Author Archives: Braden Kelley

About Braden Kelley

Braden Kelley is a Human-Centered Experience, Innovation and Transformation consultant at HCL Technologies, a popular innovation speaker, and creator of the FutureHacking™ and Human-Centered Change™ methodologies. He is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons and Charting Change (Second Edition) from Palgrave Macmillan. Braden is a US Navy veteran and earned his MBA from top-rated London Business School. Follow him on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

Building a Better Change Communication Plan

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ACMP Standard Visualization

by Braden Kelley

In the ACMP Standard for Change Management the second phase is to “Formulate the Change Management Strategy” and its first step is to “Develop the Communication Strategy.”

The quality of your communication strategy and its execution is one of the most important determinants of success for your change or transformation initiative. But let’s be honest, most of us studied something other than communications in our university education and as a result don’t know the keys to successful communications. Because we have all learned how to write and speak in high school we make the mistake of thinking that we are expert communicators, but we’re not – at least without work and a conscious focus on the key principles of effective communications.

The most important of these is to know your audience and to speak to them as individuals. When it comes to change, there are many different motivations for people to choose change.

When crafting your communication strategy for your change or transformation initiative it is incredibly important for people to refer to the best practices of marketing communications. Chief among these is the recognition of the importance of segmenting your audience so you can send relevant communications to the different segments of your audience.

One of the best ways to segment your audience for change communications is to leverage The Eight Change Mindsets:

1. Mover ’n’ Shaker

  • give these people the chance to be first

2. Thrill Seeker

  • these people like to try new things and experiment

3. Mission-Driven

  • these people need reasons to believe

4. Action-Oriented

  • these people just want to know what needs to be done

5. Expert-Minded

  • teach these people how to do it, and they will seek mastery

6. Reward-Hungry

  • these people want recognition for adopting the change

7. Team Player

  • these people are happy to help if you show them why the change will be helpful

8. Teacher

  • show these people how to get others to choose change

You can download The Eight Change Mindsets as a PDF from Slideshare here:

Leveraging The Eight Change Mindsets in your change communication strategy will enable you to focus on creating the messaging, symbols and artifacts that will help each mindset choose change.

But many change managers either aren’t familiar with the basic principles of marketing communications or choose to take shortcuts and treat the entire organization as a single audience and craft a single set of communications. This is a mistake.

It’s actually a bit ironic because ProSci’s ADKAR methodology is clearly a re-purposing of marketing’s AIDA view of customer progressions:

  1. Awareness
  2. Interest
  3. Desire
  4. Action

As a quick refresher, ADKAR as a comparison is:

  1. Awareness of the Need for Change
  2. Desire to Support the Change
  3. Knowledge of How to Change
  4. Ability to Demonstrate Skills & Behaviors
  5. Reinforcement to Make the Change Stick

If you really want to build a better change communication plan, then crash these two things together:

  1. The Eight Change Mindsets for the segmentation of your audience
  2. ADKAR for the creation of a communications sequence

Download the PDF of The Eight Change Mindsets above or go here to get the infographic if that’s easier for you.

If you need a little more guidance or just want to save time, then I’ve added a worksheet to v13 of the Change Planning Toolkit that I introduced in my latest book Charting Change.

The “Eight Change Mindsets Communication Strategy” worksheet is but one of the 70+ tools and frameworks that you’ll get when you purchase an annual license or a lifetime license of the Change Planning Toolkit developed as part of the Human-Centered Change methodology.

I’ve designed it as an 11″x17″ work mat to use with sticky notes. But this tool, and the others in the Change Planning Toolkit, can also be provided as 35″x56″ posters to licensees on an as needed basis. In addition, these tools are also designed to be used with virtual collaboration tools like Miro, Mural, Lucidspark, Microsoft Whiteboard and others.

So, start building a better change communication strategy today!

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Black Friday Shows No Loyalty

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Black Friday Shows No Loyalty

Marketers love to hold up points-based loyalty programs as proof of their contribution to their company’s financial success through repeat purchase behavior.

But traditional loyalty programs are nothing more than complicated, and expensive to manage, discount programs.

