Show Them Their Worth, or the Tool Sits Unused

Justin Lake: Welcome to Frontline Innovators Podcast. I'm your host, Justin Lake, and we've got a great episode lined up for today. Today's guest is an AI adoption strategist who helps organizations turn new technology into real, lasting behavior change. Her work sits right at the intersection of people and tools, making sure the workforce actually embraces the systems meant to support them rather than working around them. It's a perfect fit for a show about empowering frontline and deskless teams. Please welcome to the show Janie McNeil. Hello, Janie.

Janie McNeil: Hey, Justin, thank you for having me. I'm excited.

Justin Lake: I'm excited about this too. You and I had a great chat about a lot of things, deskless, and about the the area that you've grown up in and some of your family. We had just a great chat leading into this, so I'm really excited to share your stories with our audience. Let's kick this off as we do for all frontline episodes. and and I want to hear from you what you think is the biggest challenge really around. Technology adoption, when it doesn't happen, what is the biggest operational consequence inside the business?

Janie McNeil: Yeah, I think the biggest operational consequence that you can have is one, you don't have people on board with what you're doing. so then that causes an issue with the people that are working in this space. you then it starts just kind of going everywhere, right? It's like you miss one thing and then everything starts starting and crumble. Maybe don't see it the beginning. but eventually you will see it. and so I think that the biggest challenge is if you don't get people on board in the beginning and if they don't feel like they're part of the change with you and you're hearing them out and you're talking to them, then it goes all the way up to the sea level suites, right? Where at that point it becomes loss in productivity. They start seeing and loss of productivity, they start missing. people aren't using the tools that they were meant to help support them. They have now signed a huge contract that is cost them millions of dollars, but nobody is wanting to use it. and so it starts with the little thing. You think that it's not that big, you think that it's not that big of an issue. Like, we'll just, you know, send an email saying, hey, this is available now and we're just gonna Let it run his course, but it doesn't quite work that way. and I think a lot of the times the adoption piece sometimes gets missed. and it's a space where people don't even realize that they're losing a lot of money where they can simply just hire somebody to help with adoption. and it ends up being a whole heck of a lot cheaper than all the money they just wasted on a product that nobody's using, right? so that that's my take on that.

Justin Lake: You know, you you talked about kind of the trickle effect where it's it's not just at the point of the transaction, but it all the downstream impact. Can we peel that back a little bit? Cause I I think that's actually a really big deal. I think we just look at the individual and their interaction with technology or their compliance with a process. So we think it's just the effect happens at the same place the cause happens.

Janie McNeil: Yeah.

Justin Lake: And you just indicated that that's not entirely true. There might be an impact there, but that the effect happens downstream. Talk about that a little bit more. Where do you see the effect?

Janie McNeil: Yeah. I mean, and it's prolonged as well. So you'll see it all around, even after the tool has been implemented and even after people try to come back or a company tries to come back and save it, right? they forget to send maybe a survey seeing if what they did to try and save it, fix the problem that they were going for, trying to get the communications and making sure that they get feedback that represents, okay, people actually got it or people are just tired of us. Talking to them and trying to get them to use the tool, they just locked in, and then that was that, right? and then it marks them as them using the tool, right? So trying to find ways around it. If there's one thing we're gonna do, I feel like is that people are gonna find a way around something, right? and so it yeah, I think the trickling effect doesn't just start when you forget to include the adoption into your projects, but it continues to trickle on after your adopt your project has been launched, it continues to trickle on after you try to save. It. So there's also a space where you need to just make sure that everything is good for a few months before you can safely say, okay, people are actually using the tool, the tool is being adopted, or whatever it is is being adopted, and we feel confident with the responses that we have now. Even though we may not have approached it the way that we were meaning to, it just gives you a space for you to go into the metrics and and see what it is that maybe you can improve on and continue to improve because. At the end of the day, this product is probably going to be owned by a product manager, and that product can be easily looked at in that sense of is it continuing to giving give us the rate of investment that we put into it? And if not, then that's a deeper conversation of okay, C suite executives are going to question what is the value, right? What is the value of us having this product if the metrics that you're showing us aren't representing people actually using it and getting use out of the products that are being delivered? so yeah. I I think I have a lot of experience and always trying to or always having to show my worth, right? Because when it comes to adoption, you have to show the worth of the adoption, right? and so I've gotten really good at just that. Like whenever product leads or I work with product leads and we talk about what that looks like, you know, long term for them, it's like, where can we set up to their worst there's metrics or what are you looking at as metrics as your point of success? And so that's really important because they'll also have to eventually show the products, I guess just you know, why it's there and and why it's important to have it. If not, it's gonna get cut, right? Eventually when people are making cuts, the first things that they're trying to cut is things that are expensive and nobody's using, right? And so that's where, you know, just always making sure that your product is being used appropriately just helps with the adoption process all throughout.

