenes?
Torrence Smith: Yeah, it was it was a communication as well, right? We we had to, you know, schedule a meeting with as many people as we could, you know, get on the call. And actually it was a a number of meetings, right? Because often these guys aren't available. You know, they're
Justin Lake: Yes.
Torrence Smith: they're living out of the truck. you know, like, okay, when when are they usually in the office? well, you know, Friday morning or you know, whenever that was. And so we try and schedule multiple communications as well as reports. them and then you're gonna push those recordings out. And you know you have these conversations about okay, so how long does it really take to implement change sometimes? And I've heard people on the on the podcast say, we have a 30, 60, 90 day plan. You know, the reality is right for some of these applications, it might be 12 months later that you're still doing some debug. you know, I think maybe 10% of the dealerships, you know, got it right away. Just that's just who they were, right? we had maybe 80% that, you know, over the course of three, four, five, six months, you know, eight months, whatever, they figured it out, right? It took them a bit. You know, maybe it wasn't their focus, but eventually they got it. And then we had 10% that were Who are guys in high school that just never really seem to be paying attention? and not not to run anybody down. Yeah. I'm I might have been in the ten percent. Yeah. No. Yeah. So yeah, it is.
Justin Lake: That that's probably what people said about me. I I might have been in that 10% that you're talking about, but I know what you mean. Yeah. It's like a bell curve though, right? You got 10% early adopters, you've got the 80% in the middle, you've got the 10% on the back end that are either resistant or just struggling, or maybe there's some turmoil going on in their business, and this is just one more curveball that you're throwing
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: their way at at a time that wasn't optimal for them, right? We'll give them the benefit
Torrence Smith: Yeah. Yeah.
Justin Lake: of the doubt. so let this is another interesting thing to think about then. So, what you learned from that first dealership, this is in the early stage, in in the kind of the pilot phase, I imagine, before you go out wide. What did you do then to recalibrate how you then brought the solution to the next market? How did that or the next dealer or whatever your kind of wave segmentation was? How did you change the communication going forward? Did you go back and update the materials and and the The go live plan for each of those locations based on the learnings that you had from the first site or two.
Torrence Smith: You know, the first site we didn't have any trouble, which in some ways is terrible, right? I mean the first site went went well, and it's like this is great. I'm brilliant, right? Yeah, false positive. I'm brilliant.
Justin Lake: Okay. Interesting. Yes, it is terrible. Yes. Yeah. Fal false positive. Yeah.
Torrence Smith: I must be. my future's so bright. Man, I'm good. Yeah.
Justin Lake: Man I'm good. Yeah.
Torrence Smith: And and then spread it wider, and then you know, to get all these different, you know, bugs. You know, but it's you know, of ver of varying sizes. you know, yeah, because each you know, each Home Depot store was a little different. And so, you know, where they did their check-in and like how are they, you know, swiping or whatever, you know, sometimes it was an issue with the physical equipment. So, you know, it was very much this incremental kind of grindy follow-up. To identify all those things and resolve them. So it was very much on a weekly basis, a daily and a weekly basis. finding things, addressing them, and then you know, telling people about the fix. So that that issue with the latency didn't show up. you know, because we were we were in Houston. And so, you know, Houston's fairly, fairly dense, right? Yeah. and this location was in I don't I don't remember like Utah or something. So we just hadn't I I had not anticipated that potential issue.
Justin Lake: Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. I I think this is just the real world, right? This isn't a problem or at least as big of a problem if you have one or two locations and a couple dozen people. But when you start to scale projects up and you have hundreds or thousands of people and dozens or hundreds of locations, this variability starts to just catch up and it it seems to me that it's snowballs. And so that scale
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: doesn't make it more complicated on a linear graph. It's it's exponential because just as the number of locations, the number of variables, carriers are stronger in different markets, right? We talked about connectivity, the way that stores are built in certain markets are different than in other markets, right? So their technology infrastructure is different in each place. Like there's just so many variables that start to grow and they they don't just multiply, they really compound and it becomes an exponential set of variables that becomes very difficult. And I think going back to what we talked about at the top of the conversation, The sooner we can begin to prepare the folks for the change and what they should expect to see, the more comfortable we can get them with a greater number of the things that are predictable. Here's what the workflows are going to be like. Here's what the software is going to look like. Here are the things that are going to be knowingly different than what you did before. So we can start to like compress the number of changes. So that then when we get out in the field and we do experience latency because of connectivity or other things like that. We're dealing with a fewer number of variables that we can now go tackle on a one-to-one basis instead of this like mountain of challenge because we're expecting these people to take a lot of change all at one time. And you actually have an operational background. So in addition to being a change management leader, how do you think that your operational background plays into how you think about supporting the men and women on the front lines?
