Most organisational change doesn't fail at launch. It fails in the weeks after, when new tools, AI rollouts and ways of working meet the reality of everyday work.

In this Solve x HiBob webinar, host Tom Mackintosh is joined by Emily Zhang, Zara Seidler and The Hon. Victor Dominello for a candid discussion about what happens after change is announced, from trust and communication to AI adoption, manager enablement and making new ways of working stick.

Speakers

• Tom Mackintosh, Managing Director, Solve by Talent
• Emily Zhang, Director, The HumAIn Impact
• Zara Seidler, Co-Founder, The Daily Aus
• The Hon. Victor Dominello, CEO, Future Government Institute

Transcript

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while staying true to the spirit of the conversation.

Tom: Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'm Tom Mackintosh, Managing Director of Solve. We've partnered with HiBob for today's session because we see similar problems across the customers we work with: organisations communicate change, the slide decks go out, everything is well received, and then three or four weeks later, sometimes two months later, the change quietly dies. It has not been picked up or adopted.

That gap between the announcement and the stickiness of change is what we are getting into today. We have three fantastic guests from very different backgrounds who have seen, driven and built change across organisations and, in some cases, across society. We'll talk about what kills adoption, where AI comes into play, and hopefully leave with practical ideas for driving change more effectively.

Before I introduce the panel, there will be time for questions at the end. Please use the Q&A tab throughout the session. You can add questions and upvote the ones you most want answered, and we'll come to them at the end.

First, we have Emily Zhang, Director at The HumAIn Impact. Emily has a background in workforce transformation and change management, and has spent years inside large organisations across industries, particularly banking and finance. She has helped teams navigate major process and technology change, and has worked through complex stakeholder arrangements, sensitive change and challenging environments. Emily, welcome.

Emily: Thank you for having me.

Tom: Next, we have Zara Seidler, Co-Founder of The Daily Aus, Australia's largest youth news platform. The platform reaches millions of young Australians every month and was built from an Instagram page into a major media business. Zara has figured out how to capture the attention of young people in an environment with endless channels and content. She is also now advising organisations on how to adapt to generational change. Welcome, Zara.

Zara: Thank you so much. Glad to be here.

Tom: Finally, we have The Hon. Victor Dominello, CEO of the Future Government Institute. Victor was previously the inaugural NSW Minister for Customer Service and Digital. Many of us have experienced the significant changes he helped deliver, including the Digital Driver Licence and the Service NSW app. He now advises governments and organisations around the world. Welcome, Victor.

Victor: Thanks, Tom. Hi, everyone.

Tom: Emily, maybe the first question is for you. You've spent a lot of time inside organisations working through transformation. I'm curious about the moment immediately after the announcement. A lot of hard work has gone into planning and getting to that point. What does it look like then? What are the warning signs that change is quietly failing, and how do you counter that?

Emily: All the hard work leading up to the go-live date is probably the start of more chaos and more hard work. We often talk about go-live as the end point, but change adoption happens after that. The behavioural changes, the new ways of working, the questions and the confusion all start once the announcement has been made. Go-live is more of a starting gun than a finish line.

That is when you need to be prepared. The best thing you can do is equip managers, leaders and the people at the front of the communication channels with information, transparency and context. They need to help their teams navigate the confusion. Without answers, or at least a clear promise that answers are coming, you create rumours, disorientation and mistrust. That period is critical for establishing trust and confidence in what happens after the announcement.

Tom: Zara, I'm curious about how this works across different workforces. There is a generational shift happening. What communication needs to happen when questions are coming from people who are 20 and people who are 60? They are going to absorb information very differently, aren't they?

Zara: Yes. That is the point a lot of people have not quite reached yet. It is not one-size-fits-all. We do not have a homogenous workforce that can be communicated to in exactly the same way.

