Weeks 9 & 10: Using Personas and Journey Maps to Aid Change

Sometimes, leaders need a break. I needed a break. That’s why there was no article last week. 😴 But this week, I was recharged!

I am leading an important initiative at work to develop our own talent in a very niche skillset. Although I have developed many people in this area and could develop the training myself, in this case my role is to empower someone else to define the scope of the training, propose the plan and develop the content.

There's just one problem.

The person we’ve chosen to do that (let’s call him Jack) is highly capable and an expert in this field. However, just because someone is good at something doesn’t meant that they can teach it. That’s the case with Jack. It isn’t that Jack can’t teach it, Jack just needs some help figuring out how to think of this complex skillset as a series of smaller steps.

I’ve been struggling to figure out how to change his mind on the feasibility of developing this niche skillset in others and it finally hit me earlier this week - I’ll use a persona and journey map. I'm confident that with these tools I can help him imagine the steps that need to be taken for a fictional person to move from novice to expert along this journey of developing a new skillset.

My leadership studies over the last few years have been deeply focused in three areas: general leadership acumen, strategy development and design thinking for innovation. I have found that strategy development processes combined with design thinking provides such an advantage in my ability to lead and contribute to my organization. Personas and journey maps come from the design thinking toolbox.

Although this wasn't the original plan, this week's post is about how personas and journey maps would be invaluable in our change leadership toolbox.

So what is a persona?

In general, a persona is a fictitious person whose individual characteristics are representative of a group. This method of capturing the important attributes of this group is used frequently in design thinking when innovating for new products or customer experiences. This method is so powerful because it makes heavy use of empathy to capture the expressed and latent needs of the group.

In Design Thinking for Dummies by Christian Muller-Roterberg, taking an empathetic approach offers numerous advantages. You understand:

• how this person feels, thinks, and acts
• which problems, needs, goals, and wishes this person has
• how serious the problem or needs and wishes are
• what is particularly important to this person
• what satisfies this person

In the Forbes article User Personas: 17 Strategies To Ensure They’re Accurate and Effective, the author recommends strategies such as defining user groups, defining users’ pain points and goals and fusing data and empathy to craft a compelling persona for your effort.

Examples of personas could include:

• Steven, the 14 year old teenager who socializes at the mall on weekends (representing all of the teenagers who spend their weekends at the mall)
• Paula, the recent college grad who is starting her first job (representing all recent college grads entering the workforce for the first time)

In our change management use cases, we can capture personas such as:

• Bill, the employee who has worked at the company for 10 years whose business line may be in jeopardy of going away (representing any tenured employee who may be out of a job or need to be reskilled as a result of the change effort)
• Sarah, the division head who doesn’t feel her input is valued in the change process (representing anyone in leadership who feels undervalued/unappreciated in a major company effort)

While personas are useful as standalone artifacts, they are typically the starting point for defining a user's journey through a journey map.

And what’s this journey map you speak of?

A journey map is a visualization of someone’s (customer, user, etc.) interactions with a product, service, etc.

...or change initiative...

The cool and powerful thing about a journey map is not just that it visualizes each step. At each step, it captures key information about what the persona is thinking, feeling and doing. As effective leaders, we know that we are most successful when we remember that we are always dealing with humans who can't just turn their personal side off when they come to work. These tools help us...dare I say, force us...to keep that front and center!

Personas and Journey Maps in Change Efforts

What occurred to me as I started creating the persona for the training program effort I described above, is that these tools really provide a way to convey complex information easily. The most important change initiatives are certainly very complex!

In our Week 2 article, we learned about Reactance and talked about the need to create a framework to help guide my planning process. I plan to add (1) create a persona for each group that will be affected by the change and (2) map their journey through the change initiative to the framework as well.

As a first step for myself and to help you better understand the concept if you were unfamiliar with it before this post, I've created a basic template for a persona that represents one of the groups in our effort.

As far as next steps for our development plan, I plan to take a look at the overall plan again and reorganize things a bit. With the lens from the current studies, I think it could be great to read about a real change effort and see some of these things in action. The options I'll be choosing from are the following:

• American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company by Bryce G. Hoffman
• Turn the Ship Around: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet
• Who Says Elephants Can't Dance by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. (This is about IBM)
• Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella

Stay tuned to see which one makes the cut. Thanks for reading!