Category Archives: Digital Transformation

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of March 2024

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of March 2024 Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are March’s ten most popular innovation posts:

Agile Innovation Management — by Diana Porumboiu
How to Re-engineer the Incubation Zone — by Geoffrey A. Moore
It’s Not Clear What Innovation Success Is — by Robyn Bolton
How Do You Know If Your Idea is Novel? — by Mike Shipulski
How to Tell if You Are Trusted — by Mike Shipulski
Innovation is Rubbish! — by John Bessant
Celebrating the Trailblazing Women Pioneers of Innovation — by Art Inteligencia
Thinking Differently About Leadership and Innovation — by Janet Sernack
The Remarkable Power of Negative Feedback — by Dennis Stauffer
10 CX and Customer Service Predictions for 2024 (Part 1) — by Shep Hyken

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in February that continue to resonate with people:

What Differentiates High Performing Teams — by David Burkus
How well do you know your customers? — by Howard Tiersky
Does Saying Innovation Make You Sound Stupid? — by Robyn Bolton
Can You Become the Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company? — by Shep Hyken
Powering the Google Innovation Machine with the World’s Top Minds — by Greg Satell

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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Transformation is Human Not Digital

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Transformation is Human Not Digital

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

A decade ago, many still questioned the relevance of digital technology. While Internet penetration was already significant, e-commerce made up less than 6% of retail sales. Mobile and cloud computing were just getting started and artificial intelligence was still more science fiction than reality.

Yet today, all of those things are not only viable technologies, but increasingly key to effectively competing in the marketplace. Unfortunately, implementing these new technologies can be a thorny process. In fact, research by McKinsey found that fewer than one third of digital transformation efforts succeed.

For the most part, these failures have less to do with technology and more to do with managing the cultural and organizational challenges that a technological shift creates. It’s relatively easy to find a vendor that can implement a system for you, but much harder to prepare your organization to adapt to new technology. Here’s what you need to keep in mind:

Start With Business Objectives

Probably the most common trap that organizations fall into is focusing on technology rather than on specific business objectives. All too often, firms seek to “move to the cloud” or “develop AI capabilities.” That’s a sure sign you’re headed down the wrong path.

“The first question you have to ask is what business outcome you are trying to drive,” Roman Stanek, CEO at GoodData, told me. “Projects start by trying to implement a particular technical approach and not surprisingly, front-line managers and employees don’t find it useful. There’s no real adoption and no ROI.”

So start by asking yourself business related questions, such as “How could we better serve our customers through faster, more flexible technology?” or “How could artificial intelligence transform our business?” Once you understand your business goals, you can work your way back to the technology decisions.

Automate The Most Tedious Tasks First

Technological change often inspires fear. One of the most basic mistakes many firms make is to try to use new technology to try and replace humans and save costs rather than to augment and empower them to improve performance and deliver added value. This not only kills employee morale and slows adoption, it usually delivers worse results.

A much better approach is to use technology to improve the effectiveness of human employees. For example, one study cited by a White House report during the Obama Administration found that while machines had a 7.5 percent error rate in reading radiology images and humans had a 3.5% error rate, when humans combined their work with machines the error rate dropped to 0.5%.

The best way to do this is to start with the most boring and tedious tasks first. Those are what humans are worst at. Machines don’t get bored or tired. Humans, on the other hand, thrive on interaction and like to solve problems. So instead of looking to replace workers, look instead to make them more productive.

Perhaps most importantly, this approach can actually improve morale. Factory workers actively collaborate with robots they program themselves to do low-level tasks. In some cases, soldiers build such strong ties with robots that do dangerous jobs that they hold funerals for them when they “die.”

Shift Your Organization And Your Business Model

Another common mistake is to think that you can make a major technological shift and keep the rest of your business intact. For example, shifting to the cloud can save on infrastructure costs, but the benefits won’t last long if you don’t figure out how to redeploy those resources in some productive way.

For example, when I talked to Barry Libenson, Global CIO of the data giant, Experian, about his company’s shift to the cloud, he told me that “The organizational changes were pretty enormous. We had to physically reconfigure how people were organized. We also needed different skill sets in different places so that required more changes and so on.”

The shift to the cloud made Experian more agile, but more importantly it opened up new business opportunities. Its shift to the cloud allowed the company to create Ascend, a “data on demand” platform that allows its customers to make credit decisions based on near real time data, which is now its fastest growing business.

“All of the shifts we made were focused on opening up new markets and serving our customers better,” Libenson says, and that’s what helped make the technological shift so successful. Because it was focused on business results, it was that much easier to get everybody behind it, gain momentum and create a true transformation.

Humans Collaborating With Machines

Consider how different work was 20 years ago, when Windows 95 was still relatively new and only a minority of executives regularly used programs like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. We largely communicated by phone and memos typed up by secretaries. Data analysis was something you did with a pencil, paper and a desk calculator.

Clearly, the nature of work has changed. We spend far less time quietly working away at our desks and far more interacting with others. Much of the value has shifted from cognitive skills to social skills as collaboration increasingly becomes a competitive advantage. In the future, we can only expect these trends to strengthen and accelerate.