Justin Lake: I'm so glad you brought up the product managers because I I think the product managers, they've been showing up a lot in my day job, which is great because I think they should. With at Skillful, we often end up talking to OCM folks. We often end up talking to operational leadership and IT leadership about the technology itself. But really one of the key stakeholders is exactly as you pointed out, is that product owner. The person that is responsible for that technology platform and determinate its success. And I think a lot of times it's so interesting that we're talking about this because the things that they are looking to achieve with that system oftentimes aren't related necessarily directly to the users. And what I mean by that is often the people that are using the systems are a means to an end. So to make an oversimplified example, if we wanted to improve inventory tracking, we might give the folks a new inventory mechanism, a faster way to do inventory or something like that. But the goal isn't really just for their performance. The goal is so that we have better visibility into the supply chain, as an example, right? But the success criteria needs to include more than just did people log in, right? This isn't about just pure utilization. It's about are they using it? Are they following the process? Are they going through

Janie McNeil: Yes.

Justin Lake: the SOP the way that they need to in that environment. So my first question to you is, why do you think that that kind of gets swept under the rug as often as it does?

Janie McNeil: Mean it could be a combination of things. Sometimes product managers have more than just one product, right? And those products are huge products. Let's put, for instance, Microsoft, Adobe, whatever product it might be, just looking at just a huge product with, I mean, especially Microsoft. Microsoft has it's Microsoft, right? But there's so many products underneath Microsoft, right? So now you're managing Lanner, you're managing MS Projects, you're managing all these really complex, different kinds of environment products, right? That may in some way be connected because they are. That's a great thing about Microsoft, but you still have to drive them differently because You ha you have different people using this products. While MS projects might be used by a planning team or a project, maybe you have somebody just using Outlook. A new Outlook is a horrible thing everybody talks about now. and people are still trying to get a hold of how to use New Outlook. And eventually New Outlook is gonna be the new, and there's no gonna be no classic, according to what they say from the grapevine. but you have two completely different users. somebody that maybe is an admin that really heavily uses that product on an everyday basis because they have to support their C level level executive, because they have to support a whole team, shared mailboxes, distribution lists, whatever it may be, right? So they have to be an expert in that space. then they have to be an expert in MS projects. And so when you compile so much into one specific product manager, it it it does tend to sometimes fall through. And it's not for fault of their own. It's just that there's just so much work between one specific environment like as Microsoft that it really does take a lot, right? and so I guess that would be one of the things that I've noticed is just a lot of work. where sometimes a lot of work, not enough people, right? and we struggle in that space. And another thing that I've noticed is that I do think that Sometimes adoption is thought about as an aftermath instead of including people early on and including the professionals early on so that we can ask the right questions and bring the right questions up to just the top and make sure that we're all aligned. It's more thought about as an afterthought when the project is almost done. And so then they're just ready to launch, right? And we're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, come back. Let's, let's, let's understand it a little bit. Let's understand it how the user experience is going to work. And let's put a plan together on how we can make this work in the next whether whether it's a 30, 60, 90 day plan or looking at. We need to create videos for them so that they can understand it based on the information that we, you know, the learners that we have. Do we need to create KB articles, whatever it may be, right? We need to create a plan around it and build all of that information for them too, which is not something that you could just bring somebody in at the end and expect for it to be done. Right. So I think that's another reason that sometimes product managers may struggle, it's because they don't bring in the change management group early enough into the conversations.

Justin Lake: I think every OCM professional feels the same way that you do about the fact that other stakeholders tend to engage change management pros way too late. You know, we we've talked a lot on this podcast where it seems that for people not involved in change management personally, that others kind of come in and say, Hey, at the 11th hour, can you like sprinkle some of that change management stuff on this? Right.

Janie McNeil: Yeah.

Justin Lake: Like it's a magic wand somehow. It just seems like, you know, we've this we've had this podcast now for a few years and this goes all the way back. I think we started in 2022 or something like that. We've been talking about this since at least then, and I'm sure it wasn't even a new topic then. And it seems like we're still having a hard time getting other, you know, stakeholders to kind of come into realizing that this needs to be built into the project plan and the budget.