Torrence Smith: I have a specific philosophy that I've kind of taken, you know, for change. And literally I just had this conversation earlier today talking to someone at NYU on a on a different project. But you know, suppose that you say that you want you really want a hybrid car. But you've been driving, say, the same minivan or whatever the last six months and your your four kids really like that. But you say, Man, we really need a hybrid. And so the first thing you're thinking is, Well, we should sell what we have and get something completely new. an alternative that a lot of people don't think of is there are hybrid kits. So you could buy a hybrid kit and you could retrofit what you have. And so
Justin Lake: That's interesting.
Torrence Smith: you get what you want, and the kids are still riding in the same band that they have grown to love. you know, your spouse has the same sight lines that they're used to, you know, the same method of parking, navigating the neighborhood, you know. so I think really hard about transformation in that often there's only four or five really big levers that are going to make a transformation successful. And a lot of the other stuff is just bells and whistles. So if you can change as many of those things as possible, those four or five. And then at the same time leave everything else the same, then your change management becomes much easier. Because you know, depending on you know where they are in the process, their life might not change at all, even though the organization has been transformed. You know, I had a role where I put in like a global trade management slash manufacturing execution system that essentially would handle orders all the way from receipt of the contract through the processing yards all the way to the shipping terminal and then we could even track their movement on the water. So you know the goal was to improve you know order to cash. And I remember the guys in operations that were in the yard They said, well, usually we track all our orders with an Excel spreadsheet. You know, the truth was some of them were using carbon paper, but we'll we'll leave that. We'll leave that alone. so they said, well, what's gonna happen to my Excel spreadsheet? And I said, what's gonna happen is we're gonna give you a different Excel spreadsheet. That's it. Everything else? Yeah. Ninety-five percent of it is gonna be the same. We'll give you a cell phone application that when you finish loading a shipping container and you're going through an inspection, you can take photographs of all the material, it'll it'll assign it to a contract, and then it'll upload it to the cloud. That's that's what's going to change. And I had the same conversation with senior management with executives because they're worried about their guys that are having to actually do the work. And they said, So what's gonna change? And I said, Well, they're using Excel spreadsheet now. They're gonna use a different Excel spreadsheet. And I must have had that same conversation five, ten, fifteen times. But part of why we selected that vendor is because their solution had many on-ramps. In other words, you could take that Excel spreadsheet and you could email it in to the platform and it would suck in all the data.
Justin Lake: Right.
Torrence Smith: Right? So most people know email, right? We're talking, you know. technology adoption most of us most of us know email yeah so that so that works you know there there were also XML interfaces for some of the other regions which is not a new technology either it could accept data through file transfer protocol which I remember using a long time ago and then You could also connect to the system through an application programming interface, which is kind of how typically big systems communicate with each other. So by having those on-ramps, by making sure that those on-ramps were available to the business, so rather than saying, Hey, you guys were in the Stone Age using carbon paper, new sheriff is in town, everything's changing, you need to get your act together. Instead Give them a menu of options. Here's the different ways that you can be successful. We're gonna Take away your Excel spreadsheet. We're going to give you a new Excel spreadsheet. And then we're going to give you all these on-ramps. And of course, initially there was concern. But within a couple weeks, they got used to the fact that this was gonna work. You know, initially, of course, right? they hold on to their old Excel spreadsheet just in case. Yeah, to be frank, they probably did that for months.
Justin Lake: Yeah.
Torrence Smith: you know, the implementation at Mitsubishi Caterpillar, we were the ones that implemented the application and we ran a parallel Excel spreadsheet for about a year. Why? Well, because you know, if the platform doesn't deliver on the promise, then we've got a really big problem.