To understand what we can expect, look at what’s happened in the banking industry. When automatic teller machines first appeared in the early 1970s, most people thought it would lead to less branches and tellers, but actually just the opposite happened. Today, there are more than twice the number of bank tellers employed as in the 1970s, because they do things that machines can’t do, like solve unusual problems, show empathy and up-sell.

That’s why we need to treat any technological transformation as a human transformation. The high value work of the future will involve humans collaborating with other humans to design work for machines. Get the human part right and the technology will take care of itself.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Dall-E via Bing

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of February 2024

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of February 2024 Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are February’s ten most popular innovation posts:

Will Innovation Management Leverage AI in the Future? — by Jesse Nieminen
4 Simple Steps to Becoming Your Own Futurist — by Braden Kelley
Master the Customer Hierarchy of Needs – Embrace Customer Expectations — by Shep Hyken
Science Fiction Becomes Innovation Reality This Way — by Greg Satell
Are You Engaging in Innovation Theater? — by Mike Shipulski
Innovation the Star of the 2024 NBA All-Star Game — by Braden Kelley
This One Word Will Transform Your Approach to Innovation — by Robyn Bolton
Announcing the Second Edition of Charting Change — by Braden Kelley
Resistance to Innovation – What if electric cars came first? — by Dennis Stauffer
Goals Are Not the Goal — by Mike Shipulski

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in January that continue to resonate with people:

Top 100 Innovation and Transformation Articles of 2023 — Curated by Braden Kelley
Five Simple Things Great Leaders Do — by David Burkus
Thought Sparks – Episodic Innovation — by Rita McGrath
Pathways to Scale — by John Bessant
Transformation is a Journey Not a Destination — by Greg Satell

Have something to contribute?

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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Implementing Successful Transformation Initiatives for 2024

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Implementing Successful Transformation Initiatives for 2024

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Transformation and change initiatives are usually designed as strategic interventions, intending to advance an organization’s growth, deliver increased shareholder value, build competitive advantage, or improve speed and agility to respond to fast-changing industries. These initiatives typically focus on improving efficiency, and productivity, resolving IT legacy and technological issues, encouraging innovation, or developing high-performance organizational cultures. Yet, according to research conducted over fifteen years by McKinsey & Co., shared in a recent article “Losing from day one: Why even successful transformations fall short” – Organizations have realized only 67 percent of the maximum financial benefits that their transformations could have achieved. By contrast, respondents at all other companies say they captured an average of only 37 percent of the potential benefit, and it’s all due to a lack of human skills, and their inability to adapt, innovate, and thrive in a decade of disruption.

Differences between success and failure

The survey results confirm that “there are no shortcuts to successful transformation and change initiatives. The main differentiator between success and failure was not whether an organization followed a specific subset of actions but rather how many actions it took throughout an organizational transformation’s life cycle” and actions taken by the people involved.

Capacity, confidence, and competence – human skills

What stands out is that thirty-five percent of the value lost occurs in the implementation phase, which involves the unproductive actions taken by the people involved.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) supports this in a recent article “How to Create a Transformation That Lasts” – “Transformations are inherently difficult, filled with compressed deadlines and limited resources. Executing them typically requires big changes in processes, product offerings, governance, structure, the operating model itself, and human behavior.”

Reinforcing the need for organizations to invest in developing the deep human skills that embed transformation disciplines into business-as-usual structures, processes, and systems, and help shift the culture. Which depends on enhancing people’s capacity, confidence, and competence to implement the “annual business-planning processes and review cycles, from executive-level weekly briefings and monthly or quarterly reviews to individual performance dialogue” that delivers and embeds the desired changes, especially the cultural enablers.

Complex and difficult to navigate – key challenges

As a result of the impact of our VUCA/BANI world, coupled with the global pandemic, current global instability, and geopolitics, many people have had their focus stolen, and are still experiencing dissonance cognitively, emotionally, and viscerally.

This impacts their ability to take intelligent actions and the range of symptoms includes emotional overwhelm, cognitive overload, and change fatigue.

It seems that many people lack the capacity, confidence, and competence, to underpin their balance, well-being, and resilience, which resources their ability and GRIT to engage fully in transformation and change initiatives.

The new normal – restoring our humanity

At ImagineNation™ for the past four years, in our coaching and mentoring practice, we have spent more than 1000 hours partnering with leaders and managers around the world to support them in recovering and re-emerging from a range of uncomfortable, disabling, and disempowering feelings.

Some of these unresourceful states include loneliness, disconnection, a lack of belonging, and varying degrees of burnout, and have caused them to withdraw and, in some cases, even resist returning to the office, or to work generally.

It appears that this is the new normal we all have to deal with, knowing there is no playbook, to take us there because it involves restoring the essence of our humanity and deepening our human skills.

Taking a whole-person approach – develop human skills

By embracing a whole-person approach, in all transformation and change initiatives, that focuses on building people’s capacity, confidence, and competence, and that cultivates their well-being and resilience to:

Engage, empower, and enable them to collaborate in setting the targets, business plans, implementation, and follow-up necessary to ensure a successful transformation and change initiative.
Safely partner with them through their discomfort, anxiety, fear, and reactive responses.
Learn resourceful emotional states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and human skills to embody, enact and execute the desired changes strategically and systemically.