Janie McNeil: Yeah.

Justin Lake: from from the earliest onset. Well, why do you think it gets overlooked? Do do you think that people just underestimate the value or the need of really solving for this?

Janie McNeil: I think that it gets overlooked. I think it goes back into what I was talking about of always having to show your worth in that space. I do think that it get it got more overlooked before because maybe we didn't have as many or at least I didn't feel like we had as many metrics as we do now. Like now we have so much data to show. It's like data that you don't even know what to do with it. that there's just so much data on who's clicking what, where they're clicking from, where they're going next, like The next three clicks, like the data has just become so complex and there's so much data now where we can really tell the story and kind of change our communications and the our approaches based on the data that is being delivered, right? and so then that creates more of like, okay, like I see where you're coming from, I see why you're making those changes, and I see that there's the change that you made or that you communicated is actually creating an adoption of the product based on the metrics that you delivered, right? And so I do think that in the past maybe we struggled with it a lot more was because of that. And as I move into the future is something that I try to really instill in most of my projects. Like data is so important. And believe me, it was the thing that I hated to do the most. But a couple of years ago, there was a program that was that was run at the company that I was with, and it was called data literacy. And I swear to you, it is the best thing that I have ever seen a company invest in because it meant that people were learning. How to tell a story with data. It's already hard because you get overwhelmed with data, but they would literally show you how you can be better at storytelling with data. And that was just so important. And that was just kick made a complete shift in the way that I delivered products because anytime that I delivered products, I would deliver the product and we would go over what our expectations were, what the benchmarks were. And then as we kept working on the project, we kept updating the from the 30, 60, 90 day plan, we kept updating 30 days after this is what you see an increase, 60 days after this is what you see an increase, 90 days after. And as if we were closing, it created a story of, hey, through this whole time, this is what it's looked like. This is what adoption has done for you. And this is how you have really implemented the product and people have seen it. so I think that that is one of the pieces where I think maybe in change management, people may hate data, may hate pivot tables, Python, Excel, but let me tell you, Copilot might be some of your solutions there too. So that's where the AI comes in and helps you out a little.

Justin Lake: That's really interesting. So you're really th this is interesting with all the podcasts that we've had, I I haven't actually had a lot of people talking about using data to especially at the like user interface level where you see people transacting inside the software. I haven't heard a lot of people using that data to actually understand adoption or lack of adoption. So that's really interesting. So I know Microsoft in particular is doing a lot with that on their kind of desk applications for knowledge workers. Do you see a distinction between things that you've done in that area of data collection for knowledge workers versus kind of the frontline worker applications? Do you see that being a little bit different?

Janie McNeil: Yeah, I mean the co the complexity of the information that Microsoft gets you, even just being an admin and and being a Microsoft admin gives you so much access, like so much access to what people are clicking on, to what people are looking at in their computers, right? and so I think that that does tell a story for me and that does explain why maybe Microsoft even I mean, Microsoft even has a whole adoptions website. I don't know if you knew that or not, but Microsoft, yes, Microsoft has a whole website dedicated specifically for adoption. So let's say that you're coming from a business like finance. It shows you how you can adopt

Justin Lake: I don't know that. Tell me more.

Janie McNeil: co-pilot in finance, how you can adopt Excel in in finance, how you can adopt just and it's all around adoption. And they have spent a lot of time and building this out, building communities within it. And it has been one of those things that I really have liked about Microsoft because they're not just giving you the product, they're also showing you and helping you find the adoption. And so that's how I found out about the admin and the admin scores, because they actually have a whole dashboard created around adoption and they'll go in there and they'll show everything like how good your I it gives it a score and so it tells you the score of how good your product or their product is doing in your company. and then you're able to see that there. So I think that that is just the difference in them, the the the amount of complex information that they give you, the time that they took to make sure that you knew that the products that they were delivering were gonna get adopted. and I do think that sometimes maybe when you know you have product managers or even change managers that are working in these products, they don't know that those resources are there. So it's really important to just make sure that they know that those resources are there.