Justin Lake: Yep. You know, I've learned something today. I you're really making me think about how many of us talk about the initiatives that we're implementing. Many of us that are involved. I'll put myself in this category because you're making me think about some of my own communications. But we're excited. We are Leading change. We're excited about the change. Many of us that are involved in this are pretty passionate. We may have been heads down on this for weeks, months, quarters, whatever, sometimes years on on a particular change. And so we use phrases like digital transformation, which is a phrase that I mostly hate, but I find myself using it because it's it's become kind of like common vernacular and in around enterprise
Torrence Smith: Yeah, it's accurate. Yes, yes.
Justin Lake: change. But if you think about what we're saying when we say that. We we are going to the field and saying, hey, everything is going to transform. You know, it's it's like and we're excited because we're saying, hey, we're bringing new good stuff to the business
Torrence Smith: Yes. Yeah.
Justin Lake: and we're trying to get better outcomes
Torrence Smith: Yeah.
Justin Lake: and we're trying to improve customer experience and we're trying to improve operational efficiency. So we're going to do this big initiative. And we actually inflate it, not to be disingenuous about the size of the change, but but we're
Torrence Smith: Yeah.
Justin Lake: We're excited about it. We're promoting it, right? And we're we almost probably promote it as maybe being bigger than we should. And what you just made me realize is that this doesn't sound nearly as impactful. But if we said, hey everybody, guess what? We're gonna do a digital tweak. We're not transforming, we're just tweaking a couple things here and there. If instead of actually making it feel bigger, if we could actually flip that around. A little bit and say, how can we make this seem a little bit smaller? And actually, as I think about some projects that are on my mind right now, there are field service management implementations, for example. And like probably something like 80% of the things that the people in the field did before are going to be the same things that they'll do after, right? I don't know what the percentage is, but it's probably something like 80-20. Yeah. You're going to look at a customer list in the morning.
Torrence Smith: Yes. Yeah. It's probably high. It's probably high. Yeah, you're gonna get in a van. Yeah.
Justin Lake: You're you're gonna look at the list view in the morning. You're gonna have a list
Torrence Smith: Yeah.
Justin Lake: of parts that you choose to put on a work order. You're gonna have to track your time and mileage to the site. Like all those same things are still gonna happen. And so 80% of this isn't transformative. 80% of it is actually probably gonna be the same. The form on the screen might look a little bit different. Maybe the sequence of events
Torrence Smith: Yes. Yes.
Justin Lake: might be a little bit different, but it's really a tweak, not a transformation. And then we have this 20%. That we're gonna be doing different things with our warranty work than we've
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: ever done before because that's the real reason we're implementing this, is because we've done a
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: crappy job of tracking warranty entitlements and stuff like that, whatever the reason is, right? And
Torrence Smith: Yes. Yes.
Justin Lake: so I it's interesting. I I think we should promote the concept of digital tweaking. Is that that is it doesn't sound very good.
Torrence Smith: You know, some some some version some version of of that I think is on the nose, you know, 'cause otherwise
Justin Lake: Yeah.
Torrence Smith: they're going, my god, Torrance joined a cult. That's that's what's going
Justin Lake: Yes. Yeah.
Torrence Smith: on here. Or he went off his meds if he's on meds. That's you know, yeah, I
Justin Lake: Yes, exact. And everything's gonna change because there's no it it feels when everything feels like it's gonna change, then it's overwhelming. And I think as we talk about these
Torrence Smith: Yeah. Yeah.
Justin Lake: programs, we're saying, hey, because like in this project that I was talking about, you know, from from my conversation yesterday, these guys have been in this process now for well over a year. So the people that
Torrence Smith: Yeah.
Justin Lake: are implementing the change are deep into this. This is big and transformative to them. But at the
Torrence Smith: They are. It is. To them.
Justin Lake: end of the day, to the guys in the field. probably something like eighty percent of what they do will be very similar to the way they did it before.
Torrence Smith: Yeah, sometimes the low-key approach, you know, is is is the best because the more so I here's an assumption I make is that most of the people we deal with are carrying more anxiety than what they let on. They're worried about their mortgage, their their cars, you know, their spouse. Little Jimmy has taken a little bit longer to talk than what we thought, you know. Cat got the flu. And you know, you're not sure if it's gonna be terminal. they say this because we actually had
Justin Lake: And sometimes all these things
Torrence Smith: to take our cat to the doctor recent and you know. Cats okay. But yeah. They're all happening at the same time. And then Torrance
Justin Lake: I'm happy to hear that. But sometimes these things all happen like at the same week in the same month. Yeah.
