The One Problem Interview with Germain St. Denis: My name is Avil Beckford. I started a new series called The One Problem. It's something that's near and dear to my heart. My guests, come on, and they present a problem that they're passionate about, and they have five to 10 minutes to offer their solution. I started this because as a way for all of us to learn from each other. Today, my special guest is Germain St. Denis. He's an experienced leader in consulting, technology adoption and change leadership. Let me turn it over to you.
Germain St. Denis
Thank you. Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to be here. I feel honored to be one of your guests. So let's look at this for a moment. Over the past two or three years, the pace of change and innovation has been very, very rapid, really accelerated. And if you consider that a year ago, the Covid-19 pandemic has just added rocket fuel to this whole situation.
And in fact, the pandemic was the biggest driver of change and innovation that we've had in a long time. It probably accelerated things by 10 years. Not the CEO, the strategist, but the CIO. The pandemic drove everything. So we changed because we had to change. Right. We were forced to change. But the problem that it caused is, and it's serious, is that the pace of change is faster than organizations and people can adapt.
Poor adoption of change, whether it's a business transformation, new technology, a new organization model for adoption and change, can negatively impact an organization. Or the poor leadership behind the change can negatively impact employees, and they get disengaged. So think about that for the moment. That's a big problem. The successful organizations are those where executives, all leaders have a more open mindset and are involved in leading the change. And this is where I come in.
The One Problem Interview with Germain St. Denis Talking
About the Rapid Pace of Change
Germain St. Denis
I can help organizations that are very good at establishing relationships and figuring out where people are strongest. And I can help organizations navigate through all of these changes brought about by innovation, by the pandemic, by how we work today. Very different people working remotely. So I'm very good at doing those things. I can help build high performance teams. I can help identify patterns which may be negatively impacting organization and help them create more collaborative processes so that everybody can actually thrive rather than just survive and try to make it through the current situation.
So this is basically my one problem solution. And everything about change really is about people. So I'm the architect of the people first. That's where I come in if I can help.
Avil Beckford
Thank you so much for talking about change leadership, and technology adoption, and how it can help people navigate the different changes that are taking place. So I have an additional question for you, and I hope I don't catch you off guard because that's not my intention. So what are some technologies that businesses should be using these days because you talk about technology adoption. What are some that you refer to your clients to use? This is a learning environment.
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Germain St. Denis
Yeah, it's a learning environment. And there are various technologies involved, and they're not as important as how they're introduced. So some technologies, for example, that were kind of forced on people by the pandemic is how to use remote video, remote collaboration. So everybody's using Zoom. Companies are using brainstorming tools like Mural, for example, or Miro. There's a bunch of those. This is all about the change to how we work. But there are major technology or emerging technologies that are used in terms of a digital transformation where processes are changed from being manual or semi automated to maybe more completely automated changes to enable more e-commerce functions within an organization.
And those types of changes are really significant. So the actual technology the company chooses, whether they choose, for example, to move to the cloud with Amazon or with IBM or with Google, it doesn't really matter which one. The implication of those changes are the same on the organization and on the people. There's a lot of focus on artificial intelligence right now, A.I., block chain, those types of things. And again, the same idea has to be introduced in such a way that people know how to use them.
And then your organization can derive the benefit. So the way I look at it is the benefit derived by any of those changes is directly related to the amount of effort put in getting the people to adopt the change.
Avil Beckford
OK, so, yes, it's more about how the work gets done and not specifically about one piece of technology. And the other piece, which is so important because I studied computer science a long time ago, is about educating people and getting them to buy into the change. And that's where the change leadership comes in, right?
Germain St. Denis
Yes, exactly. Yeah. I studied computer science as well. Things have changed quite a bit, but implementing technology is only one part of the equation. Last year I worked for a HR cloud as a service company, and sometimes the client wasn't quite ready to start getting involved in information exchange or sometimes the technology was implemented successfully, but the client wasn't trained enough to be able to use it properly. And so therefore we had to continue to support them until they were they were trained enough.
So there's a big, big role for an internal change agent. And I don't mean bring in a consultant to do all this stuff necessarily. That's one option. But the change leadership has to come from the top. So every level of organization has to have a change leadership mentality and an open mindset and make sure that they realize what are the implications on all the stakeholders, including the people in the field. It's not enough to say, OK, we're making this change and make it happen. Just go ahead and do it. The execution is as important as figuring out the strategy itself. Right.
Avil Beckford
Thank you so much, Germain. Thank you.
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