Justin Lake: That's really interesting. I had no idea that Microsoft was was making those investments in those applications. And it is interesting also, it it it kind of makes another point that these applications that you're talking about, even things like Excel, have been around literally for decades. And yet we still have to focus on adoption all of the time. Like we can't just assume that everybody knows how to use it. As in most cases, and I'm one of them, I you know, I probably use four percent. of what I could be using Excel for. and so, you know, my you mentioned pivot tables before. That's always my Achilles heal. Every time I have to use a pivot table, I have to go back and watch a YouTube video or something because I forget how to do it.

Janie McNeil: Yeah. You have it flagged, your favorite and your favorites.

Justin Lake: Yeah, exactly. Because I you know, I use them like once every, you know, six months or something like that. It's not a normal part of what I do. And so on occasion I need a refresher and then I go back in and it feels natural again and and then I use it for a couple of days and then I may not see it for a while. But it's interesting to hear that, you know, one of the largest software companies in the world, some of the most widely deployed applications in the world still needs to be thinking about adoption and refresher content to make sure that users are are getting the most value out of their platforms. Now

Janie McNeil: Yeah.

Justin Lake: When you and I first talked, you mentioned that you you grew up in one of the largest manufacturing communities in the world. You you talked a lot about being around a lot of, you know, what we would call frontline workers today. How do you feel that the way that you grew up in the community that you've grown up in has affected how you think about supporting the men and women on the front lines through change?

Janie McNeil: Yeah, I think that it's giving me s a lot of versatility in the way that I see people understand the information that is being fed to them. it really helps me support from a user experience standpoint and putting myself in their shoes. I think one of the things that we talked about the last time is that many of the times the people in our community, this is this is their end game. The manufacturing world is what their grandparents did, what their parents did, and what they will do for the rest of their lives, right? not to say that they some of them don't go off and do something else completely different. Yes, they do, but a lot of the people in our community that that ends up being their end game because you have good benefits, you you know, you end up making a good life for yourself, your whole family's here. and so I do see that a lot of the companies around here invest into that, right? And so they invest into our communities, they invest into our schools, and so we're talked about manufacturing engineering from the time we're in pre K. I used to come home with these little there were these little like balls like that were like really fluffy and then they had a little hard hat on top of them and then they had a company name on top of them depending on whichever company came by and they had a little sticker on the bottom of them. I don't know if you remember those or not and they had their little googly eyes and you'd put them in your dashboard and we would conduct all of them. It was like the most exciting thing that we would do. I think our daughter actually has one upstairs. I'll have to like send you a picture later or something. But yeah so they they've always been part of the community and coming into talking to the to the young kids, but then it just progresses once you go into middle school, once you go into junior high. And then even if you go into high school, you have specific programs that are intended to be to get your kids a college ready is what they call it. Or workforce ready. I'm sorry. The whole model of the school, yeah, the whole model of the school is called workforce ready. So that means that they are taking welding classes in school. They are doing everything from vet techs, dog daycares, florists

Justin Lake: Workforce ready, right.

Janie McNeil: they have a little data center there. They have all sorts of things. And so that I think in itself really feeds into the type of people that we have in the community. Maybe this is what they want to do. maybe they want to do a trade job. And if they want to do a trade job, these people may learn things differently and may have to grasp and understand things in a different way. So sometimes when we're coming

Justin Lake: Yeah.

Janie McNeil: you know I I've said and some conversations where they're like, just write this article and send it to them or write this article and somebody will look into it. And I'm like, well that's not the way people learn in that space. First of all, they're out in the manufacturing world and you're talking about you're trying to teach them how to pull a sample water so that a sample of water from a tower so that you can sample it and send it off to the lab to be tested. You're either gonna have to show them because they learn from hands-on training, or you're gonna have to show them a video. And so over the years, a lot of the things that we've shifted to is like recording videos and creating videos and then editing those videos so that then they can show them in like safety meetings and just make it available to them anytime so that they can go back, watch that video, just like you said, YouTube, right? Even in the technical world, we have seen that the age of

Justin Lake: Yes.

Janie McNeil: just videos is just amazing. And I mean when you go back, isn't YouTube called like poor men's college. Like I think my husband learned how to put an alternator in our car from watching a YouTube video. So all of that to say that people that are hands-on and they're out in the field, this is how they learn. And no amount of white papers, KB articles,

Justin Lake: Yeah.

