Please Don’t Make Me Use a New Tool!

We’ve worked with a lot of leadership teams over the years, and their teams resist new data tools way too often. This is usually because leadership implements a new tool in the hopes that their organization will have ‘all the data’ now, everyone will be more informed, and data-driven decision making will be ubiquitous! Hooray!

But the team sees it differently. They see it as change. And with any change there will be opposition. Excuses start to show up in numbers for this new confusing thing that they’re convinced will never be fully accepted.

• The team’s not technical enough
• No time for training
• The old way was fine
• The new tool has flaws

So how do you create a mindset that results in long-term adoption?

Key Takeaway - Show team members how to answer ONE question with the new tool.

Ask them to think of one business question they'd love the data tool to answer. Then show them the 5 or 10 steps they need to execute to get that answer.

With this one successful interaction, you’ve now created a positive association with the new tool. They know that in the future, when that question comes up, they can easily get the answer. This also gives them something to build on. “Ok, I already know how to do one thing, what if I want to get this other thing?” is a much more comforting question than, “Where do I begin?”

The other important factor is time. As with any change, you can’t expect full adoption overnight, so allow the team to build confidence with the new tool at their own pace with a series of small wins built-in to your onboarding.

Remember, you don’t know EVERYTHING about Excel. Nobody does. But you still use it regularly. Why? Because you learned how to solve one thing at a time, and over time, that accumulated knowledge turned into general comfort using the tool. The same logic can be applied to any data tool.

Here’s this week’s question: in your experience, what’s the worst part of using new tools?