The 90-Day Playbook To Get Buy-In For Company Transformation

Most innovation and transformation initiatives don’t fail because of bad ideas. They fail because the leaders and teams driving these initiatives cannot get buy-in.

It’s easy to assume that if your idea is good, people will naturally support it.

But change makes people nervous. They may resist your initiative due to fear of uncertainty. Your colleagues are more likely to be paying attention to who else in the company is supporting your idea or whether you have early successes. They will look for social proof before they are comfortable to get onboard.

And that’s why the first 90 days can make or break your initiative. If you use that time to build momentum and prove value, you won’t have to push people to buy in — they will pull themselves in.

The Wrong Way To Start
I once worked with a Head of Innovation who made a bold entrance into his new company. His arrival was announced with a big internal event, complete with executive endorsements and a high-energy kickoff.

He later confided in me that if he had a chance to do it again, he would have taken a more low key approach. He believed that the early fanfare before having success created resentment among his colleagues. He was seen as just another outsider with crazy ideas. He wished he had started by listening first, getting some small wins and scaling his initiative quietly.

The lesson here is — how you start can shape how people react to your initiative.

If you move too fast, you can leave people behind. But if you take the right steps, you can build momentum that carries you forward.

The Right Way To Start
After working with several companies, I’ve found that the difference between success and failure comes down to how well you identify and leverage champions. These are people who believe in what you are doing and are willing to actively contribute to your success.

The momentum created by early adopters and champions is how ideas move from interesting to inevitable. In this article, I will show you how you can apply the science of persuasion, influence and behaviour change to create the right momentum in the first 90 days.

Phase 1: Laying the Foundation (Days 1–20)

The first phase isn’t about pitching your initiative. It’s about understanding the landscape and identifying the people who will help you build momentum. Think of this early phase as your listening and learning period. You are trying to understand your stakeholders and find early adopters that may become strategic champions.

1. Start With Discovery

One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is assuming they already know what their colleagues care about. Instead of rushing in with a plan for your initiative, take the first few weeks to listen and learn.

Start by mapping out key stakeholders and meeting with them individually. Don’t just ask for their support, try to learn about their challenges, frustrations, and priorities. The goal is to find out what has worked or failed in the past, potential obstacles to your initiative and what success looks like for them.

This isn’t just about gathering information — it’s about building trust. During the conversations, it must be clear to your stakeholders that you genuinely care about them. One of Cialdini’s principles for persuasion is reciprocity. People tend to give back to those who have given to them. By showing your stakeholders that you care about their success, they are more likely to care about yours.

At Strategyzer, we run an ecosystem assessment before working with a company to build their innovation capabilities. Here are some examples of what we have learned:

• During a workshop with a large international airline, we uncovered duplication of efforts. They had several innovation programs with different sounding names that were working on similar things.
• At a non-profit organization, we discovered that getting started with an innovation was nearly impossible because you needed permission from your line manager and support from at least one other team member.
• At a packaging company, we learned that leaders were asking the wrong questions to early stage teams about five year revenue plans and that this was stifling innovation projects.

The lessons that we learn during these discovery phases inform our roadmap for supporting and working with our clients.

2. Identify Early Adopters

Starting with discovery will help you identify early adopters. Not everyone you engage with will be skeptical of your initiative. Some will be ready to lean in. Among these early adopters is where you will find your first champions. As you analyse your interviews look for people who:

• Asked you insightful questions
• Have been frustrated by the status quo
• Are convinced about the need for change
• Have been actively looking for solutions
• Were already experimenting with new ways of doing things
• Have some resources and time to invest in working with you

Everett Rodgers’ work on the Diffusion of Innovation shows that you need innovators and early adopters that lean into new ideas without needing much social proof. These innovators and early adopters make up about 16% of an organization, but they can serve as a bridge to the rest of the company.

If you don’t find early adopters, it is difficult to create momentum for your initiative.

At the software company Intuit, Kaaren Hanson drove the Design4Delight (D4D) initiative by recruiting a group of innovation catalysts that helped managers work on various projects throughout the company.