My experience building The Daily Aus was about trying to make news accessible and engaging for a new generation. What we realised was that the way traditional media communicated with young people was not landing. Their consumption habits are different, the way they communicate is different, the messages that cut through are different, and the platforms they use are different.

The first step is acknowledging that you need to tailor the message, the platform and the person delivering it. Recognising those distinctions is really important up front.

Tom: Are there practical tips you would take from that? How do you actually reach those different audiences?

Zara: It might be unpopular, so I'll start strong. I think it is about empowering the young leaders in your organisation to deliver messages that might be controversial or might not land with a younger cohort. Have someone speak across to them, not down to them.

For us, that has been key to successful communication. When there is information overload and young people feel like they are battling it from every direction, it matters to have someone in the organisation who looks like them, sounds like them, can deliver the message, can create that two-way communication and is equipped with answers. That is what we have seen work.

Tom: Victor, how does that apply when you are thinking about all the citizens within a state or even a nation? It is a different scale, but you still have generational shifts and people who need to be reached in different ways. How do you adjust for that?

Victor: Government does not have the luxury of saying, 'We are only going to target this segment.' It is not Service NSW for some; it is service for all. We have to cater for people who want face-to-face engagement, so we create physical shopfronts. We cater for people who want to pick up the phone and speak to a call centre, and for people who want to do it online. Increasingly, we also need to think about the generations coming through who will want to do it bot-to-bot: 'Hey Jarvis, get me a driver's licence.' That is government 4.0.

With the Digital Driver Licence, we had about 85% adoption and 94% satisfaction, which was extraordinary. When I looked at the adoption data, I expected it to be skewed toward younger generations. But there was a very equitable distribution, even in the 65 to 74 age bracket. That showed me that if you produce or deliver a service that is both useful and usable, people will adopt it.

It destroyed the myth for me that older generations are not digital natives. That is rubbish. If you make something useful and usable, you can get mainstream adoption through digital channels. A click on the phone is far more cost-efficient than face-to-face, but there will always be a portion of the population who do not want digital. They want the phone, face-to-face or paper. You still have to provide those channels. But the more you can push through digital, the faster, more efficient and ultimately better the service can be.

Tom: Emily, how do you apply that thinking inside an organisation? And maybe this is a moment to bring AI into it. How is AI going to change the communication strategy and adoption within an organisation? Victor talked about bot-to-bot. Where are we going with this?

Emily: AI has limitless opportunities to improve or optimise the way we deliver communications and receive feedback within an organisation. Using AI to analyse language, conversations and feedback on Teams or Slack can be powerful and valuable for understanding how people on the floor are feeling.

Engagement surveys and quick change-readiness surveys have limitations. Not everyone participates, and the results can be outdated or skewed by people wanting to say the right thing. But using AI ethically, and in a way that gives us genuine insight, can help us pivot the initial change plan and create interventions that actually mean something.

Tom: Absolutely. Zara, one of the things you have thought about at The Daily Aus is avoiding the creator-as-influencer model. Thinking about how AI now comes into play and communicates with individuals about change, how do we make sure that communication remains authentic?

Zara: I might jump off the back of what Victor was saying, because I think it is really interesting. When you are leading a state through major change, of course you cannot change the product to fit every demographic. But the same product can be marketed and communicated differently depending on who the audience is. My 96-year-old grandmother and I both have the Service NSW app and a digital licence, but the route to getting there, and how that change was communicated, would have looked very different for each of us.

Whether it is AI adoption, organisational change or anything else, the core product does not have to change depending on the target market. But the way the message comes across absolutely does. Victor would have such interesting insights into how that was communicated across such a huge population and still achieved the take-up it did.

Tom: That feels like a perfect cue for you, Victor.

Victor: I remember the QR check-ins at the time. The younger generation knew what a QR code was. You point your camera at it and it prompts you to a site. But with older generations, we were finding that they would go up and literally take a photo of the QR code because they did not know what to do. We are laughing at it now, but at the time it was a real change management issue.

