Creating a biotech data platform is about more than just designing and building software - You also need to get people in your organization to use it.
There’s a name for this dark art: Change Management.
John Kotter’s excellent book Leading Change defines a simple, concrete, eight-step approach to change management.
But I want to quibble with one of them - in fact, the first one.
Kotter argues that before you can convince people to change what they do day-to-day, you need to create a sense of urgency to convince them that the extra energy required to change their behavior is not only worth it but absolutely vital to your organization’s future.
This may make sense for members of large, old, bureaucratic organizations.
But in my experience, at a small and fast-moving startup, urgency can actually be the main barrier to change.
Who has time to carefully define and adopt a new process when you need your next results yesterday?
So the key is more subtle than just a sense of urgency: You need individuals to believe that temporary slow-downs needed to change their processes will not only make the process faster next time, but are absolutely vital to long-term success.
This is the change mindset.
And this is the key ingredient in pushing a biotech organization to adopt the changes it needs to scale.