Torrence Smith: waltz into the room and says, Doing this transformation, guys, everything's gonna be different. You know? And then he offers me some Kool-Aid, which I refuse to drink, right? So, you know, sometimes it's it helps us to, you know, look at the project as it stands and kind of what the objectives are and and ask just a really simple question which is you know how is this going to affect the team right so these different groups right so as an example that global trade management platform there was a a group of people called the centralized container department and they handled You know, all these export shipments for the United States. And it was something like 700 containers a month. So a lot of volume, right? Two-thirds of that going to China. So lots of stress, lots of movement, etc. So just imagine if I had gone over there, you know, talked to the the director who was over that and said, Hey, we should do a transformation, change everything, right? They're already staying there till six or seven o'clock at night. They're coming in on weekends. And now you want to throw something new at them. You know? the way that we approached that communication was, hey, we think that there's a way to simplify what you're doing. And right now you're here till you know six, seven o'clock at night. You guys are coming in Saturdays for you know like a half a day. We think we can get that down to where you can work eight to five. Right? Selling the dream, you can work eight to five. but you know that that that was the approach because they were doing all of this manually. It was email, Excel spreadsheets, and we had a whole room of cabinets filled with folders. And and this wasn't that long ago. We're talking
Justin Lake: Yeah.
Torrence Smith: twenty twenty eighteen. So so that was how they were managing the process. And so It shifts from you're throwing this new thing at me. I hope you don't ruin my life, to maybe my stress will go down, at least at work, right? The cat still has the flu, you know, interest rates are still going up, but may maybe this will work. And you know, maybe a lot of times is enough hearing. Hearing people in the business say maybe this will work, right? They don't they don't always have full faith, right? Because they're they're probably not going to be at as many meetings as we are. they haven't spent all this time talking to the different vendors about what's possible, etc. But if we can get them to that maybe point, then now they're kind of malleable, right? They'll they'll join a call with the vendor, they'll join a a demonstration. they're open to having discussions about mapping the process and how it works today and what are the what are the issues, right? Because the issues a lot of times we wanna we wanna shut down that guy that complains all the time. He's a resistor.
Justin Lake: Yeah.
Torrence Smith: You know? How will you deal with the resistance, right? Like, okay, this is getting kind of hardcore, right? like we're hiding behind walls and throwing grenades. You know, the reality is is, you know, probably they have anxiety. They have seen these types of initiatives fail. So, you know, what are we doing to show them that this time it's different?
Justin Lake: Yeah. I think that's really well said. And I think a a big takeaway for me, even with my own internal communications, you know, on my own team, I think there's there's a lesson to be learned here about just rethinking how we communicate because I think another thing about frontline workers, and I've talked about this probably a hundred times on the podcast, is the time element. This always comes
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: up when we're in the field. Or in training centers like I was this week, the time that is not afforded to the people on the front lines during their time of change is a source of additional stress and frustration for them. So
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: if they're expected to do 10 deliveries a day or close five tickets a day on a service call or whatever the case may be, like we tend to not give them enough time for those things already. And now we're saying, hey, you need to. absorb this transformative digital project that we have. And so I think
Torrence Smith: Yeah.
Justin Lake: it would serve us and them better if we can really help them calibrate to say, hey, listen, we know that you have limited time. So actually what this is is it's a change to five, 10, 15, 20%, and maybe even dull that out over time so that we're not asking them to turn 180
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: degrees right out of the gate.
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: But begin to build a plan of evolution. And I I love your idea of the phrasing and the concept of just saying, hey, you're doing it on spreadsheets before, you're gonna do it on spreadsheets now. We're gonna change some of the processes downstream. Whether it's actually
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: a spreadsheet or just the way you fill out data, you know, on an inspection today versus the way you do it tomorrow, we're gonna do the same QC steps that you did before. We're just gonna have you document it a little bit differently, right? So
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: instead of saying, hey, we're changing the QC process.
Torrence Smith: Yeah.
Justin Lake: We're saying, no, no, no, the QC process is actually the same, but we're just gonna document it in this new piece of software now. That's a literal example from something that came up earlier in this week. And
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: so we can position it. There's a few different ways we can position it. One might be paralyzing, one might seem like, okay, well, that's fine, because all the other stuff that I'm already doing is gonna stay the same. And it's just this one change to this little piece. I I think that's pretty good advice to to to share with others.