By then slowing down, to pause, retreat and reflect, and choose to operate systemically and holistically, and cultivate the “deliberate calm” required to operate at the three different human levels outlined in the illustration below:

The Neurological Level – which most transformation and change initiatives fail to comprehend, connect to, and work with. Because people lack the focus, intention, and skills to help people collapse any unconscious RIGIDITY existing in their emotional, cognitive, and visceral states, which means they may be frozen, distracted, withdrawn, or aggressive as a result of their fears and anxiety.

You can build your capacity, confidence, and competence to operate at this level by accepting “what is”:

Paying attention and being present with whatever people are experiencing neurologically by attending, allowing, accepting, naming, and acknowledging whatever is going on for them, and by supporting and enabling them to rest, revitalize and recover in their unique way.
Operating from an open mind and an open heart and by being empathic and compassionate, in line with their fragility and vulnerability, being kind, appreciative, and considerate of their individual needs.
Being intentional in enabling them to become grounded, mindful conscious, and truly connected to what is really going on for them, and rebuild their positivity, optimism, and hope for the future.
Creating a collective holding space or container that gives them permission, safety, and trust to pull them towards the benefits and rewards of not knowing, unlearning, and being open to relearning new mental models.
Evoking new and multiple perspectives that will help them navigate uncertainty and complexity.

The Emotional Cognition Levels – which most transformation and change initiatives fail to take into account because people need to develop their PLASTICITY and flexibility in regulating and focusing their thoughts, feelings, and actions to adapt and be agile in a world of unknowns, and deliver the outcomes and results they want to have.

You can build your capacity, confidence, and competence to operate at this level by supporting them to open their hearts and minds:

Igniting their curiosity, imagination, and playfulness, introducing novel ideas, and allowing play and improvisation into their thinking processes, to allow time out to mind wander and wonder into new and unexplored territories.
Exposing, disrupting, and re-framing negative beliefs, ruminations, overthinking and catastrophizing patterns, imposter syndromes, fears of failure, and feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.
Evoking mindset shifts, embracing positivity and an optimistic focus on what might be a future possibility and opportunity.
Being empathic, compassionate, and appreciative, and engaging in self-care activities and well-being practices.

The Generative Level – which most transformation and change initiatives ignore, because they fail to develop the critical and creative thinking, and problem sensing and solving skills that are required to GENERATE the crucial elastic thinking and human skills that result in change, and innovation.

You can build your capacity, confidence, and competence to operate at this level by:

Creating a safe space to help people reason and make sense of the things occurring within, around, and outside of them.
Cultivating their emotional and cognitive agility, creative, critical, and associative thinking skills to challenge the status quo and think differently.
Developing behavioral flexibility to collaborate, being inclusive to maximize differences and diversity, and safe experimentation to close their knowing-doing gaps.
Taking small bets, giving people permission and safety to fail fast to learn quickly, be courageous, be both strategic and systemic in taking smart risks and intelligent actions.

Reigniting our humanity – unlocking human potential

At the end of the day, we all know that we can’t solve the problem with the same thinking that created it. Yet, so many of us keep on trying to do that, by unconsciously defaulting into a business-as-usual linear thinking process when involved in setting up and implementing a transformation or change initiative.

Ai can only take us so far, because the defining trait of our species, is our human creativity, which is at the heart of all creative problem-solving endeavors, where innovation can be the engine of change, transformation, and growth, no matter what the context. According to Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, and co-director of AI4All, a non-profit organization promoting diversity and inclusion in the field of AI.

“There’s nothing artificial about AI. It’s inspired by people, created by people, and most importantly it has an impact on people”.

Develop the human skills

When we have the capacity, confidence, and competence to reignite our humanity, we will unlock human potential, and stop producing results no one wants. By developing human skills that enable people to adapt, be resilient, agile, creative, and innovate, they will grow through disruption in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives, that are appreciated and cherished, we can truly serve people, deliver profits and perhaps save the planet.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

Find out about our collective, learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, is a collaborative, intimate, and deeply personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, and can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning and coaching program for leadership and team development and change and culture transformation initiatives.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Announcing the Second Edition of Charting Change

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Thanks to the popularity of the First Edition of Charting Change, I am privileged and excited to announce the early availability of the Second Edition of Charting Change, my best selling book on planning and executing organizational change and transformation used as a course book by universities around the world.

What was the impetus for the book and what’s new you might ask?

Executives are under escalating pressure to deliver increasing profits every quarter, while technology advances at an increasing rate. In such a pressure-cooker environment, leaders must hard-wire their organizations to be mindful of costs while simultaneously becoming more flexible and faster at planning and executing the change programs required by innovation and the shifting demands of the customer. The companies that successfully innovate and stay at the top of their industries have one thing in common – they learn fast and manage change well.

Charting Change (Second Edition) provides a set of visual tools that will help you build a coherent approach to change, identifying both the things that will help make the effort successful, and those people and barriers that will try to block the way. Leaders that read and absorb this book will be able to make productive use of the tools to drive buy-in, alignment, and successful change outcomes across the organization, its systems, and its culture.