Black Friday is a faux holiday devoted to the religion of discounting.

This begs the question…

Do Black Friday deals do anything to create loyalty of any kind?

The idea behind Black Friday deals is almost as old marketing – the loss leader.

By offering one or more items at a substantial discount, the company and its marketers hope that a larger than normal group of potential customers will flood the shop (physical or virtual) and buy the loss leader (aka Black Friday deal) AND many other items they may (or may not) have been intending to buy.

Whether this is how it plays out in practice is a closely-guarded secret and debatable at best. Complicating the situation is the fact that Black Friday has become a virtual arms race that companies of all shapes and sizes are almost forced to participate in.

This means that nearly every retailer is offering some sort of Black Friday deal today, resulting in consumers:

  1. Best Case — Your existing customers start at your shop (online or virtual) and make a transactional purchase of one of your Black Friday deals (usually unprofitable for the company) and hopefully many other products or services to make your existing customer’s overall purchase profitable, plus they tell their friends and families to shop with you

  2. Worst Case — Your existing customers buy nothing or only your Black Friday deals, tell none of their friends and family, and you spend a lot of money on advertisements to attract non-customers to your shop that only buy your Black Friday deals

One of my marketing professors at London Business School – Mark Ritson – recently published a very funny video on the relationship between marketers and consumers:

Bridging the Gap Between Black Friday Deals and NextGen Loyalty

Marketers have an overly optimistic perspective on customer loyalty and their implementations of customer loyalty programs.

The reality is that very few customers are loyal and much of what we speak of as customer loyalty is no more than repeat transaction behavior.

In my article Next Generation Loyalty – Part One I look at how to excavate sources of NextGen Loyalty using Loyalty Archaeology™.

True loyalty (customer or otherwise) is when someone engages in a behavior that is not in their most obvious best interest because of a higher commitment.

Very few customers will ever behave against their best interests, but engaging in Loyalty Archaeology™ you can better understand where the value comes from in your products & services and work backwards to identify potential sources of customer loyalty.

Continue reading Next Generation Loyalty – Part One here.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Free Customer Experience Maturity Assessment

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Free Customer Experience Maturity Assessment

HCL Digital & Analytics Customer Experience (CX) Strategy practice lead Danyel LaGow recently published a new white paper titled:

5 Practical Strategies to Boost Your CX Success

“Driving a seamless customer experience alongside fundamental business decision-making is indispensable for business profitability. In this constantly evolving customer expectation landscape, how you cultivate your relationships will speak for your brand.

Danyel LaGowThe tectonic shift in how consumers engage with brands demand attention to new ways to enthuse customers with the intent to deliver next gen customer experience. Having an end-to-end customer journey roadmap in place is the first and foremost step towards creating a serious customer experience strategy. A customer journey map not only showcases the end-to-end customer interactions but also enable the visibility of every touch point. This further reveals internal bottlenecks and customer pain points – primary identifications to work on a customer experience management program.

It is important to assess your current CX to realize where your company stands in CX maturity, before you outline your strategy. This paper will help you dig deep and understand the five key components of successful CX, which are paramount to promoting customer success across organizations.”

Download the whitepaper to know more

Included with the white paper is a free Customer Experience (CX) Maturity Assessment.

“While many organizations have an idea about their customer experience (CX) maturity, a thoughtful assessment gives you a frame of reference to help develop a strategic roadmap. Regular assessments, as part of your annual activities, help measure the progress of your CX efforts.

This assessment is divided into six key CX components that are critical in fostering customer success in customer-centric organizations. There are three questions for each CX component, amounting to a total of 18 questions.”

The survey should not take you more than five minutes to complete.

Take the FREE CX Maturity Assessment

Image credit: Pixabay

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Next Generation Loyalty – Part One

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Next Generation Loyalty - Part One

Loyalty Archaeology™

Excavating Sources of Next Generation Loyalty

Marketers have an overly optimistic perspective on customer loyalty and their implementations of customer loyalty programs.

The reality is that very few customers are loyal and much of what we speak of as customer loyalty is no more than repeat transaction behavior.