Torrence Smith: Well, and then another another part of that that you can even apply within the project team itself is, you know, once again, they have lots of anxiety, right? They don't wanna they don't wanna fail. and so you're you're proposing that they be responsible for some part of this new thing. And you know, a lot of times I'll just say things like, Well, you know what, let's just try it out. Let's try it out and see if it works. And if it doesn't work, then we'll try something else. You know? So the goal then is to move as quickly as possible. Because I think many times our our creative mind works against us. And so as the project drags out, the anxiety goes up, as you alluded to, like literally right at the beginning of our conversation, right? Like what's going on? Is management you know planning some initiative they haven't told us about? Is this secretly doing something else, etc.? So you know, even within even within the project team, you know, the faster it moves, the less anxiety they have, the less chances
Justin Lake: Totally.
Torrence Smith: they have to to have anxiety. and so you know it it actually pays off to joke a little bit and then To you know, ask for decisions in the meeting. So you want to be polite, you're not being quote unquote confrontational per se, but you're asking for a decision. And then if they say, Well, I've got concerns, then it the response is good, that's good, because that's what you want. You know, same thing in dealing with the guys in the field. Hey, here's what we're thinking of doing. And if you're lucky, they trust you enough to tell you. That's stupid. You
Justin Lake: Yes.
Torrence Smith: know, that will never work. That will never work. I mean, that's that's like a sign of trust that they're willing they're willing to be that honest with you. So if you can get that, then the question is, well, okay, why? And you know, you want to document all those things, and then you know, the conversation continues to drill into those to figure out, you know, which ones are maybe an issue. that occurred in a past implementation, but it no longer matters. Or or maybe it's something major that you over
Justin Lake: Be remiss to not plug my own platform right now because we can actually support something that you just said. And this is actually not something that we have promoted in the past, but we are starting to do so. And so it's skillful what we do is we simulate the workflows and software, primarily for the purposes of training. But there's also an opportunity for us to use it. Same functions, no difference, just how we apply the tools that we already have to soliciting feedback before things have gone live. So
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: imagine a scenario if we're going to be launching 20 new workflows to the field service team and months ahead of go live. We don't have all of those workflows built in Salesforce or SAP or whatever platform we're implementing, but we have five or 10 of them. What if we started letting the team have exposure to those new workflows in a simulation? They can't break anything, they can't do anything wrong, they can't mess anything up in the system. There's no data, right? It's just a simulation. That's what our platform does. But if we wait until the end, then all we're doing is we're we're giving them a better tool at the last minute and we're still expecting them to drink from a fire hose. If we use
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: it instead month, many months before go live and we start soliciting feedback through those simulations, they get to go in there and say, no, that's easy. That's that's going to be just fine. Okay. So now the product team
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: can just say, okay, great, that one's done. you mean this warranty thing? When they come back and have complaints about that, well, it's good that we caught that before we did the build and before we went live with this thing, because now we can capture some of that feedback earlier on. So listen, I lead a company that has a platform that does these things. Whether you use skillful or whether you do this in some other fashion, I think there's a a practice here that is underutilized that to me would be some low-hanging fruit to go out and get some feedback. But also what you're doing when you do that is you're introducing them to the change very far ahead of when they'll actually have to do this in the real world in their job. And I think just, you know, this has become a theme of our conversation today, Torrance. So it'll just reduce the unknowns, which therefore reduces the anxiety, the fear of the unknown. And
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: now they're going to look at these workflows and say, that's actually not that different from before. Just the the UI changed a little bit, but it's the same QC
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: process. It's the same process. Okay. Yes, I told that team that they should fix this thing. Great. That was good feedback. But most of it is just not that different. And I think we can, we can do a lot of good there to. bring them into the process, all the reasons we always talk about that, but I think we we bring them into the process or we I think when that recommendation is made, we talk about bringing them in often in like the whiteboarding process, like trying to understand the current state. And I think there's an
Torrence Smith: Yes. Yes.
Justin Lake: opportunity to bring them more into now the future state. And get their
Torrence Smith: Yes.
Justin Lake: feedback along that journey. And I think it serves so many purposes
Torrence Smith: Yeah, you want it.