This second edition features new topics such as architecting for change, overcoming resistance to change, systems thinking, and building a continuous change culture, as well as new visual tools such as the Organizational Agility Framework. This book will help leaders and managers visualize, plan, and execute change and transformation in a more accessible, visual, and collaborative way. Once you are done reading Charting Change (Second Edition) you will approach any big change with confidence.

Kate Hammer Whynde Kuehn SPECIAL BONUS:

AND, the new edition also includes two new Guest Expert sections from Kate Hammer on storyFORMing and Whynde Kuehn on Business Architecture!
.

SPECIAL DEAL: To celebrate the launch of the hardcover (free shipping worldwide*) and the eBook, my publisher is offering everyone the special 40% off employee discount when you enter the discount code EMP24 through February 24, 2024 directly on the Springerlink web site.

SPECIAL ASK: If you purchased the First Edition of Charting Change and left a review on Amazon, please go to the First Edition page on Amazon and copy your review and paste is a review on the Second Edition page on Amazon. This will give people looking at the Second Edition page on Amazon a much more alive page to browse when they are considering purchasing the book. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t copy over the reviews when a new edition is released. Thank you in advance!

I am eternally grateful to everyone who supports the Human-Centered Change and Innovation blog with your readership. Getting a copy of the Second Edition of Charting Change is a great way of supporting my efforts in bringing you the very best thought leadership on human-centered change, innovation, transformation and experience design topics not just from myself, but from all of our amazing contributing authors as well.

Keep innovating!

What People Are Saying

	“There’s no denying it: Change is scary. But it’s also inevitable. In Charting Change, Braden Kelley gives you a toolkit and a blueprint for initiating and managing change in your organization, no matter what form it takes.” – Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and To Sell is Human
	“Thoughtful, thorough, and practical is the rare blend that Braden has achieved in this Change Management field guide. Much more than a series of tactics, Charting Change will explicitly, sequentially, and visually help users create a diverse set of experiences for stakeholders that will most certainly increase likelihood of success.” – Eric D. Hieger, Psy.D., Business Transformation and Change Leadership Practice Lead at ADP
	“As the pace of change speeds up, the market disruptions and resulting changes can be daunting for all. We all wish we could predict how change will affect our business, our market and our people. No matter what business area you come from, change affects us all and can produce great outcomes when managed well. In Braden Kelley’s newest book, Charting Change, he provides a terrific toolkit to manage this process and make it stick.” – Denise Fletcher, Chief Innovation Officer, Xerox
	“Braden Kelley and his merry band of guest experts have done a nice job of visualizing in Charting Change how to make future change efforts more collaborative. Kelley shows how to draw out the hidden assumptions and land mines early in the change planning process, and presents some great techniques for keeping people aligned as a change effort or project moves forward.” – Phil McKinney, retired CTO for Hewlett-Packard and author of Beyond the Obvious
	“Higher employee retention? Increased revenue? Process enhancements? Whatever your change goal, Charting Change is full of bright ideas and invaluable visual guides to walk you through change in any area where your organization needs it.” – Marshall Goldsmith is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Triggers, MOJO and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

Now available at all of the Amazon online bookstores (USA, UK, CA, DE, FR, JP) and many other retailers around the world.

SpringerLink offers free shipping worldwide* (40% off employee discount through February 24, 2024 with code EMP24).

Amazon Kindle version is now available in English at various Amazon sites around the world (USA, UK, CA, AU, DE, FR, JP)!

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of January 2024

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of January 2024 Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are January’s ten most popular innovation posts:

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2023 — Curated by Braden Kelley
Creating Organizational Agility — by Howard Tiersky
5 Simple Steps to Team Alignment — by David Burkus
5 Essential Customer Experience Tools to Master — by Braden Kelley
Four Ways To Empower Change In Your Organization — by Greg Satell
AI as an Innovation Tool – How to Work with a Deeply Flawed Genius! — by Pete Foley
Top 100 Innovation and Transformation Articles of 2023 — Curated by Braden Kelley
80% of Psychological Safety Has Nothing to Do With Psychology — by Robyn Bolton
How will you allocate your time differently in 2024? — by Mike Shipulski
Leadership Development Fundamentals – Work Products — by Mike Shipulski

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in December that continue to resonate with people:

Reinventing Wheels — by Dennis Stauffer
Continuous Improvement vs. Incremental Innovation – Are They the Same? — by Robyn Bolton
Customer Success is Everyone’s Job — by Geoffrey A. Moore
Just Start Already — by Mike Shipulski
Price is Relevant Only in the Absence of Value — by Shep Hyken

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P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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Transformation is a Journey Not a Destination

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Transformation is a Journey Not a Destination

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When Mohandas Gandhi was a young lawyer he was so shy that he couldn’t even bring himself to speak in an open courtroom. He was also impulsive and had a nasty temper. Nelson Mandela started out as an angry nationalist, who argued vigorously about joining forces with other racial groups in a coalition to fight against Apartheid.