When I worked on the IDA Innovation Program at Novartis, we trained a group of coaches. Some of them turned out to be champions who took our program back to their business units and invited us there to help them drive change.

Early adopters who become champions have been the strategic heartbeat of every successful innovation and transformation program I have worked on.

3. Double Down On Champions

Once you have identified your champions, it’s time to bring them closer. Go back for deeper conversations with them. Understand what resonates with them, what concerns they have and how they might benefit from early involvement.

You want to make your champions feel like insiders!

Share with them some early thoughts about your initiative and ask them to give you feedback about how they would do it differently. Share with your champions how you are using their feedback to shape your initiative in follow-up conversations.

Allowing your champions to shape and co-create the initiative with you will give them a sense of ownership.

Research on the IKEA Effect shows that people place high value on things that they have partially created themselves. This extends beyond furniture to organizations. For example, when employees co-create their learning and development plans, they are more likely to feel invested in the outcome.

The underlying principle here is that when people put effort into creating something, their perceived value and emotional attachment to it increases.

When we were launching the Lean Product Lifecycle at Pearson, we invited our early adopters into a series of workshops where we shared our early thinking using simple posters and sticky notes. We then invited them to provide feedback and reshape our thinking. These workshops were instrumental in creating buy-in.

Phase 2: Show and Tell (Days 21–70)

Now that the groundwork has been laid, it’s time to get things moving. The next 50 days should focus on showing tangible evidence that our initiative can produce positive results. We should work closely with our champions on the challenges that they are facing, get early wins and then celebrate with great storytelling.

1. Get Early Wins

Most initiatives live on PowerPoint slides. The drivers of these initiatives move around the company making presentations, hoping to convince people to buy in. But this is just theory, what people care about is evidence of success.

Work with your champions to deliver a concrete win — something that addresses a real pain point for the company.

Rather than push for disruptive ideas, try to find something low risk that can generate quick wins. An innovation team at Samsung started by solving a small but painful issue for a senior manager. Not only did the senior manager become an active supporter, the team also built their credibility within the company.

What you are looking for is social proof, which is another element in Cialdini’s theory of persuasion. People are more likely to adopt a change when they see others benefiting from it. So to be effective, the win should be:

• Visible: People can see the impact
• Valuable: It solves a real business problem
• Verifiable: You can measure success and quantify the impact

Once you have your early wins, it’s time to celebrate like crazy. In public!

2. Tell Your Story

In sharing our successes with the business, we should lead with narrative rather than facts and data. Stories are psychologically powerful because they help people make meaning and process information deeply. Part of getting buy-in is having people develop an emotional connection to your initiative.

People connect with a story when they can see themselves in the narrative.

I consistently get pushback when I use examples from other companies to make a point. There is always someone in the audience who asks how this is relevant for their specific company. When you have early successes from within the company, this challenge goes away. The stories become easily relatable.

Make your champions the centre of the story!

Put the spotlight on them and not yourself. Have them tell the story of how you helped them succeed. Edwin Hollander describes how Idiosyncrasy Credits are earned by showing fidelity to the group. When people can see that you are a good team player, they are more likely to give you permission to drive change.

3. Refine Your Vision

One of the benefits of working with early adopters and telling your story is that you will get questions and feedback from the organization. Those who are curious about your success will wonder how they might replicate with their own team.

As you get questions and feedback, use them to refine the vision for your initiative.

At Strategyzer, we once got the opportunity to deliver an innovation sprint with a large food ingredients company. The feedback we got from leaders after the sprint was that the ideas were too safe and there was not enough breakthrough innovation.

Before making the next call for ideas, we worked with our innovation champions to develop the company’s definition of breakthrough ideas. We hosted three virtual workshops, then synthesized their inputs into the criteria that we used for the next call for ideas.

An important aspect of getting buy-in is to go beyond seeking and getting help. You also need to use the feedback you are getting to engage in reflective reframing. Your refined vision is what you will now take with you to have conversations beyond your early adopters and champions.