Customer Loyalty Programs Are Really Just Discount Programs

If we are honest as marketers, today’s typical customer loyalty program is no more than an a way of automatically gathering purchase data and distributing discounts. Today’s traditional points-based customer loyalty program is actually just a fancy and often costly discounting program because smart marketers only use discounting to capture sales that would not otherwise have occurred. As soon as you begin distributing discounts to people that would have purchased anyways, then you are cannibalizing your own profit margins.

If you want to dispute that a points-based loyalty program is nothing more than a discounting program, you have to look no further than web sites that quantify the value of points given for airline miles, hotel stays, etc.

So what is customer loyalty?

According to the Oxford Dictionaries, loyalty is a strong feeling of support or allegiance.

In a business sense, most people look at customer loyalty as a measure of how likely a customer is to do repeat business with a company or brand.

But this way of looking at customer loyalty is too easy to “achieve” and is more related to repeat purchase behavior than true loyalty. The definition of loyalty in Oxford Dictionaries is too weak as well.

True loyalty (customer or otherwise) is when someone engages in a behavior that is not in their most obvious best interest because of a higher commitment.

A United States Marine putting himself or herself in harm’s way to recover a wounded comrade from the battlefield is a demonstration of true loyalty.

A customer paying a higher price for an identical product could be a demonstration of loyalty, but could also be an example of brand value or linked to other intangible, often emotional sources of value not directly linked to the product itself (desire to support a company’s social purpose, affinity for cartoon characters used to promote the product, etc.)

A customer paying a lower price for an identical product because you’re giving them a “loyalty program” discount is not a sign of loyalty.

Focusing on the interfaces and experiences related to your products, services and solutions and their surrounding emotional components are more likely to engender loyalty than building a points-based program.

I’m not saying points-based programs are bad, but let’s be clear – they’re not loyalty programs, they’re great for gathering customer purchase data and helping to drive repeat purchase behavior. But, if your competitor offers a better points program you’re likely to lose your supposedly loyal customers.

What does a Next Generation Loyalty program look like?

A Next Generation (aka NextGen) Loyalty program has very little to do with points and promotions, but instead focuses on identifying and leveraging the variables that represent opportunities to create actual loyalty for your brands and their associated products, services and solutions.

Next Generation Loyalty programs can only be created if you understand where the value comes from for each of your products, services and solutions.

Innovation Resonance Venn Diagram

In my popular article “Innovation is All About Value” I highlighted the fact that there are three key value considerations in the pursuit of innovation:

  1. Value Creation is pretty self-explanatory. Your innovation investment must create incremental or completely new value large enough to overcome the switching costs of moving to your new solution from the old solution (including the ‘Do Nothing Solution’). New value can be created by making something more efficient, more effective, possible that wasn’t possible before, or create new psychological or emotional benefits.

  2. Value Access could also be thought of as friction reduction. How easy do you make it for customers and consumers to access the value you’ve created. How well has the product or service been designed to allow people to access the value easily? How easy is it for the solution to be created? How easy is it for people to do business with you?

  3. Value Translation is all about helping people understand the value you’ve created and how it fits into their lives. Value translation is also about understanding where on a continuum between the need for explanation and education that your solution falls. Incremental innovations can usually just be explained to people because they anchor to something they already understand, but radical or disruptive innovations inevitably require some level of education (often far in advance of the launch).

All three are defined in the article on the link above and were created in an innovation context, but there is no reason they couldn’t also be used in a marketing context to identify potential sources of customer loyalty to be leveraged or enhanced.

Another great way to work backwards to identify potential sources of customer loyalty is to leverage A Practical Model for Jobs to be Done (JTBD) from Jim Kalbach. The six components laid out in his graphic below being:

  1. Situation
  2. Motivation
  3. Desired Outcome
  4. Functional Jobs
  5. Emotional Jobs
  6. Social Jobs

Practical Model for Understanding Jobs to be Done from Jim Kalbach

Using Loyalty Archaeology™ to Uncover Sources of NextGen Loyalty

These two simple frameworks give you a great place to start your quest for Next Generation Loyalty. Using Loyalty Archaeology™ to understand potential sources of loyalty will provide the foundation for building a potential program of loyalty enhancements.