Yet as I explain in my book Cascades, both men learned to conquer themselves and evolved into inspirational leaders that achieved transformational change. Movements, as the name implies, must be kinetic to be successful. They need to start in one place and end up somewhere else, evolving and changing along the way.

The same is true for an organization. To create a real impact on the world, you first must drive change internally. That’s not easy and it doesn’t happen all at once, which is why most transformations fail. However, successful leaders understand that to bring true change about it is not enough to simply plan and direct action, you have to inspire and empower belief.

Building A Genome of Values

When Lou Gerstner took over as CEO of IBM in 1993, the company was near bankruptcy. Many thought it was a dinosaur and should be broken up. Yet Gerstner saw that its customers needed it to help them run their mission-critical systems and the death of IBM was the last thing they wanted. He knew that to save the company, he would have transform it and he started with its values.

“At IBM we had lost sight of our values,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of Gerstner’s chief lieutenants, told me. “IBM had always valued competitiveness, but we had started to compete with each other internally rather than working together to beat the competition. Lou put a stop to that and even let go some senior executives who were known for infighting.”

Pushing top executives out the door is never easy. Most are hard working, ambitious and smart, which is how they got to be top executives in the first place. Yet sometimes you have to fire nasty people, even if they outwardly seem like good performers. That’s how you change the culture and build a collaborative workplace.

In doing so, Gerstner led one of the greatest turnarounds in corporate history. By the late 1990s, his company was thriving again and continues to be profitable to this day. That would have never been true if he saw the problem as one of merely strategy and tactics. IBM had to change from the inside first.

Forging Shared Purpose And Shared Consciousness

When General Stanley McChrystal first took over Special Forces in Iraq, he knew he had a magnificently engineered military machine. No force in the world could match their efficiency, expertise and effectiveness. Yet, although they were winning every battle, they were losing the war.

The problem, as he explained in his book, Team of Teams, wasn’t one of capability, but interoperability. His forces would kill or capture Al Qaeda operatives and collect valuable intelligence. Yet it often took weeks for the prisoners to be questioned and the data to be analyzed. By that time, the information was often no longer relevant or actionable.

What McChrystal realized was that if his forces were going to defeat a network, they had to become a network and he set out to build connections within his organization to improve trust and interoperability. He upgraded liaison officer positions to only include the best operators and embedded commandos into intelligence teams and vice versa.

While formal structure and traditional lines of authority stayed very much in place, operating principles changed markedly. The transformation wasn’t immediate, but soon personal relationships and shared purpose replaced archaic customs, procedures and internal rivalries. Even those resistant to change found themselves outnumbered and began to alter their views and behavior.

That allowed McChrystal to also change the way he led. While in traditional organizations information is passed up through the chain of command and decisions are made at the top, McChrystal saw that model could be flipped. Now, he helped information get to the right place and decisions could be made lower down. As a result, operating efficiency increased by a factor of seventeen and soon the terrorists were on the run.

Forging Cultural Awareness

As one of the largest credit bureaus in the world, Experian’s customers depend on it to help determine which customers are good risks and which aren’t. If its standards are too lax, lending organizations lose money from making bad loans. However, the opposite is also true. There are also consequences if it fails to identify good credit risks.

“One of the things that made the US so successful throughout its history is the principle that everybody can participate in the American dream,” Alexander Lintner, Group President at Experian told me. “Yet today, if you don’t have access to credit, it is very hard to live that dream. You can’t buy a house or a new car or do many other things most people want to do.”

“If we rely solely on traditional credit scores about 26 million working age adults are left out of the credit system,” he continued. “That means our clients are missing out on as many as 26 million potential customers. So at Experian, we’ve been working on extended scores based on alternative data, such as rent and utility bills, to help establish a credit history.”

As a fairly recent immigrant to the country, Lintner knows the problems that having a lack of a formal credit history can cause. He credits his company’s efforts to promote cultural awareness programs internally through Employee Resource Groups for driving a passion to solve problems for customers and the public at large, especially related to financial inclusion.

Transformation Starts At Home

Clearly, Experian didn’t start its Employee Resource Groups as a product development strategy, but to improve the lives of its employees. “We strive to make a very diverse group of people feel that Experian is their home,” Lintner says. Nevertheless, Its internal commitment helped create empathy for those who are excluded from the financial system and helped lead to a solution.

Chances are, that won’t end with using alternative data to improve credit scores, but will affect many other facets of its business. To drive a true desire to solve problems, it must be genuine. Much like Gandhi and Mandela, you have to first drive change internally if you hope to create a real impact on the world.

Wladawsky-Berger talks about IBM’s earlier transformation in similar terms. “Because the transformation was about values first and technology second, we were able to continue to embrace those values as the technology and marketplace continued to evolve,” he told me and credits that transformation in values with the company’s continued profitability. While IBM has had its challenges over the years, nobody talks about breaking it up anymore.

What most organizations fail to understand and internalize is that transformation is always a journey, never a destination. There is no immediate return on investment from cultural change. Investors won’t cheer you on for firing top employees who are disruptive or creating Employee Resource Groups. Yet great companies understand that transformation always starts at home.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credit: Pexels

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What is Digital Transformation anyway?

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Digital Transformation is the third wave of digital evolution.