So we worked with publicans, RSLs and others, because a lot of seniors would go there. We asked them to show people how the QR codes worked. When you make something useful and usable, and you build confidence in someone, they realise it is not that scary. Once they have done it once, they can become an advocate. They go to their friends and say, “Let me show you how to do this.”

To Zara’s point, people then start showing and teaching others in their own language, with their own stories and experience. If you make the product useful and usable, magical things can happen. If it is a bad experience, I will tell five friends not to touch it. If it is a good experience, I will tell 20 friends because I want to be the hero who can improve their life.

It comes down to creating a really good experience and putting the right dynamics in place to make sure it is happening. As Emily said, these are big cultural changes. They are not just structural changes. Culture change is the hardest change of all.

Tom: It is incremental, isn’t it?

Victor: Definitely. Culture change reminds me of a golf swing. I can go and buy a new golf club tomorrow and maybe drive the ball another 10 metres, but my golf swing will still be shocking. If I want to drive the ball 30 metres further and do it consistently, the club will not fix it. I have to change my muscle memory. I have to change my swing. That takes practice, time and discipline. That is culture change. That is where big uplift happens.

Tom: Emily, that resonates with what you were saying about habits. How do you instil those initial habits across an organisation? Victor talked about finding one person who says, “This is useful,” and spreads the word. We have had champions of change internally at Talent and Solve. Is that a model you look at?

Emily: Change champions, a change network or a change angel network is fundamental in any change programme. What Victor spoke to is the most powerful type of change champion: the organic type. When you deliver a change initiative, you will usually set up change champions. They could be subject matter experts, they could be leaders, but to Zara’s point, they need to be across the organisation, not just top-down. Peer-to-peer leadership is the most valuable and powerful way of getting people on board.

On making habits stick, the important thing is to plan for what happens after go-live. You need to be considered about how you make the new behaviours or ways of working stick. That takes time. We have talked about incremental behavioural shift, and you need to put in a framework, structure or cadence. Set up check-ins. Have end-of-week quality checks. Have team meetings every couple of days.

That structure tells people, “We are working towards this new way of working, not reverting to the old way.” Familiarity is always the easiest place to go back to. So you have to intentionally drive behavioural change through habits and rituals until it becomes everyday practice. Top-down narrative can only carry you so far. It has to be put into practice over time, until it becomes muscle memory.

Zara: On that, Tom, what is interesting about younger generations is that they demand, or at least expect, a lot more transparency around decision-making than previous generations. What we have observed is that leaders need to explain why change is happening and walk people through it. It needs to be a two-way conversation.

I am Gen Z, my entire workforce is Gen Z and we service a Gen Z audience, so I see it quite intimately. In the past, perhaps a workforce would simply have been expected to follow suit. Now there is a much greater expectation of transparency. Our job is to explain the news, not just tell people the news. I think people are beginning to expect the same from their organisations and workplaces.

Tom: That leads back to trust and authenticity. You cannot always be completely transparent about everything, so how do you navigate that in more complex environments?

Zara: It is extremely challenging. Being on the coalface of the news cycle, where things are hyper-partisan and people feel strongly and emotionally about it, transparency matters where possible. But more than that, it is about building trust with the organisation.

You mentioned before that we chose not to go down the influencer model, which is what we have seen a lot of new media do, where people trust one person rather than the organisation. If trust is broken, especially among young people and traditional institutions, how can we rebuild it? For us, it is speaking across, not down. It is young people telling the news to fellow young people. It is meeting them where they are, on the platforms where they consume information.

If young people are not using an intranet in the same way previous generations did, then what is the innovative thinking about how to reach them in a way that is meaningful and engages them long-term? For us, one of the biggest trust-building exercises has been owning our mistakes.

Tom: Victor, you were part of a very traditional institution. How do you create that level of trust across society when looking at change? I am from England originally, and there is always huge pushback around government owning data and accessing personal information. AI is pushing that even further. What are your thoughts on the challenges we will face in driving AI change?