You might be sensing that there is no one size fits all when it comes to NextGen Loyalty, and you’d be right.

What insights about the sources of your customers’ loyalty do you think these frameworks can provide?

What other tools do you think would be useful in excavating sources of potential customer loyalty?

In the next article in this series we’ll look at how to take the insights on customer loyalty sources and build a program of initiatives to enhance and accelerate your sources of unique customer loyalty. We’ll also look at how to go beyond points and redemption to leverage different parameters in your program of initiatives to build Next Generation Loyalty!

Image credits: Pixabay, Braden Kelley and Jim Kalbach

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Free Human-Centered Innovation Tools

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Free Human-Centered Innovation Tools

Innovation is all about change, and change only succeeds when people are put at the center. Therefore, people are also the heart of innovation.

It is because of this fact that I continue to build out my Human-Centered Innovation methodology and toolkit.

Keeping with the spirit of placing people at the center of innovation and change I have not only resurrected Blogging Innovation as Human-Centered Change & Innovation (follow us on LinkedIn) – complete with a weekly newsletter – but am also creating this curated collection of human-centered innovation tools.

I will give this page a start with some of my free tools from my Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit along with other well-know people-centric innovation tools.

BUT, this page will always be under construction, so please contact me with your suggestions of free tools to add.

Free Human-Centered Innovation Tools

Assessments

1. Innovation Maturity Assessment

Free Innovation AuditTo help people evaluate their level of innovation maturity against the above graphic, I am sharing the 50 question innovation maturity assessment I use with clients. The assessment is most powerful when answers are gathered at multiple levels of the organization across several groups and several sites, but you can also fill it out yourself and get instant feedback – for FREE.

Click here to visit the Free Innovation Maturity Assessment page

Strategy Tools

1. Play-to-Win Strategy Canvas

Play-to-Win Strategy CanvasMatthew E. May designed and developed a wall canvas to be used when facilitating strategic choice-making with small teams. Over time, the canvas has evolved as he learned more and more about the art and discipline of strategy facilitation… what people struggle with most, where the resource of time is best spent, etc.

He introduced v3.0 of the canvas a few years ago in a short post, but here’s a little content to both explain what’s different (and why) and a few tips.

The first thing you’ll notice is that strategy-making is in three big steps:

1. Choose (strategic choices using the Play-to-Win framework)
2. Reverse Engineer (what must true for the choices to be good ones)
3. Test (validating what must be true is in fact true, or true enough)

Click here to download the free Play-to-Win wall size canvas

Click here to download the free Play-to-Win 11×17 canvas (aka A3)

Planning Tools

1. Visual Project Charter™

Visual Project Charter™The Visual Project Charter™ helps organizations:

  • Move beyond the Microsoft Word document
  • Make the creation of Project Charters more fun!
  • Kickoff projects in a more collaborative, more visual way
  • Structure dialogue to capture the project overview, project scope, project conditions and project approach

This download includes a premium 35″ x 56″ scalable PDF that I am making available to project managers for use in planning their projects in a more visual and collaborative way for greater alignment, accountability, and more successful outcomes.

The download will also include a JPEG version for use with online whiteboarding tools like Miro, Mural, Lucidspark and Microsoft Whiteboard for when your sticky notes need to be virtual.

Click here to get the Visual Project Charter™ for free

2. Business Model Canvas

Business Model CanvasThe Business Model Canvas is a popular tool from Strategyzer than can be used collaboratively to sketch out and iterate on potential business models for a new business or innovation opportunity. Why use the Business Model Canvas?

  • Map Existing Business Models – Visualize and communicate a simple story of your business model.
  • Design New Business Models – Use the canvas to explore new business models whether you are a start-up or an existing business.
  • Manage a Portfolio of Business Models – Use the canvas to easily juggle between “Explore” and “Exploit” business models.

Click to visit Strategyzer’s Business Model Canvas download page

People & Culture

1. Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck

Nine Innovation RolesI’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.