Janie McNeil: All of this information that they have to read, and it's probably in a super complex language because we love to do that to ourselves. they're they're they're not gonna understand it or they're gonna have a lot of questions about it, right? And so I think that understanding that people learn in a different way and that that's okay, I think it's a huge, a huge way to get adoption because you have to be able to shift the learning experience based on the product that you're trying to get them to adopt or based on the people that you're trying to get the information to be adopted by. And I think we don't spend a lot of time in that learning space where like people find that having a learning specialist or learning and development specialist in those spaces with a change management, it's it's really pivotal in the way that people adopt those changes.

Justin Lake: But I think it's often treated, I agree, by the way, but I think it's often treated like it's some kind of luxury or it's like a nice to have, instead of being a strategic element to ensuring success.

Janie McNeil: Yes it is. Yes, exactly. And I and I honestly think that LND, learn the learning and development person and the OCM work very well together as hand in hand because they might create a working document, right, that just explains everything step by step, but they do it from a learner's perspective. where we then go in and figure out a plan. So how now that we have this experience plan, like how do we make it known to the people that it needs to go to and how do we get them to adopt it? and so yeah, I think that they work very close in itself, but I also think that a lot of the times the organizational change management ends up Or the change manager ends up taking some of that bulk of the responsibility of creating the content because there's just not somebody to do it. And in order for you to get a good adoption out of it, it would be for you to create those processes and that information. and so just imagine how much more work we would get done if one was just dedicated to one thing and then the other one was dedicated to just making sure the change actually stuck. but again, it's treated like a luxury, like you said.

Justin Lake: So this is interesting. D despite the fact that I lead a learning technology company, I don't describe myself as an L and D expert nor an OCM expert. So I'd actually like to just learn a little bit from something that you just said about where the lines of delineation should be drawn between the change management function versus the L and D function. And I and I think You know, there's obviously gonna be some overlap if we were to put these on a Venn diagram on the whiteboard. I know that there'd be some overlap between them, but w could you kind of share your take? If you could architect the perfect plan in your mind, where would you kind of carve out which responsibilities for each of those two professionals?

Janie McNeil: Yeah, so I've worked with an L and D person in our group before, and it was it was amazing because I didn't feel like I had to do all of the work in the video creations and all that stuff. So what we did is that, for instance, I'll take you to the process of what we did. She came forward to us with we decided that The way that we were going to create an impact and change on this group, we assessed it before if we brought her in, was that by creating a video explaining how Copilot worked, that was what's gonna that will was that will was gonna set us apart and get people to adopt it when using it for communications. And so what we did is that Once we knew what the plan was moving forward. So as the OCMs, we decided what that plan was moving forward and what it meant for us to be successful in the change based on our audience. we then brought her in and we were like, hey, so now we need help creating this video that really kind of helps people like they're just watching the video and clicking through and understand what it is that we're trying to do and what they can accomplish with Copilot. And so she's like, okay, great, yeah. Here's a document, fill it in like you would just answering any questions. It was literally a list of questions in one side. And then the other one, she's like, give me some illustrations if you can think of them. If not, we'll meet together and we'll go over it. She made it super easy, which I think that's what learning and development people are meant to do, right? They're they know how the brain works. They know how things need to be structured. They already have a structure in place. You just have to follow their process. And so we worked through it. We met up maybe like two times. We finalized it and we felt good. Well, about a week later, she comes up with the first draft and I was like amazed. I was like, How did you create that in like whatever time? She's like, it was nothing. I was like, it is not nothing. Okay. So then we move on and we make, you know, final edits like this maybe should maybe be a little bit longer. Maybe we can add a link at the end, whatever. We make the the final changes. She goes back, she delivers it a week after, we're done. We just deliver it via the the plan that we had already discussed as as change management and we delivered through the appropriate channels and then that was that. and so it was it it was just so simple. and that's what I'm saying that we didn't have to go back and forth with so many people. We didn't have to get an email, respond two days later, and then a project that's supposed to take two, three weeks takes like three months. and so I I think that's what people don't understand sometimes in a business standpoint is that if you have the key pieces in those spaces, then it really does save you time because it goes from a project lasting three months and you paying salaries for three months for all those people working on that to you just doing it in two weeks or or a month, let's even say, by the time you send out all the communications and you're done and you move on and you get into another project, right? And so

Justin Lake: Right.

Janie McNeil: I think that's where that's where there's maybe a little bit of gap, but I do think that it's really easy to work. At least people that are in this space, I I think it's really easy when you work together. You just have to know when to bring them in. And I think because you're so conscious of being brought in at the end with product managers and you know, them needing change, you're a little bit quicker to understand that hey, this is where we need to. established. Like I don't need to create the whole thing and then bring her in. I need to cre bring her in once we've established this is the path that we want to take and then let her take the lead and do her what she does best, right? Or what they do best, whoever it is. and so yeah, I I think that that's just the easiest way that I've been able to manage some of those projects.