Victor: In terms of trust, I have a framework called SPRITE: security, privacy, resilience, inclusion, transparency and ethics. In many ways, we focus on ethics around AI, and particularly on security and privacy. They seem to be the superheroes. But for me, the critical part for government is transparency, and that will become increasingly important.

It is hard for government because, as Zara said, there are some things you do not want to know and should not know, such as national security matters. There are also some things where you do not want to know how the sausage is made. But the more transparent we are, particularly with AI, where the algorithms are becoming so sophisticated and we do not always understand what is coming out of the black box, the more likely we are to build trust.

I remember rolling out initiatives and posting on LinkedIn to say we were going to roll out something new. You would get likes and support. But I got more commentary when I posted something saying I had failed and I was sorry. People said, “Good on you for owning that. Do better next time, but keep going.” I remember saying to my team that the more open we are about our failures, the more trust we build and the more licence we get to try again. Not to fail again, but to improve. That was a powerful lesson.

Zara: It is also very human in the age of AI to see that from leadership. Whether it is a failure, a learning or a lesson, I think we are craving that opportunity to see human accountability.

Tom: Emily, do you see that inside organisations? What are some of the failures you have seen, and how have they been turned around?

Emily: There have been many failures. Some I can speak to and some I cannot. But the biggest failure is when managers and leaders have not been equipped or prepared for feedback, comments and questions from their teams. They start answering questions incorrectly or, worse, over-promising things that are not going to happen. That is one of the fastest ways to deteriorate trust.

The learning is to prepare people managers for what to expect and how to answer the difficult questions. Sometimes you do not know the answer. Especially in a restructure or organisational change, there are legalities around what can and cannot be said. But you can say, “I do not have the answer right now, but we will communicate when we can.” It is about keeping the dialogue open and being as honest as you can be.

Tom: There are always limits in the corporate world on what level of transparency is possible, just as there are in government. Where does trust land when we think about the technology itself? There is so much technology change happening, and people’s belief in the technology is part of the issue. Victor, you have led a lot of digital transformations. What are your thoughts?

Victor: I still think transparency is the superhero, because it allows people to pressure test and make their own decision. If they are flying blind, trust can evaporate quickly.

Increasingly, I think we need more humans in the loop. I call it humans on the hook. When we are designing systems for the future, we have to ask what future governance looks like. In a human-driven society, you cannot put a bot in jail. You need somebody on the hook. Not because they are going to fail, but because humans have to be accountable somewhere for a decision.

If we simply say, “Let the bot do everything,” then if something fails, we have delegated responsibility to something that cannot be held accountable. Transparency around decisions, and accountability with a human ultimately saying, “This is where we need to go and I am on the hook for it,” builds trust. If I know you are on the hook, I can look you in the eye and say, “All right, I will follow you. I know you are taking responsibility and not delegating it somewhere else.”

Tom: Zara, you work with a lot of leaders in organisations. What would you suggest they do not do when considering the role of AI?

Zara: When you asked Emily for an example, one came to mind that is probably the most absurd example within our organisation, but I have learned a lot from it. For anyone not familiar, The Daily Aus started on Instagram. We are an extremely visual platform, and we have more than half a million young Australians who follow us there.

One day we received a grant to spend quite a bit of money on a brand refresh. We spent months on it. We changed the font and tweaked the colour palette ever so slightly. Then it was go-time. We went live. I remember we had mimosas in the office and were feeling very smug about ourselves. Almost immediately, we received thousands of messages from people who were appalled that we had changed our font and had not consulted them.

I remember thinking, “This is a joke. This will blow over.” It went on for months. There are now university modules in graphic design about what not to do. It is called Fontgate. At the time, we dug our heels in and said nothing. We were backing our font change. It had cost us $30,000, and we were going to experience that $30,000 in all its glory.