Justin Lake: that it would be crazy not to do that. So again, whether you use skillful or whether you do this in some other fashion, I'd encourage people to start doing that as part of that change program. And it needs to not be in the days and weeks leading up. You need to do this far enough in advance that if you learn something insightful from the field, you have time as the product team to then go and change us, right? So that you because now if you have information. that shows that something's not gonna work well in the field, the worst thing that you can do is find that out too late to make change. So the sooner you can learn those insights, the sooner you can get them implemented. And that then by the time you go live, you're you're gonna give them a better experience.
Torrence Smith: Yeah, and I think you can be strategic with it. You know, you know, we had, you know, field service technicians who had, you know, more respect amongst the other field service technicians because of their their skill and their tenure. And so involving those people in the process gave the project a lot of credibility because then, you know. They can report out, hey guys, here's what we found. You know, you know, separate implementation when I was you know in the recycling business, and we had one of our supervisors involved heavily in the process and deciding what the the future was was gonna look like. And you know, that person was able to accurately explain what the impact. Would be on the future with our proposed changes. So those people become, I don't know what you'd want to call it, I've heard change agents, I've heard mavens,
Justin Lake: Mm-hmm.
Torrence Smith: you know. Suppose I should come up with my own term and then sell it. You know,
Justin Lake: Yes, you should.
Torrence Smith: but I think of it as like a minimum viable process. in that you want to make sure that that process works. And if you can get to the point where It works, then the energy level and the amount of support I think goes way up because you know waiting until the very end and doing a kind of big bang go live is very risky because essentially you're asking for a vote of yes or no, are you in favor or against and you're you're doing it without ever priming the audience. Yeah, in a perfect world, you had discussions with them in the beginning, and some of the reasons for the changes are because of inputs that you got from them. And so, you know, that momentum is ideally moving forward kind of from the beginning. and so they're they're following along with all the various twists and turns as things go well or go badly. and when you get to the end, you know, they're really excited. They have ownership. You know, we talk a lot about alignment. in business and I think you know sometimes by alignment we mean are they going to do what I told them to?
Justin Lake: Yes, that's what we mean. Yeah.
Torrence Smith: That's what we mean. Are we aligned? Or or are you gonna have to get a different job? Right?
Justin Lake: Right.
Torrence Smith: which is okay, that that's an approach, but there's also consensus.
Justin Lake: Mm-hmm.
Torrence Smith: You know, and so are are you getting compliance or are you getting commitment? So that four months from now, when you've moved on to the next project, or that cat that had the flu, things have taken a bad turn, you're gonna have to be home for a week, you know, to hand feed them or something, things don't fall apart just because you're not there to play police officer. It's gonna carry forward on its own momentum, you know, and I think that that is how you can then have you know a number of major initiatives, you know, within, you know, a year, two years, three years is it's like a kite. It's got enough momentum. You've got it up off the ground. It's high enough. It's gonna stay in the air. Yeah, so you know, do you have compliance or do you have commitment? And if you say, well, you know, I don't know what that is, Torrance, but we're aligned and they're gonna do what I say, then things are gonna get kind of dicey when you've got four or five of these things going at the same time.
Justin Lake: Torrance, we gotta wrap it up. I feel like there was so much more that I wanted to be able to cover. I before we close this thing out, is there one piece of advice you were hoping to offer today that I didn't ask the right question to to pull it out from you?
Torrence Smith: well so who would the advice be aimed at?
Justin Lake: That's up to you. But I think most of the listeners would be, you know, the the people who are doing similar roles as what you're doing. They're operations leaders, they're change leaders, their IT project teams that are implementing technology. So the frontline workers themselves probably aren't listening to our podcast, but people who are making decisions that are impacting them are listening today.
Torrence Smith: Sure. I do have a piece of advice and it's going to be counterintuitive, especially for people who work a lot with technology, and I work a lot with technology as as do you. And a challenge we have is being constantly interrupted, inundated with information, and then if you use AI, which I use AI, now you have this whole other fire hose of data coming at you. And so people say, well, you know, I've got like certain times when I don't use my cell phone and etc. Right. But one of the simplest things that you can do is go buy a notebook. They got like a five by eight notebook that they sell at you know pretty much any place that's that's a retailer. And you can put your schedule in there, your to-do lists, your meeting notes. And for people who also spend their time in the field, you're not going to be able to take your laptop out there. And and if you keeping notes in your phone, now it just looks like you're distracted.