Justin Lake: You just mentioned something that I have seen happening a lot lately. I think more this year for some reason. That the teams that we're talking to are delaying the documentation and training content creation and the change management communication plan because their hair is on fire trying to build out the actual platform itself. And I think They are already inundated, probably behind, probably over budget. And so they're pushing these other essential elements, they're pushing them further and further down the road, which means that time and budget's going to continue to get compressed at the end. And so it seems like it's like watching a car accident that's about to happen in slow motion before it actually happens. Like you know they're not going to be able to steer out of the way. You can see it. You're standing back a mile away. You can see the trajectory. You can see they can't slow down. And yet you know there's going to be an impact. And I haven't figured out how to help those folks like rewind a little bit and say, you're going to experience pain because of what you're doing right now. Like I know you think you're helping yourself because you're delaying. the documentation and creating some of the training materials and stuff like that. But in the end, it's actually going to be more painful. And I just haven't found the right words to help or or the right document or whatever it is that I could do to help those folks see that we can avoid some of that. It would be better to get started now. And at least start building out a framework, at least build out some of the assets, at least begin to think about the communication plan sooner rather than later. In fact, even start to drip some of this out to the end user population in advance so that we're not slamming them and having them drink from a fire hose in the 11th hour. You know? What are your thoughts on that? Do you agree or do you see that a little bit differently? Do you maybe take a perspective from the product owners a little bit more? What are your thoughts on that?

Janie McNeil: Yeah, I think that I mean, I think it's a little bit of both. I think sometimes it a lot of the times I just I am so sensitive or I I I think I'm just one of those people that is a very big empath no matter who it is and what they're doing, right? so I really do empathize with the product managers and what they have to go through and all the products that they have to lead, right? So I really do try to be empathetic to how, you know what I mean, they forget to sometimes like bring in, bring you in at some point. But I think it it all revolves around relationships, if I'm being honest with you. And I feel like maybe in the beginning, we might start off with say that I'm starting at a new company. They don't know me. I mean, they don't know me. I don't know them. Right. And so you have to build that trust. And with that trust, I I think that it comes where they naturally start. bringing you in. it's a little bit more different when you're just consulting and they never really get to experience you at a full time like they know that you're in the company and they can just reach out to you. but even at that point I try to make it clear that I'm there to support that I can support in any way. I try to do maybe like a weekly or a bi-weekly catch up just like hey I'm here if you need help with anything just pointing like hey put me in coach like I'm here right so

Justin Lake: Yeah.

Janie McNeil: trying to keep that just open line of communication and saying, Hey, I'm here, I can help you. You don't feel like you have to carry it all. And sometimes even then, they're so overwhelmed by everything that they don't even it they feel like it's so much harder to explain everything to you for you to catch on than it is for them to just keep going the same trajectory that they're going, right? And so that's where I start kind of like adding myself in situations where I'm like. Hey, do you mind adding me to your meeting? I would love to just kind of lease listen in. listen to where you guys are at the project. Like maybe I can help offload some some work and and start working on some of those pieces together and we don't even have to meet for you to explain a product. We could just I could just kind of jump in and I always say I'm really good at listening and making sure that I understand like what you guys are trying to do. You won't even know I'm there. which I lie because I talk too much, but

Justin Lake: Yeah.

Janie McNeil: I I do think that being just that open, I I think that's another thing that really is stressful for them where they feel like it's just gonna take too much work for me to explain it. I'm just gonna do it. And I feel like we see that in everyday work. Like sometimes we don't allow people to do what we do and like transfer the workload because we're like so overwhelmed with just it takes me 30 seconds to do it. I'm gonna have to teach it for 30 minutes. But if you just teach somebody for 30 minutes. then you don't ever have to do it again, right? Or you don't have to worry about that piece. And so making sure that they know that without me bluntly saying that and just making myself available, I think it's the only way that I've been able to just kind of wiggle my way way in there and understanding their products and making sure that I can, you know, help out whenever I can. I think that and also a good conversation with your leader, if she says or he says, or whoever says, these are the projects that fall under your change management, then I just kind of stay nearby and I hover over a little bit and just be like, Hey, do you need anything? And and that helps.