About three months later, the government and Meta were in a dispute about whether news companies should be paid by big tech. We were at risk of all news being taken off Meta, which was our primary platform. We had to communicate this very important information to our audience. To do so, we reverted to our old font and said, “Now that we have your attention, please pay attention to this important issue. Also, while we are here, we are sorry. We hear you. We will not change our font again.”

It was a great lesson in accountability and attention. You cannot just expect change to happen if you do not walk people through it. Everyone who joins our organisation learns about Fontgate. The same lesson applies to other forms of change. You cannot expect mass adoption of AI if you have not taken people through the steps that got you there and the tools they need to get there.

It is very rare, if ever, that there is a Gen Z person or a young person in the leadership team of a larger organisation. So you are not hearing that voice, even though that group may make up a large part of your younger workforce. If they are not in the room, you need to identify the change agent in the organisation who can deliver the message and you need to take people through the thinking they have not been privy to, within reason. We learned that the hard way with a font.

Tom: It sounds like a minor thing, but clearly it was not minor for a lot of people. The learning is really understanding your audience, understanding what is important to them, and making sure that what you are changing to is useful so it will actually be adopted.

Victor, how do you feel about the recent change around digitising landing cards? Is that something everyone wants and therefore easier to adopt?

Victor: It has been one of the banes of my existence. We are literally one of the last countries on earth to have an inbound passenger paper declaration card. I went to Egypt, the land of the pyramids, and they had digitised theirs. It is embarrassing. We have had the pilot going for about 18 months and now it is going to take another 18 months. I do not know why it has taken so long.

There will be some people who, for some reason, love origami and love filling in paper. But I think they will be an absolute minority. In Singapore, it is passportless. People want stronger, secure borders. There are cameras looking at you at the airport and people expect that because we want to keep our border safe. In Singapore, you go through using biometrics.

I think there will be rapid uptake once it occurs, if it is simple. If I have to download 400 different apps, then I will become apoplectic. But if it is simple, and the individual citizen is in control, then I think there will be adoption. Tell us once, remember who I am until I tell you to forget who I am.

Tom: There is a great question in the Q&A. Five years from now, what skill do you think every people leader will wish they had started building today?

Victor: It is really challenging because things are changing so rapidly that no one will be able to say with certainty. But I have reduced it to four Cs. I think leaders, change agents and basically everybody needs these skills.

The first is critical thinking. Particularly with AI coming through, it will be so much easier for us to follow the Google Map and turn left when it says turn left, until suddenly we do not know how to read a map. The second is creative thinking: what is the new idea? If you do not have those two skills, you are really going to be a lemming.

The third is the ability to communicate that thinking. If it is just a thought bubble in your head, it stays in your head. Are you a great writer, speaker, painter or musician? How do you communicate your ideas of criticality and creativity?

The fourth is courage, and it is increasingly being defined as a skill rather than a character trait. It is the ability to say, “I am going to give it a go. I am going to put my hand up. I am going to say my piece and put it into play.” If you have those four things, I think they will get you through most storms.

Tom: We are really only on the first lap of working with AI and figuring out how we use it, interact with it and where it works. There are errors already, but five years from now, we will be interacting with it differently and have a better experience of where humans add value as the person on the hook.

Victor: Everyone is going to have Jarvis. We have already started using bots, whether that is ChatGPT or something else. In five years, the interface will change. Whether it is a brain-computer interface, optics, something in your ear or under the skin, the interfaces will be very different.

Tom: Another question: what is one misconception organisations have about AI adoption today? Emily, you are working within organisations at the moment. What are your thoughts?

Emily: The main misconception I see is that people know what to do with it. Organisations put something like ChatGPT, Claude or another large language model in place and assume that people will automatically flock to it, know what to do, know how to prompt properly and know how to get the most out of it.