What is Digital Transformation anyway?

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

The first wave was brochureware. Enterprises created websites that communicated their story. As simple as this idea is, it was revolutionary. The business value of providing instant sales and marketing material at the click of a mouse is hugely valuable.

The second wave was eCommerce. Enterprises connected customer-facing digital front-ends to their back-end systems, so that customers could engage in transactions directly via their browser or mobile device. This wave generated much more value than brochureware, because it reduced the cost of customer interaction, and removed friction from the user experience. Businesses who have mastered eCommerce have been able to trump former market leaders. In today’s world, if you can’t provide elegant digital options for the customer throughout their entire journey, you’re toast.

Now we find ourselves in the third wave: Digital Transformation. eCommerce added new pathways for pre-existing offerings, but companies going through digital transformation need to reinvent themselves for a digital age. Netflix made the transition from being a mail-order company to a streaming company. Though they still focus on their core value proposition of providing extended choices and increased convenience, their entire solution offering had to shift, along with their customer experience, pricing, contracts with suppliers, marketing, and more. Furthermore, given new methods of interacting with the consumer, it became practical for them to focus serious resources on content creation, as well. While the Netflix DVD-by-mail service was definitely eCommerce enabled (i.e. you could order DVDs via their web site), their digitally transformed value proposition is fundamentally impossible without digital.

Uber is doing the same thing for transportation. While plenty of taxi and limousine companies have apps that allow you to order their vehicles, Uber created a business model that was completely digitally focused. This meant that they didn’t need to own any vehicles or hire any drivers to become the largest ground transportation company in the world. It’s worth noting that Uber didn’t really go through a digital transformation, it was born digital. Digital Transformation is what pre-digital companies must undertake to compete in the newest wave of the digital age.

But even those companies that are “born digital” will need to focus on ongoing transformation. There are multiple examples of early digital successes, companies like Yahoo and MySpace, that failed to continue to transform.

Digital Transformation also requires a different mindset around where digital “lives” within the organization. You can visualize the way digital transformation works in the enterprises like this:

Wave 1 – Brochureware: Digital was part of marketing.
Wave 2 – eCommerce: Digital is a support service, creating digital pathways to pre-existing services like ordering, customer support, and billing.
Wave 3 – Digital Transformation: Digital reimagines the entire value proposition and business model of the company.

The goal of Digital in Wave 2 is to support the strategy and operations of the company by augmenting non-digital channels with more efficient and elegant digital alternatives. But in Wave 3, digital is driving the bus. The entire company — its value proposition and business model — is reimagined with digital at the center. This requires some substantial shifts in organizational structure, roles, and mindset; these shifts make companies hesitant to move towards true digital transformation. They engage in what is sometimes called Digital Decoration, that makes them seem progressive while protecting the “integrity” of their legacy business structures.

This is a losing strategy. There’s a long history of companies who decided to protect their existing models over supporting new ones. Kodak suffocated its early digital camera products; Blockbuster resisted focusing on digital delivery of entertainment. Western Union scoffed at the telephone.

In fact, here’s an example of an internal memo sent at Western Union:

“Why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device [a telephone] when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States?”

Western Union opted out of the “digital transformation” of its era and I predict the same outcome for pre-digital companies who take a similar approach.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credit: Pexels

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Creating Organizational Agility

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Why is it that we need so much agility for digital transformation? The answer is simple: the speed of digital.

Creating Organizational Agility

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Digital moves fast. Technology is changing rapidly, and changing customer expectations. Competitors are moving rapidly, and start-ups and tech companies are going after your customers. You have to be able to come up with new ideas, test them quickly in the market, make quick decisions about what you’re going to pursue or not pursue, and how you’re going to change and evolve.

Remember in the movie The Matrix, when the bullets are flying past Keanu Reeves? He’s able to move very quickly, sensing which direction a threat is coming from, and adjusting his movements to successfully avoid them. That is the kind of agility that we need in the digital arena. It’s the kind of agility that most start-ups have, and many enterprises don’t.

What are some ways you can improve your organizational agility? In this article, we’ll discuss five specific types of agility that important for success in digital and digital transformation. We’ll also discover some of the things you can do. within the context of a large enterprise, to try and improve each of those types of agility.

Sensing

The first type of agility is the agility of sensing. But what does that mean? Imagine The Matrix. The first thing you have to focus on isn’t moving, but knowing what’s going on around you, so you can be alert and aware of all the things that might require action on your part. You can think of sensing agility in four major categories:

1. Customers

Ultimately, your customers’ behavior drives your success. Study their behavior on your websites, mobile applications, in stores, and through the other channels in which you interact with them. Be constantly measuring and watching their behavior. Agility in this area isn’t just how quickly you’re collecting data, but how nimble and agile you are in analyzing that data, and in understanding what it means so you can determine what actions to take.In addition to your own behavioral metrics, how else can you study your customer? Make sure to measure their ongoing satisfaction, survey them, conduct usability testing, and use data from third-party research that shows technographic, behavioral trends and psychographic trends. There are many sources of information to help you understand your customer segments and how they may be changing.