Justin Lake: Right. Yeah, I think you're onto something with that that overwhelm that ironically causes people to take on more rather than shed, you know, some of that responsibility. I'm working with a product owner at a major global company right now. He's trying to roll out new technology in twenty twenty-seven. I don't remember the exact number, but it's thousands of people on the back end. But he's got a gate process. That he's got to get 60 people on the platform this year to get the next phase of approval. And he is like taking phone calls from people around the world at two, three, four o'clock in the morning and doing like one-on-one tutorials with them, you know, kind of holding their hand to get them to that process. I know. And so I think what you just described, I think describes him. I think he's overwhelmed, he's determined.

Janie McNeil: bless his heart. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Justin Lake: And you know, he wants to be successful. He's gonna figure this out no matter what. But instead of perhaps delegating some of that to others, he's taking it all on himself. And I think it's it's almost like this self-fulfilling prophecy because he's so busy doing the one on one hand holding that he doesn't have time to delegate the work to others.

Janie McNeil: Yeah.

Justin Lake: But because of that, he's ending up having to do calls at two o'clock in the morning, you know? And I think, you know, of course, from from our perspective, we can give him a platform that will help support some of that so that, you know, we can deliver that type of knowledge asynchronously to people around the world all the time and take out a little bit of the workload for those people. But I also think it's just the planning phase, as you talked about, like the sooner we can get started. the sooner we can start to build those materials out and hopefully make it less overwhelming in the eleventh hour.

Janie McNeil: And I think us just overall, I I think that we keep learning right. And so one of the things that might be beneficial for because I've struggled with it too, is and one of the things that was told to me was leaders know how to delegate. You know, if to be a leader, you have to know how to delegate. and that's most of what leadership is, is delegating and make sure that everybody's aligned and being kind of that. branch that everybody linked into. so just we continue to learn, right? So just taking some sort of leadership expertise. I think that's another really good thing that people know or companies don't realize that they need to invest in is just leadership building and continuing to make sure that leaders are good leaders. 'cause it's very important to

Justin Lake: Coming up to the end of our time. Before we wrap up, I'd love to hear something you're able to share. What what's a an adoption challenge that you're working on, particularly anything you're working on with frontline team members today? What's something that you're working on and what are some of the challenges that you're trying to overcome today?

Janie McNeil: Coming up to the end of our time. Before we wrap up, I'd love to hear something Yeah, I think that one of the main challenges right now for just adoption, I think in a big era of AI, you have this group of people that are really scared of AI. You have a group of people that are struggling to know if they should take the leap and understand it. and I think one of the things that I have learned over the past few months of just or the past few years of working with AI and being pilot pilot groups is that in order to get people to adopt AI, you're going to really have to put the people at the front of it. So when people say things like, we are restructuring because of the era of AI, or are transforming our company, creating something different, reorganizing because of AI, that makes people not want to adopt AI. So it you have to be really careful with the way that you're choosing to, and maybe companies you know are going through a hard time. There's been massive layoffs everywhere. And maybe that's the way that they're using to explain why there's a lot of layoffs. We don't really know, right? Unless we're sitting in those conversations, what's really happening and why There's been so many restructures everywhere, but but I think that if you are a company that's trying to get people to adopt AI, you're going to have to explain to them how they are important to use AI. Yes, AI can help them be less stressed, do things faster, but at the end of the day, you still need somebody to do it, to work it and to be able to manage it, right? And so I say this to say that there is a really good tool that I've I've learned about and I've used with Prosai. Prosai has and it's very simple. It's just a table. It has, I think, like three pieces, and it says you put the task on the left, and then as you're working through your everyday life, you write your task. What is a task that pops up for you today? that is a nuan nuance and you're just like, I really don't want to do it. It's fast, but it's just overwhelming and it just makes me upset. And you write that task and you go like that for like the whole week and you get a list of things that are tasks that you're doing right. And so then now you have these three buckets and you categorize them and you check them you check the box that either is something that you have to do because there's no way to automate it. It's something that maybe you can help speed up the process by asking co-pilot or whatever to draft the email that you send every month for the newsletter or whatever it is. So then you're working with AI, or it's something that you can automate, like a flow. When somebody submits a form, it automatically adds it to a list, and that list is seen by everyone on, you know, an a a question that is asked or how it's answered or whatever. it may be. And so there's those three buckets, the things that are automated, the things that AI has to do with you, and the things that you have to do yourself. And so that it goes back to being able to one, showcase your work and or your worth and be like, okay, this is this is what I own. Like I still have to be here to do this role, right? But this is how I can adopt AI and this is how we can work together. And make my life easier. And then this is what I can just set off because it's just something that can be set up once and then I don't have to do it ever again. And I can focus on something else. And so if there is something that I would tell companies right now that are going through AI and a lot of change there is that you are going to continue to get people that are not going to want to use it. And if you don't create systems where you make them understand that you see their worth. It's gonna be a really big struggle to get the people that you want to use it to use it, right? and maybe at some point they'll be like, you know, we're just gonna get rid of everybody that just doesn't want to use it. Like, if you can't use it, you're just you know. and if that's the company that wants to do that, then I mean there's nothing that we could do in that space. But if you want people to adopt it with peace and continue to cease. you know, growth. I think it was, I can't remember what company just recently did it where they invested instead of letting go of people, they just invested in the education of AI. And that's that's what you do, right? You help support the people so that they can grow in that space. since they already know all your processes, they already know everything. It would be so much more expensive to reteach somebody else with the expectation that they would just come in knowing AI Maybe they do, but they don't know the processes that your people have been working on forever, right? and so that's kind of my spiel on what I see a lot of people struggling with with AI adoption and maybe how they can use a center people center approach of hey, like just have a conversation, make it seem make it not just seem, but make them understand that there is worth. The value that there is worth to the work that they do, and they need to continue to be able to evolve. Like I said, we'll continue to grow in our careers. There's always personal developments. Treat AI as a personal development. I was learning data just a couple of years ago with data literacy, right? And and so we continue to grow. It's just another tool that we have so that we can continue to grow.