Organisations are starting to learn that these tools are being used in ways they had not considered, including within the work environment. Preparation matters. People need to understand, at a basic level, how a large language model works and what practical skills they need, such as prompting or giving the tool the right persona to help produce the outcome they need.

A lot of organisations have simply said, “Now we have AI. We do not have a strategy, but here it is. Go for it.” Then everyone is running blind. The misconception is that because everyone is using it, everyone knows what to do with it.

Tom: Zara, a question from Nat Whelan seems aimed at you. In many larger organisations, executive teams do not have Gen Z representation. Some boards are starting to add younger voices, which is interesting. How would you create that sense of speaking sideways when the executive structure does not easily enable it?

Zara: My bias is that we should be including more young people in decision-making. But one way we have worked with organisations is by helping set up peripheral youth advisory groups: teams within the organisation, or groups of up-and-coming leaders, who have the opportunity once or twice a year to present to the board or hear from the board and executives about major transformations the organisation is looking to implement.

Those people can then be equipped and empowered to deliver the message. No one expects board composition to change overnight and suddenly include a group of 28-year-olds. But you can begin to create pathways, whether in an advisory capacity or as part of an additional role. We have helped organisations identify and recruit those change makers within their teams who are best placed to communicate.

It is not easy, but neither is change. If we accept that change is challenging, then we should expect the same challenges to arise when delivering that change.

Tom: To bring it back to adoption after the announcement, where do you see the moment of truth? What is the critical moment where change either falls flat or gets picked up? Victor, any thoughts?

Victor: If I could pick up on what Emily said earlier about AI, when I speak to organisations there tend to be three buckets for AI use. The first is: something is fundamentally broken, can AI fix it? The second is: something is working okay, can AI improve it? The third, where I think there is real opportunity, is: what are we not doing that AI could create a new environment or opportunity for?

I do not think we have enough focus on that third bucket, where the biggest uplift could potentially be. But that goes back to culture change. How do we rewire our thinking to see AI as a new tool, not to apply to all problems, but to open up new opportunities?

Zara: Can I jump in on that? Our research found that young people are adopting AI en masse, but they are not necessarily bought into it. They are not using it in their personal lives to the same degree as they are in the workforce, because they feel they have to in the workforce. Otherwise, they feel their jobs are at risk and the jobs of the future are not secure in the way they once were.

The opportunities Victor just spoke about are not necessarily how AI has been framed inside organisations. Adoption metrics are one thing, but genuine buy-in from a cohort using AI to create new opportunities is where I think the shift will be over the coming years.

Tom: We are getting close to the end, so I will ask each of you the same final question. With all these thoughts in mind, what is the single thing you would want a people leader or executive leader to go and do on Monday morning to help drive change? Zara, what do you think?

Zara: If you are trying to implement major transformation, empower the people around you to deliver that message and start that groundwork now. Do not expect it to happen overnight. Identify the change makers, work with them, empower them and tailor the message accordingly. All we do every day is try to communicate the same information differently, and that is difficult. That work should start on Monday.

Tom: Emily, what do you think?

Emily: Know your audience. Know your people. What does it mean for them? How do you communicate it? What is the best message to explain the “why” and what you can communicate? Change is challenging because people are involved, people are impacted and people are different. That is the biggest variable in success.

Tom: Victor?

Victor: As a leader, give yourself permission to have quiet time to think. As leaders, we stand on the shoulders of giants. When we are up high, we can see where the blue sky is and where the storm clouds are. We have an obligation as leaders to set the vision. But to do that, you need time to think.

Shut the door. Have some quiet time. If you are on the treadmill all the time, you are not giving yourself the space for that deep responsibility to set the vision, empower people and bring them on the journey. One of the things I learned as a minister was that my most productive time was quiet time to think about what the future looks like.

Tom: That is good. We can all go and get some quiet time now because we are at time. Thank you so much for your insights. I really enjoyed that conversation and hope everyone who dialled in did as well. The recording will be made available afterwards. Thank you again, and see you soon.