Human Shaped Digital Transformation

For a lot of organisations Digital Transformation is a synonym for Digital Adoption, which isn’t strictly true. Of course doing digital without adopting or at least adapting digital is a nonsense but actually the biggest part of any transformation project isn't about digital it's changing the way people think and work. That’s especially true when it comes to the decision makers.

Here’s a truism. When you start on any transformation project, the first thing you have to realise is that some stakeholders, possibly the majority, don’t really want you to transform anything. That’s not to say they don’t think change is good, oh no, no, no. In fact, most stakeholders demand change, they demand better performance and new revenue streams and the kind of improved, faster, easier, processes that only digital technology can produce … but they demand it happens to somebody else.

Even if the owner of the company has bought you in personally and at great cost, even if you’ve a proven track record of delivering effective change and increased revenue, the sheer inertia of most organisations to accepting change is incredible. The desire to maintain the status quo is the anchor that a lot of stakeholders place their worth upon and woe betide anyone who wants to change that. In the whole of transformation methodology is there a scarier phrase than “Why change it? It’s worked for centuries.”?

There is a reason why the term ‘change aversion’ is in common usage, for most businesses change is:

• Scary, what if it doesn’t work, why take the chance?
•  A fad to mess with processes or systems that already work (definitions of ‘work’ will differ from person to person)
• A challenge to their expertise in and ownership of a process
• Expensive, in time and resources, for an unproven return on investment
• Unfair, targeting the wrong people, if they (definitions of ‘they’ will differ from person to person) would just change their way of working everyone would benefit

In fact it’s not unusual to find people in positions of influence who are not just averse but actually hostile to change. It’s bad enough when you start looking at an organisation with legacy backend systems that were old last century or using analogue systems in a digital environment, but dealing with legacy thinking can be even worse. That’s the real drain on resources.

Here’s another truism. For the most part, the people who don’t want change are the ones holding the purse strings. HiPPOs don’t generally suffer from the problems that legacy systems and legacy thinking produce. they’re seldom on the production side of things where the impact is most acute, but get down and dirty with end users and the appetite for change is usually overwhelming. Change seldom works from the bottom up, though, so if you can’t get the management team on-board you might as well give the money back and go find some place that is ready and willing for change, just for your own sanity.

Challenging a decision maker who refuses to change, is like doing an emergency stop in the fast lane of the motorway – no one is coming away happy! So don't do it, don't make challenges, make them into allies not enemies. So how do you do that? How do you get these immovable objects rolling? Well there are some general rules of thumb you can follow.

1.      Get stakeholders involved from word one is identifying problems. Not solutions, problems, and get them out of their silos to do it. Actually this is often easier than it sounds, it goes back to that argument that ‘they’ need to change, offering a critic a chance to safely air their criticisms is a powerful incentive. The reverse is true as well, phrase it as a ‘problem shared is a problem halved’ and as long as it’s not personal, most people will take it in good stead after all if they’re good at their job they probably already know something isn’t working, they just haven’t had the support to fix it. Give them the chance to do just that and they'll jump at it.

Here’s where it can get difficult though, get the end user in – well you’d expect a UX to say that wouldn't you– but it’s very hard for stakeholders to defend their cherished preconceptions when different sets of end users are repeatedly tearing them apart. This recognition and rationalising of problems creates common ground and is the start of building a bridge between stakeholders and users. It’s not the whole bridge but it’s a good start.

2.      Identify and prioritise the big problems. I’m a nice person, kind to small animals and give to charity etc. but there are times when I could cheerfully spend a whole day slapping people who use terms such as ‘low hanging fruit’ and ‘quick wins’ as if they’re always good things. They’re not. They have their place after the big problems are sorted but if your mechanic is wiping the wing mirrors and polishing the paintwork on your car and ignoring the fact that the engine is lying in a puddle of oil underneath the car… they’re not really helping. Getting buy-in for this isn’t easy, big problems are scary and everyone has their own little pet peeves which they want fixing first, but you’re building a consensus on priorities and that too is difficult to argue with.

3.      Understand and show the full journey, from brand touch point to fulfilment. Not just the digital journey, not just the part of the journey where the end user is a customer, the whole thing from creating brand awareness to procurement and supply chains through the storage and consumer endpoints, everywhere and anywhere that humans get involved. If you concentrate just on digital you'll end up with a Procurement System that feeds seamlessly into your shiny new IMS system and is fully integrated with a LMS AI that updates documentation using the data being processed to provide the kind of quality learning materials for end users that make the angels sing. Then it all grinds to halt because suppliers are working to a different set of logistics to you, and nobody has considered the hands-on fulfilment process so there’s no warehouse space, not enough people to get the stock from the warehouse to the customer, and when there are there is no way of collating offline sales and online sales into a single user account so nobody really has clue as to what’s going where and why and to who. Seeing the whole human dominated journey is paramount, digital is the facilitator of product and service for people, without people your lovely shiny expensive digital solution is going nowhere.

4.      Now you’ve found what needs to change, where and why and in what order, you can start finding solutions. Express the nature and value of the proposed digital solution working with its analogue counterpart, and how that journey eliminates the problems that everyone has seen and agreed need fixing on the journey. Now, (and this is important) tell the end users what you’re doing too. A simple “We’ve listened and these are the changes we’re making:” along with a timescale and reason for the changes will do it. This simple communication technique removes so much user antipathy, you may be surprised. This will be the final section of the bridge needed to bring end users and business together.

5.      Get everyone involved with testing the damn thing! Not just to see if the code has bugs, test with real end users to see if the entire journey is actually usable, useful and valuable if it isn’t … fix it. Just as it’s important to get stakeholder and user input in to identifying problems and solutions it’s just as important to get them involved with seeing the solutions evolving and being validated.

Is it that easy?

No, of course not. Things will go wrong, people will still defend the indefensible, budgets will change, management will change, products will change, arbitrary and unrealistic timelines will appear without consultation, new solutions will appear in the market that will make your solutions look clunky in comparison, differing perceptions of Agile, or UX will skew the project timelines in fact adoption may still not happen because of a whole lot of other variables, but it stands a much better chance of happening if you transform people’s ways of thinking before attempting to transform the digital systems and processes they work with.