2. Technology

Technology is changing at a rate like never before, whether it’s wearable tech, big data, or virtual reality. Things like beacons and other network tools allow us to sense where our customers are with more accuracy than ever before. There are so many technologies that have the potential, at the right point in time and at the right level of maturity, to enable you to create a new value for your customer. Paying attention to and sensing these changes in the technology landscape will allow you to quickly figure out when they’ve reached a point where you can take action. If you don’t (or don’t move quickly enough), you can expect your competitors, traditional or start-up, to be doing just that.

3. Competitors

It’s critical to have to sense what your competitors are doing, and to constantly research competitive strategies. How are they changing their product mix or pricing? How are they changing their customer service, and where are they failing to deliver for their current, or might fail their future, customers? How are they communicating with your customers, to bring them over to their side?

4. Regulatory

Regulations are especially key if you’re in a heavily regulated industry (though, most industries are subject to some level of regulation.) As regulations change over time, they can change current opportunities, or even create new ones.

That’s a lot to pay attention to! How can you effectively put sensing programs in place? The first thing to remember is that simply gathering information is not sufficient. You need to gather the information, and then analyze it to develop actionable insights. Finally, you’ll need to social and share that information with your team.

When you break it down, there’s no big mystery on how to achieve a sensing culture. The main thing you need are resources that are both dedicated to these activities, and that have the right research and analytical skills. Recognize that a part of success in digital is to be constantly sensing, and create a culture where information from sensing is being communicated and disseminated on an ongoing basis. Encourage your people to voraciously consume information, and use it in actionable ways as they develop products and services to improve the digital experience of the customer.

Technology

The primary tool of the digital world is the tool of technology. Do the tools you have at your enterprise allow you to move quickly from an idea to a customer experience?

Generally, that’s not the experience in most enterprises; many struggle with technology stacks that were created in an era before we had the need for this level of agility. They may have been conceived with a certain kind of transactional process in mind that’s either no longer applicable or reflects only one of many different types of transactional processes that you need to support. Truthfully, a lot of aging technology needs to be replaced, or needs to be wrapped so that it can gain the necessary level of agility.

Here are three specific things you can do to help guide work between your business and IT departments and see how to move forward technology that you currently have supporting digital forward.

1. Requirements

What does requirements mean? Traditionally, the business side would define the requirements needed for a particular project on a particular channel and IT would build them for us (hopefully successfully!) The problem this model is that the end result is only what’s needed at that moment. Today, we need to be able to change, evolve, and adapt so quickly that process is too slow. If every time we realize what we need, we have to go back through a whole time-consuming IT build, things wouldn’t move quickly enough. When you’re thinking about requirements, don’t only think in the context of what you need today, but ask the broader question of the requirements for technological agility, and communicate that to your IT department.After all, the IT department and those responsible for implementing technology all need to understand what needs to be flexible — because you can’t make everything flexible. There needs to be ongoing dialogue to focus the requirements around the things that need to be able to change on an ongoing basis.

2. Software

Software as a service platform is a huge help for all of us trying to make technology more agile. Why? Because in the old days, a software product (something like a major piece of enterprise software,) would require hardware implementation. It could take a year or two to implement it, and the implementation would require massive customizations. The software would be expensive to buy, implement, and customize. And if you wanted to make a change? You’re talking about abandoning major investments.In today’s SAAS world, we’ve created much more flexibility by using an integration layer around our most core systems and data. We can plug in different tools, whether a shopping cart tool, CRM, data mining tool, or mobile capabilities added into our apps. If we build out our capabilities using these types of platforms, we can swap out and change things much more rapidly.
And with most of these SAAS platforms, we don’t have the issues associated with versions. Previously, if you were on one version of SAP, and you wanted to go to another version of SAP, it required a major headache of an upgrade. Today, versions build off core components in software. A product like SalesForce is constantly evolving and improving. Everyone is always on the most recent version of SalesForce, and you have a huge ecosystem of plug-ins and other code that’s designed to work with anyone’s implementation. That’s just one example of a SAAS platform that gives you an enormous amount of agility and flexibility, so it’s important to move yourself to SAAS platforms wherever possible.

3. Abstraction

You want your product development team, product owners, content creators, and marketers to be able to tweak and adjust the digital experience as much and as rapidly as possible. That means you want to try to abstract the capabilities up from the level of code.

There are three main areas of abstraction:

Content Management: It’s imperative to be able to publish and edit content without needing to go through IT. I know that might sound super obvious and kind of old school, but I constantly see large enterprises where key parts of the content ecosystem isn’t accessible from a business perspective, and always requires IT involvement. Don’t let that happen to you!
Presentation: It’s one thing to edit the content, but what if you want to change the layout? What if you want to change the process for content creation? Making those capabilities accessible to business users is possible with today’s experience management tools. We do a lot of work implementing these kinds of tools, and making sure that the business has the ability to make changes in the experience at their fingertips, and without having to go back to IT. This is a crucial capability for anything they’re going to want to frequently change.
Business Rules: Implement a business rules engine as part of your technology stack, so that as you decide to make changes — whether in pricing, policy, or logic — they are not primarily in code that has to be changed by a developer. Then your business rules can be changed in more or less the same way your content is changed: by a business user that has the appropriate entitlements.

