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TRANSCRIPT
Live the transformation you want to be Why the key to successful digital transformation lies not in capabilities, but in mobilising the hearts and minds of those involved.
Ask any CEO, CTO or CMO about how they intend to deliver the digital transformation of their business and they will more than likely reel off a list of technologically led capabilities from their roadmap. Too few of them will talk about the human value or meaning they seek to create within their organisation. It is this fundamental misunderstanding of digital transformation, which prevents organisations and their employees from realizing the true transformative value of digital. This paper proposes a new four-‐step framework for business leaders seeking to deliver meaningful and enduring digital transformation, the basis of which is the need for creating an on-‐going dialogue within the organization driven by internal storytelling.
Figure 1: Four-‐step framework for leaders to help embrace new ways of ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’:
Step 1: seeing through complexity
Step 2: collaboratively aligning for success
Step 3: embracing a culture of “wrong thinking”
Step 4: unleashing your internal storytelling
Step 1: Seeing through complexity Today one of the key constants is change. New, disruptive digital trends emerge daily to disrupt consumers’ behavior and the way businesses operate. Understanding how to successfully capitalize on this is increasingly key to survival and ultimately, success. It is no wonder then, that R&D spending by the Global Innovation 1,000 companies reached $638bn in 2013, the highest level ever recorded.
However, despite such levels of investment, new research from Capgemini/MIT suggests that two thirds of global enterprise companies are failing to evolve digitally. This is because the instinct of many is to create new tech capabilities and features, which ultimately only serves to magnify complexity and paralyze organisations from advancing. The less obvious but more effective route to digital transformation is through an organisation’s people. Empowering people to transform the business should start with adopting ‘visualization’ to bring to life abstract concepts. This builds common and coherent ways of seeing the world you are trying to transform and avoids any over reliance on words alone, which – with their multiple interpretations – can quickly create false assumptions. At SapientNitro we embrace visualization from the moment we map out the ecosystem of touchpoints in the world our clients want to transform (see figure 2). Step 2: Collaboratively aligning for success Whilst visualization helps to reduce complexity, it is just the start of a much greater challenge for any digital transformation project: alignment.
Figure 3: Visualsing touchpoints (ecosystem maps)
Figure 2: Increased annual R&D spend
Often evolving in an additive manner, department-‐by-‐department, product-‐by-‐product, the siloed nature of most businesses can be an insurmountable barrier to digital transformation, which requires multi-‐disciplinary teams to work together. As such, transformation leaders need to find systemic ways to engage and align diverse sets of stakeholders. Collaboration is in SapientNitro’s DNA and shapes our unique approach to the ‘discovery’ phase of any transformation project. Fostering co-‐creation upfront enables us to understand and align around what is important. Far from relying solely on analytical research, we engage stakeholders in a heavy cocktail of observations and insights that are expertly mixed in facilitated environments. Leveraging non-‐traditional creative techniques, we help our clients collectively shape where they want to play and how they can win.
A key step for any transformation project is to define its vision. SapinetNitro does this with a technique that aligns disparate sets of stakeholders through slowly building up the values of their vision one post-‐it note at a
time, before organizing and prioritizing into meaningful themes. We call this the ‘newspaper headline exercise’ and its simplicity enables stakeholders to use tangible outcomes to assemble the vision. Step 3: Embrace a culture of “wrong thinking” A key challenge of transformation is that it inevitably deals with the future, and the future is desperately hard to fathom. It is hard to understand what customer needs will be and therefore what requirements and capabilities your transformation should deliver.
The path to discovery is, and should be, full of mistakes and false leads. Some of the most transformative moments are born out of ‘wrong thinking’ – the kind of original ideas that only
Figure 4: Co-‐creating visions (making physical talismans of the future)
Figure 5: Embracing lots of ideas (divergent thinking)
come to life when we dare to be different, keep an open mind and have no fear of failure. You can’t do things that are radically different if you are afraid of making mistakes or follow convention wisdom. Market research and analytical thinking are useful tools but only inventiveness and abductive thinking can help organisations leap into the future. Nothing is more prized at SapientNitro than the willingness and ability to generate new ideas, take chances and fail fast in the pursuit of transformative innovations. Our co-‐creation workshops build on the principle, “the best way to get a good idea is to have lots of ideas” and use forced association, ‘what if?’ statements, with other non-‐traditional creative techniques to achieve just that. Once myriad ideas are generated, participants self select and prioritize the best. The second principle our transformation process is built upon is “a culture of making”. Whether it is developing conceptual ideas or testing solutions, our process puts ‘making’ at its heart. It is only through prototyping and experimentation that we can begin to understand the future, which customer needs we can solve, what solution requirements are needed and which associated capabilities will be required. Anything else is just guessing. Step 4: Unleashing your internal storytelling
The quality of collaboration within a team is key but so is a team’s interaction with the rest of the organisation; especially key stakeholders such as board members, budget controllers and staff on the front line, who are the most likely to feel the effects of any transformation. As such, the communication coming from the team is just as important as the communication within it.
Figure 7: Using video as a cultural prototype to inspire employees
Figure 6: learning through doing (prototyping)
Bringing brands to life through storytelling is at the heart of what SapientNitro does. Leaders must learn to embrace ‘cultural prototypes’ to communicate their vision and plan for transformation to the whole organisation, and thereby win the hearts and minds of employees. SapientNitro has a dedicated process deigned to achieving just this. Our ThirtySix process involving creative workshops for stakeholder groups generates video content of the vision, along with posters, PowerPoint presentations and seminars, which can be used to involve and inspire the whole organisation. Conclusion Ultimately, the most successful organisations are able to combine both an authentic and a human approach to their digital transformation. Their ‘purpose’ and an open and collaborative corporate culture, combine to inspire the whole organisation to create meaningful value for customers. Peter Drucker once said “your first job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help orchestrate the energy of those around you”. The four-‐step framework can help guide leaders to do just that by empowering all employees to embrace and live the transformational change desired.
Figure 8: Using infographic
posters to communicate change