Click here to visit the Nine Innovation Roles free gifts page
(multiple languages available)

Frameworks

1. Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation

Eight I's of Infinite InnovationThe Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation framework is designed to be a continuous learning process, one without end as the outputs of one round become inputs for the next round. It’s also a relatively new guiding framework for organizations to use, so if you have thoughts on how to make it even better, please let me know in the comments. The framework is also ideally suited to power a wave of new organizational transformations that are coming as an increasing number of organizations (including Hallmark) begin to move from a product-centered organizational structure to a customer needs-centered organizational structure. The power of this new approach is that it focuses the organization on delivering the solutions that customers need as their needs continue to change, instead of focusing only on how to make a particular product (or set of products) better.

Click here to download the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation PDF from LinkedIn
(go into fullscreen mode to download)

2. Building a Global Sensing Network

Building a Global Sensing NetworkThe purpose of a global sensing network is to allow an organization to collect and connect the partial insights and ideas that will form the basis of the organization’s next generation of customer solutions. This involves collecting and connecting:

  1. Customer Insights
  2. Core Technology Trends
  3. Adjacent Technology Trends
  4. Distant technology trends
  5. Local social mutations
  6. Expert Communities

Click to read more about Building a Global Sensing Network

Click to access this framework as a scalable 11″x17″ PDF download

Prototyping & Testing Tools

1. The Experiment Canvas™

The Experiment CanvasThe Experiment Canvas™ is designed to help people instrument for learning fast in iterative new product development (NPD) or service development activities. The canvas will help you create new innovation possibilities in a more visual and collaborative way for greater alignment, accountability, and more successful outcomes.

Click to read more about The Experiment Canvas™

Click to download the Experiment Canvas™ as a 35″ x 56″ scalable FREE PDF poster

Add to this list of Free Human-Centered Innovation Tools

This page will always be under construction, so please contact me with your suggestions of free tools to add.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Don’t Forget to Innovate the Customer Experience

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Don't Forget to Innovate the Customer Experience

Too often we speak about Innovation, Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, Employee Experience and Organizational Change as very distinct and separate things.

But is this the right approach?

Those of you who have read both my first book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire and my second book Charting Change know that the main reason that the second book even exists is because innovation is all about change.

Apple couldn’t bring the iPod, iTunes and the iTunes store to market without inflicting incredible amounts of change upon the organization and building many different new organizational capabilities and hiring many new types of people with many types of expertise new to the organization.

I’ve also written about BIG C and little c change, with BIG C change including transformations of many types (including digital) and little C change including projects and other small initiatives. And yes, every project changes something, so every project is a change initiative. And so yes, project management is in fact a subset of change management, not the typical wrong way ’round that change management is usually made subservient to project management.

Stop it!

Architecting the Organization for Change

For an invention to have any chance of becoming an innovation, the organization must transform, and to do this well we must design corresponding changes in both employee experience and customer experience to accelerate and integrate:

  1. Value Creation
  2. Value Access
  3. Value Translation

See my important article Innovation is All About Value for more background on these three phrases.

Because of the interconnectedness between innovation, change, transformation, customer experience and employee experience we must look at these different specialties holistically and in a coordinated way if we are to maximize our chances of successfully completing the journey from invention to innovation.

Service Design and Journey Mapping have a role to play, as does Human-Centered Design because people are at the heart of innovation and transformation. These tools can help uncover the customer needs and help visualize what the NEW experiences must look like for both employees and customers to maximize the holistic value created and the ability of customers to access that value as effortlessly as possible.

As we work to design the potential innovation as a product or a service or a combination of the two, we must also consciously design the customer experience and employee experience to enhance to possibilities of this invention becoming an innovation. This includes potentially designing OUT touchpoints in current journeys that people may taken as a given, but maybe no longer need to exist if we are truly keeping the customer and their wants/needs at the center of our focus.

As part of your innovation activities, consider creating customer and employee journey maps, printing them poster size and placing them front and center on your innovation wonder wall so that you can ask your innovation team the following questions:

  1. What is different about this customer or employee touchpoint when considering our potential innovation?
  2. How could we design out the need for this customer or employee touchpoint?
  3. With our potential innovation, what customer or employee touchpoints may no longer be necessary?
  4. With our potential innovation, what new customer or employee touchpoints may we need to create?
  5. What organizational and employee knowledge and capabilities are we missing, that we must have, to deliver the necessary and expected customer and employee experiences?