Justin Lake: Mm-hmm.
Torrence Smith: So if you've got your notebook with you and you can index them as two, it's a little bit of work to index it, but you've got all your conversations there, you've got all your history, you can write notes to yourself about, you know, if things go well or things go badly. I literally have notebooks going back 12 years. It's a habit I've I've kept that long. And you know, the great thing is, like they haven't figured out yet how to send email to paper.
Justin Lake: Yeah, from that notebook.
Torrence Smith: Yeah, from that notebook. Yeah, so you're able to concentrate, you know, and I think for people you know like you and I, and and to be frank, many of our technicians really are knowledge workers.
Justin Lake: Yes.
Torrence Smith: you know, we were we were paying technicians fifty dollars an hour and we were having trouble keeping them because other companies were willing to pay even more to get that same guy or or or woman with their technical knowledge. So, you know, how do you get them to where they are not distracted? Well, you know, you could give them an outlook. They'll write down in there whatever they want to write down in there. but there's so much that we think of or get inspired by that we never take the time to write down. And if we did that, I think are less.
Justin Lake: I think you're right, that is counterintuitive, but probably good advice. I know I'm guilty of being connected seemingly twenty four seven and I could probably use a break every once in a while. So it might be hard to pull my smartphone and tablet out of my hands.
Torrence Smith: You know what? I do both, right? I got a smartphone, I've got, you know, I I don't even know what other other gadgets. The laptop,
Justin Lake: Yeah.
Torrence Smith: the iPad, the my ebook. I mean, you know,
Justin Lake: Yeah.
Torrence Smith: yeah. So I'm I'm I'm
Justin Lake: No.
Torrence Smith: lecturing myself as much as I'm talking to anybody else.
Justin Lake: Well, I think we're we're in this era right now where we are inundated with technology and it's interesting because we're we're here, you know, on a podcast that talks about technology adoption. And so we're actually trying to drive more adoption in some ways. but I think it's it's fair to talk about, you know, all we are still humans at the end of the day. We were not, you know, we didn't evolve originally to use technology natively, right? There are a lot of things that we're doing today that we, you know. our minds and bodies probably weren't really optimized for. So we certainly have to consider that. And I think when we talk about all the change that we're talking about on this podcast and in in our work outside the podcast, it's certainly something to think about. And especially for the technicians and, you know, product delivery folks that have so much other stuff to consume in order to do their job, we do need to look for ways to you know, give all of our brands a a break. So Torrance, I appreciate that that last bit of advice. I always feel like we we could have gone on this route for for two hours. so lots to share. look forward to staying in touch with you. And I hope our paths cross again outside the podcast.
Frequently Asked Questions With Torrence Smith
What is the biggest cost of poor frontline technology adoption?
Lost credibility, which arrives before the financial damage and outlasts it. Once a rollout goes badly, workers carry that memory into the next initiative, even under different leadership. The financial cost is real, and large ERP programs can leave an organization worse off than before, but the trust deficit is what makes the following project harder.
What is nemawashi and how does it apply to change management?
Nemawashi is a Japanese term for preparing a tree's roots before planting, used in Japanese industry to mean the meeting before the meeting. In practice it is a series of low-stakes conversations with operators, technicians, dispatchers, and middle managers before the formal discussion, so that concerns surface early and the formal meeting can focus on what to do rather than what is wrong.
When should change management start on a technology project?
At the design stage, not near go-live. The cost of correcting a mistake is lowest at the very start, when an idea is still two people in a room. Once design is paid for, vendors are engaged, and executives have committed, both the burn rate and the credibility exposure climb sharply.
How should leaders talk about a technology rollout to frontline teams?
Smaller and more specifically than instinct suggests. In many field rollouts roughly eighty percent of daily work is unchanged, so naming exactly what changes and what stays the same lowers anxiety. Framing every project as a full transformation makes the change feel unbounded, and people fear what they cannot picture.
What is the difference between compliance and commitment in change adoption?
Compliance means people do what they were told, which is usually enough to reach go-live but tends to unravel once leadership attention moves on. Commitment comes from involving people while the plan is still being shaped, so the result reflects some of their own input and the change keeps its momentum without someone policing it.