Decision Making

If you’re in a large enterprise, I’m guessing that you’ve had the experience of trying to move digital efforts forward, only to be faced with a multi-month or multi-quarter capital budget approval process that requires endless spreadsheets, forecasts, meetings.

On one hand, these things exist for good reason. When companies are doing a large amount of capital investment, they want to make sure that those decisions involve all the right people, and are being thoroughly vetted. It makes sense to want to spend their money carefully, but in the digital world, this process just doesn’t work. The speed of decision-making from the old, quasi pre-digital world kills our efforts in the digital arena, because digital requires moving quickly. It’s crucial to create a faster process for getting those decisions made. In the digital realm, you’re better off being fast than being right. If you’re fast but wrong, you have agility. You’ll be able to sense how what you’re doing is wrong, and can react and make a shift. If you’re slow? Forget it.

Wayne Gretzky explains that he wins at hockey not by skating to where the puck is, rather, where the puck is going to be. Can you imagine seeing where the puck is going, but then having to fill out a 25-tabbed Excel spreadsheet, submit it to the capital-approval process, and wait several months? By then, the game is over, everyone’s gone home, and the puck’s been put back in the locker room. You need to be able to move more quickly than that.

To solve this problem, make sure that you have true alignment around the goals you’re trying to drive through digital. So often these capital-approval processes are about strategy and tactics: What are we going to do? What kind of tools are we going to use? What technologies are we going to buy? What capabilities are we going to provide to our customers? That’s exactly the kind of stuff we have to be agile about.

Agree with senior management on the things we’re trying to drive through digital: brand awareness, lower acquisition cost, increased wallet share, and increased conversion on the website. Once you agree on the key business goals, find people who you trust to run digital. Give them the money, and the room to fail on the way to success.
I worked with a large energy company once that made this shift because of these problems. They made the decision to give the Chief Information Officer and the Chief Marketing Officer a substantial capital budget to rapidly drive digital, with quarterly check-ins to report how they spent the money, and what the programs were achieving. This process was hugely successful for them, and resulted in large increases in digital revenue, that far eclipsed the investments that were being made.

Unfortunately, after two years of success, another even larger energy company came in and bought the first company, telling them, “That’s not how we do it.” They dismantled the process, and the gains and growth subsided.

You can learn from their story. Try your best to get the level of autonomy and authority needed for the folks on the ground, who are actually doing these digital transformation projects.

Strategy Shifts

Ninety percent of all start-ups fail. Those that succeed don’t often achieve success because their original idea, business model, or original concept was right. As I’ve mentioned previously, Facebook started off as a dating site, eBay started out as a Pez dispenser collectors’ site, and Flickr started out as an online role-playing game. These companies succeeded because they changed and shifted their strategy many times on their way to success.

In the enterprise world, we often judge projects on whether they achieved their original vision or goal, hit their original budget, or achieve the ROI based on their original funding. This mindset doesn’t work in the digital space. You run the risk of teams starting to see issues, problems, or reasons to shift their strategy, and not doing it, because they’re afraid of being judged by the project’s original standards. They’re afraid of being told that they have to start the funding process all over again, simply because the strategy has shifted and changed the scope of the project. This isn’t how successful digital companies are operating.

Create a process that embraces and expects that the project you’re funding is going to go through a process of trial-and-error to find its way to the kind of digital transformation success that you’re seeking. Keanu Reeves can’t know where all the bullets are going to be before he goes into the room — that’s not how he avoids getting hit by a bullet. He does it by sensing what’s going on around him, and moving to where he needs to be at that particular moment in time. Give your digital teams that level of flexibility and, reward them for making those kinds of shifts.

Teaming

FROM gets involved from working with a lot of companies, and we get the same questions a lot:

What’s the right organizational model for digital?
Should there be one central digital team?
Should digital be part of all the different P&Ls?
Should it be a blend, a combination?

These are important questions. Having said that, let me disavow you of the myth that there’s one magical structure whereby all the digital work can be kind of done by one single team of people operating under one executive. That’s impossible! Digital efforts cut across every part of the organization. When you want to move quickly to make a change or bring something new to market, you need IT, Marketing, R&D, Customer Support, Engineering, Manufacturing, and any other key silos in the organization to make it happen.

As a side note for all of you balking at the idea of silos: You’re going to have them. You can structure them in different ways, e.g. phases of the customer lifecycle, customer segment, geography, but you’re going to have them if you’re a large enterprise.

The key isn’t to try to figure out how to get rid of silos, since that’s all but impossible, but to figure out how to create a culture where teaming across those silos happens rapidly, and there’s alignment and mobilization of the people that are needed. We’ve done work like this across many organizations, including our own. Teaming agility is what’s necessary to achieve that kind of alignment, whether by workshops to align goals, or just a culture of innovation that creates the organizational functionality that we need for people to be able to swarm around an opportunity quickly, instead of focusing on the friction that can exist between different departments.

These five areas of agility that are essential. Most are something large enterprises struggle with, but hopefully you’ve gained a few tips and tricks on how to overcome some of those challenges.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credit: Pixabay

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