As we explore these questions, they allow us to look beyond the product or service that forms the basis of the potential innovation that we are creating and create more value around it, to make our customers’ and employees’ experiences of our potential innovation better, and to increase our chances of more successfully translating the holistic value for its potential customers.

Customer and employee experiences are not detached and separate from the new products and services forming the basis of your innovation activities.

The change and transformation that accompany innovation are not separate either.

We must look at all of these specialties together and not see them as isolated things, otherwise we will fail.

So keep innovating, but be sure and consider the change and transformation necessary to help you be successful and how you are going to innovate your customer and employee experiences at the same time!

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AI Has Already Taken Over the World

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AI Has Already Taken Over the World

by Braden Kelley

I don’t know about you, but it’s starting to feel as if machines and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have already taken over the world.

Remember in primary school when everyone tried really hard to impress, or even just to be recognized by, a handful of cool kids?

It’s feeling more and more each day as if the cool kids on the block that we’re most desperate to impress are algorithms and artificial intelligence.

We’re all desperate to get our web pages preferred over others by the algorithms of Google and Bing and are willing to spend real money on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase our chances of ranking higher.

Everyone seems super keen to get their social media posts surfaced by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tik Tok, and even LinkedIn.

In today’s “everything is eCommerce” world, how your business ranks on Google and Bing increasingly can determine whether you’re in business or out of business.

Algorithms Have Become the New Cool Kids on the Block

According to the “Agencies SEO Services Global Market Report 2021: COVID-19 Impact and Recovery to 2030” report from The Business Research Company:

“The global agencies seo services market is expected to grow from $37.84 billion in 2020 to $40.92 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.1%. The market is expected to reach $83.7 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 19.6%.”

Think about that for a bit…

Companies and individuals are forecast to spend $40 Billion trying to impress the alogrithms and artificial intelligence applications of companies like Google and Microsoft in order to get their web sites and web pages featured higher in the search engine rankings.

The same can be true for companies and individuals trying to make a living selling on Amazon, Walmart.com and eBay. The algorithms of these companies determine which sellers get preferred placement and as a result can determine which individuals and companies profit and which will march down a path toward bankruptcy.

And then there is another whole industry and gamesmanship surrounding the world of social media marketing.

According to BEROE the size of the social media marketing market is in excess of $102 Billion.

These are huge numbers that, at least for me, demonstrate that the day that machines and AI take over the world is no longer out there in the future, but is already here.

Machines have become the gatekeepers between you and your customers.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

(insert maniacal laugh here)

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Join Me for Innovation Day 2021 – October 15, 2021

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Join Me for Innovation Day 2021 - October 15, 2021

Join me for the American Society for Quality’s (ASQ) Innovation Day 2021 on October 15,2021.

The theme for this year’s event is intersectional global value.

There will be an exciting line-up of innovation-oriented keynotes, in-depth topic speakers, practitioner and student lightning-talk sessions, panel discussions, workshops, round-tables, meet the author sessions, and a diversity-oriented networking experience.

I will be delivering the closing keynote to the event in my role as innovation speaker.

I hope you will join me for this live virtual event.

More details coming soon!
(including more details on the speakers and sessions)

Please register here: https://events.eply.com/ASQTCInnovationDay2021

All proceeds go to funding our inaugural ASQ Innovation Scholarship.

ASQ Innovation Day 2021 Page 1ASQ Innovation Day 2021 Page 2

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Digital Transformation Virtual Office Hours – Session One

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Digital Transformation Virtual Office Hours - Session One

84% of digital transformations fail, according to research by Michael Gale of PulsePoint Group.

A digital transformation is the journey between a company’s current business operations to a reimagined version of itself from the perspective of how a digital native would build the same business operations leveraging the latest technology and scientific understandings of management science, leadership, decision science, business and process architecture, design, customer experience, etc.

