Digital Transformation, A Human Pursuit

Over the past two years, the global pandemic has forced businesses to rethink and accelerate their digital strategy. That strategy should not only focus on solutions, but also on the people who will experience the transformation, and how it will affect them, writes Arthur Shectman, CEO and Founder of Elephant Ventures 

The current market exists in a different transformational landscape than before. Businesses have always needed to transform, but when you look at some of the executive surveys about demand forecasting for digital transformation services, there’s four or five times the demand for digital transformation services or some type of lean product development support. Businesses are now forced to accelerate their transformation agenda because of the pandemic- businesses that could have afforded to go slow and take three to five years to transform, are now at risk of their competitors pulling years ahead based on effective and immediate transformation efforts.

The emergence of this competitive threat materialized  where certain businesses that were historically in a very competitive landscape, were also really well positioned to transform much faster than their peers. When you boil that down it equates to pressure to digitally transform much faster which means there’s a ton more headcount supporting transformation that is needed. Software engineers, data engineers, product development people that understand transformation, Agile coaches, enterprise agility coaches, all kinds of things become necessary in greater numbers and at a higher speed than before. Amidst all that, the fundamental nature of employment and work has also shifted to a point where remote is considered the new normal. Employees no longer are locked into a death march transformation job with the local company that is the only one they can commute to. They can earn a living remotely through other companies who are going to need the same service and their skillset, and they can now have a much greater choice and control over the environment they choose to work within. 

The old project structures where people were doing digital transformations and building up several hundred people in a specific central location to execute a large-scale enterprise transformation that was going to take five years are gone. That’s not how it’s working these days. Companies are having to retool their recruiting and HR functions to give much more consideration to work-life balance, and how a company can best care for the engagement of its people.

The Human Factor

For me, when talking to “the Phunts” (our internal staff) about what we do, I try to rally the team around the concept of  increments of business value that we deliver to our clients. Everyone focuses on the idea that the next increment of work we’re going to do, must attach to some incremental business value. This helps us to track emerging client needs and to the Agile Transformations that are afoot at most clients. In one sense, transformational alignment has become more agile, more iterative, more incremental, because of the pace and the volatility of direction we are seeing. To succeed in the environment, you need to adopt smaller increments of value delivery that are much more rapid and you also have to have very gifted architects and long-range planners that are making sure that those increments stack up in a meaningful direction over time. The second thing I tell our staff is that ½ of our product is the experience that our clients have when they work with us. That’s why I place a lot of importance in the morale of our combined teams, as this feeds directly into their overall engagement, execution and performance.

There are many studies on how high-morale teams are also high-performing teams. Whether that’s causal or correlated is up for debate, but you can’t really debate the idea that if people are enjoying the experience of the transformation, and they feel secure, and they feel that they have trust and empowerment to do what they need to do and they have the security and psychological safety to speak up about what’s wrong, then you’re going to get better outcomes. I believe part of the new dimensions of work are really about caring for the collective experience, and then creating psychological safety so that people can speak up when things are going wrong without fear of retribution or being fired. Without that, they’ll leave and find a better place to work. 

Transformational leaps

As transformation consultants, we’ll talk about ourselves as “pole vaulters of the can’t”. There is a line of reasoning that looks at mature companies that have legacy systems most in need of digital transformation. They have evolved that way for a reason: their behaviors, their structure, and their rigidity is around protecting shareholder value and so often those folks have a culture that is risk-averse. Their job is to tell you what you can’t do to protect the safety and integrity of the existing business. In transformation initiatives, you have to confront that culture head-on and figure out ways of discussing possibilities. When people feel they’re at risk, they tend to make irrational, fear-based decisions and it can be very difficult to defuse that reaction. The ability to take risks is paramount to the project’s success.

With all that in mind, transformation and innovation are continual skills that must become part of your culture and your competitive arsenal. That said, if you create a project to achieve a certain business objective, or a certain structural objective, then it definitely should have an end. These endings are important both for morale, and celebrating achievement, as well as to take stock of current process and practice, and to offer a ‘reset’ or a ‘new start’ to make process or cultural changes. That regular opportunity to celebrate, reflect, and realign is KEY to ongoing transformation efforts and team health.  I would argue that while these endpoints are somewhat subjective there are reasonable places to insert them. After a minimum functional transformational execution, the business value “clearing price” has been met and beyond that, you get to decide how much more time and budget incrementally is worth investing in that particular direction. While you can ‘Keep Calm and Transform On’ it is still very important for team morale to declare victories along that journey.  

Alternatively, before that clearing price is reached, you haven’t launched enough business value for it to be recognized by the business and your project is at risk of being a failure. After that major value delivery is reached,  at some point, you do stop and you go into maintenance mode on some system or a process change that you were transforming. That said, I don’t think we live in times where you can say: “the digital transformation is completely done”, or “our innovation program is finished”. I think you have an ongoing need to drive system efficiency and work toward system-wide new market capture. So, in that sense, your innovation program is much more about continual innovation and transformative renewal as a cornerstone to your culture, your practices and your people’s mindset. .

Arthur Shectman is CEO and Founder of Manhattan-based software innovation and digital transformation consultancy Elephant Ventures.

To learn more, please elephantventures.com.