Justin Lake: You know, it's a little bit interesting that the knowledge workers now, like there's been a role reversal. For decades I was involved in technology deployments on the frontlines, where the men and women on the front lines were being handed a new mobile device and they feared for their future because of the automation that was affecting their job. And the knowledge workers would try to say, well, don't worry about that. We still need somebody to drive the truck and do this and do that and the other thing. Right. And now there's a role reversal. Now in this era, the frontline workers, the field based employees are not seen to be as threatened by AI as a lot of knowledge workers who are sitting in a desk working on Excel spreadsheets that Claude or Copilot can recreate in five minutes. Right. And so it's it's really interesting to see the that role reversal, that transition. where the fear has shifted to a different segment of the workforce. But what's the most interesting part of that is that it still comes down to the same thing, which is the anxiety associated with things that are new, particularly those things that are technology new, because they are they make us feel like if we embrace the technology, they're gonna need fewer of us humans to do this. And so that threat really actually squashes a lot of the adoption. And so whether you're talking about a knowledge worker working on spreadsheets or a frontline worker doing deliveries or field service calls, I think the same thing that you said is true. We have to remind the humans of where their value is. We might have to remind some senior leaders in the organization about where their value is, if we're being honest. Yeah. I mean, yeah. And so I think that's really important to to make sure.

Janie McNeil: And you got that list already. You just gotta show your list.

Justin Lake: That everybody in the organization understands the value of the humans and then, you know, make sure that the technology is there to support them, not just necessarily replace them. But something else you said I also agree with, which is that I I do think as humans we have to accept that this is not going anywhere. And the more we can embrace it, the sooner we can embrace it and be a part of the solution rather than truly let ourselves just be affected by the solution. I think it'd be good. good for everybody. And there will be some people that will opt out and that's okay too. But it's gonna be really tough for those people to succeed in in the current and future, you know, a world economy.

Janie McNeil: Yeah, and I mean I think that's why that list is so important too. I think a lot of the places where people may fail is where they think AI is needed for everything. AI is not needed for everything, right? something so simple that make it so complex by running it through AI or doing all this stuff. Like it it just it doesn't have to be. and so I think that that's why a process has like really good guidance on hey, just write it all down. Maybe some things need it, maybe some things don't. So

Justin Lake: Right. Right.

Janie McNeil: it just and again, you can send that s up to your senior leadership and let them know you're worth I don't know how they'll see it, but you can send it to them and be like, Hey, you know what? You still need me here

Justin Lake: I think that's good advice. Janie, we're gonna wrap it up there. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. I appreciate getting to know you and sharing your wisdom with our audience. Thank you so much.

Janie McNeil: For sure. Of course. All right. Thank you guys. Bye y'all.