Here is a quick review list of ten things to keep in mind for a successful digital transformation:

  1. Reimagine your business from a digital native perspective
  2. A Human-Centered Data Model (customers & employees)
  3. Put your customers and employees at the center
  4. Identify intersection of what’s needed & what’s possible
  5. Simplify processes
  6. Reduce complexity
  7. Design elegant experiences
  8. Technology comes at the END – not the beginning
  9. Start by making strategic choices
  10. Build capabilities needed to achieve your transformation

LinkedIn Virtual Office Hours – Digital Transformation – Session One

On Tuesday, August 31, 2021 at 11am EDT I opened up a Virtual Office Hours session on LinkedIn about Digital Transformation.

To participate in this first in a series of virtual office hours, you only need do two things:

  1. Follow me on LinkedIn
  2. Visit this LinkedIn post, add a comment with your question and I will answer it!

Here is an example of how these Digital Transformation Virtual Office Hours will go:

QUESTION ONE from Howard Tiersky:

How can you determine if your data model is human centered?

Can you talk more about that idea?

ANSWER from Braden Kelley:

Great question Howard! The best way to evaluate whether your data model is human-centered is to look at the most frequent actions driven by your data.

The first mistake people make in building their data model is to not start with the end in mind.

The second mistake people make in building their data model is to not be brutal in insisting that nearly 100% of the data gathered is actionable and not just nice to have. BUT, it is far more difficult to make the decision not to gather a piece of data than it is to just make your forms one field longer.

To try and create a human-centered data model you want to focus on making sure you’re only gathering actionable data and that it is being used to drive outcomes for humans (customers, employees, partners, etc.).

Finally, one side effect that people don’t consider when building their data model and gathering non-actionable data is that they end up inflating the number of reports that get built and that people have to sort through to find the ones that are human-centered and do contain actionable data.

So, design your data models from value derived for humans and the actions necessary to execute, evolve and deliver – backwards!

QUESTION TWO from Mark Schaefer:

In my experience across many verticals, it seems like digital transformation usually occurs only when the pain in business necessitates it. In other words, the cost of avoiding change becomes greater than the cost of implementing solutions.

Do think this is still the case or are companies outside of tech beginning to think more long-term and strategically about these transformations?

ANSWER from Braden Kelley:

While it is definitely true that most companies only engage in the perceived pain of transformation when it is less than the perceived pain of avoiding change, an increasing number of organizations are recognizing that doing nothing is no longer a viable option.

A true digital transformation not only has the potential of equipping the organization to better fight off entrance by digital natives, but also to deliver improved customer and employee experiences and to improve employee retention and recruitment in this tight labor market.

And yes, companies outside of tech are beginning to think more strategically about these transformations as I am about to begin working with a company in the natural resources industry.

Companies in every industry can no longer put off this important work, and in fact a true digital transformation has the side benefits of increasing innovation capabilities and capacity when done well.

Click to Add Your Question on LinkedIn

p.s. If you’re interested in Digital Transformation, you’ll also enjoy some of the articles I’ve written for a number of publications including CEO World, the HCL Technologies Blog, and of course Human-Centered Change and Innovation:

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Digital Transformation – Ask Me Anything on LinkedIn

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Digital Transformation - Ask Me Anything on LinkedIn

Ask Me Anything on LinkedIn about Digital Transformation

On Tuesday, August 31, 2021 at 11am EDT I will we be hosting an Ask Me Anything session on LinkedIn about Digital Transformation.

To participate in this first in a series of virtual office hours, you only need do two things:

  1. Follow me on LinkedIn
  2. Visit my LinkedIn profile at 11am EDT this Tuesday, August 31, 2001 and post a comment on the 11am EDT post with your question and I will answer it!

I’ve written extensively about Digital Transformation for a number of publications including CEO World, the HCL Technologies Blog, and of course Human-Centered Change and Innovation. Please feel free to check out some of my writings to inspire your questions August 31st at 11am EDT!

Join me with your questions Tuesday, August 31, 2021 at 11am EDT on LinkedIn!
(watch for the post and add your question as a comment)

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