Phase 3: Beyond Champions (Days 71–90)

The final stretch of your first 90 days is all about locking in support and preparing for the next phase of your initiative. This is where you leverage the early success and refined vision to reach out to stakeholders beyond early adopters and champions. The actionable roadmap that emerges is how you will scale your initiative.

1. Identify Your Early Majority

For any company wide initiative to succeed, you need to move beyond the early adopters. Social scientist Damon Centola’s research shows that a cascade of change is typically triggered when 25% of the population begins to embrace a new idea. What we know from the research on the Diffusion Of Innovation is that innovators and early adopters typically constitute about 16% of the population.

To get to 25% of the population, you have to go beyond early adopters and start working with the early majority.

Early adopters move fast, whereas the early majority is more careful. They may not be negative about your initiative, but they need strong social proof. So reflect back on all the encounters you have had in the last two phases, from the discovery interviews to celebrating your early wins.

Which stakeholders appeared to be positive about your initiative, but were a bit hesitant to step in?

Map each of those stakeholders and make explicit what you need from them. Do you want them to endorse your initiative, advocate for it publicly or actively contribute resources in some way? We are now going to expand our engagement and target them for deeper conversations.

2. Expand Your Engagement

Just like you did during the discovery phase, reach out to your early majority stakeholders, set up meetings with them and invite them to participate in your initiative. Use your early success stories as social proof but don’t be pushy. Frame the conversation around how the stakeholders think they might be able to help. Allow them to share their concerns about participation. There could be barriers currently limiting their ability to contribute, such as other key strategic initiatives.

One way to encourage people to participate is to start with a small request. This foot-in-the-door technique is effective because it allows stakeholders to participate without putting too much on the line. As they get comfortable with your initiative, you can then come back to ask for more.

You can leverage your champions to help with the conversations you are having with this next group of stakeholders. A peer who has experienced success with your initiative can have a strong influence on decision making.

The goal of our expanded engagement is to get a sense of which stakeholders are willing to participate; and for those who are still hesitant, the circumstance under which they might be encouraged to participate. This knowledge will inform how we develop an actionable roadmap.

3. Create An Actionable Roadmap

Let’s just reflect on where we are. In the last 90 days you have done discovery research, worked with early adopters, scored some early wins and shared your stories with a range of stakeholders. You should now have a real sense of your organization and how to rollout your initiative going forward.

It’s time to create an actionable roadmap. What are you going to work on first? Which stakeholders are going to help you with that? How are they going to be involved? Will you have monthly check-ins? Regular reviews? Continued co-creation?

Having a long-term engagement plan will keep stakeholders involved, invested, and committed to the project’s success as it scales. Just make sure you have clear milestones that are measurable so you can track progress.

The ultimate goal is to push your initiative over the tipping point where more than 25% of the people in your company support your idea. Once you get there, the momentum you have created becomes easier to sustain.

The Path Forward

By now, you should see a pattern.

The first 90 days aren’t about selling your idea. They’re about creating momentum.

Here are a few thoughts for your you to remember going forward:

1. Start by listening: Don’t just launch your initiative without first taking the time to understand the dynamics in your company.
2. Momentum beats good ideas: Always remember that successful initiatives are not about having great ideas, it’s all about building momentum.
3. Getting champions is critical: The best place to start building momentum is through working with early adopters and champions.
4. Small wins drive momentum: Get an early win and use that social proof to create momentum.
5. Narrative beats data: When telling stories about your success, don’t just present facts and data; instead focus on narratives that make your champions the heroes of the story.
6. Get to the tipping point: Beyond champions you need to engage with an early majority of stakeholders, who will help you get to a tipping point.

It is important to realize that the first 90 days are not a linear path. Things may not go exactly to plan. Use this article as a guide.

But don’t skip the stages!

Make sure you are doing the right things at the right time:

• If you don’t have champions, keep working on it until you do.
• If you don’t have an early win, keep working on that until you do.
• If your story doesn’t resonate, keep working until it does.

Early momentum is what will attract the early majority. It is better to go over the 90 day period and work on this early stage until you succeed.