Having Outside Perspectives and Increasing Team Diversity Improves Digital Transformation and Avoids the Failure Chasm

How Smart Companies Are Avoiding the Digital Transformation Failure Chasm

If you are leading a digital transformation or a software project, you may have seen the stats that 80% of software transformation fail. Teams,  busy doing what they have always done, might not see a new way of looking at things.

1962, Abraham Kaplan, a Professor of Philosophy, urged scientists to carefully consider their methods for their research. His point was just because certain methods happen to be handy, or one has been trained to look at a problem from a certain perspective -it doesn't mean that method will produce the best outcomes.

Sometimes teams formulate problems and solutions by using techniques they are especially skilled in. In 1966’s Abraham’s Maslow's The Psychology of Science stated, "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." There can be an over-reliance on the familiar or the habit of using the same perspective.

What does this have to do with software development and implementation? José M. Gilgado observed oftentimes software developers and implementers "tend to use the same known tools to do a completely new and different project with new constraints." Why? The “comfort zone” – a state where we don't want to change anything to avoid risk. The issue with using the same perspective every time? We see the problem from only our point of view and get limited results.

The solution? Increase the diversity of perspectives. Otherwise we fall into group-think. Supporting this idea is complexity theory professor Scott E. Page at the University of Michigan. In his book, The Difference, he states on how we code things is our "perspective." He found the power of diversity creates better groups, firms and business outcomes. The bottom-line? Encouraging and working with diverse perspectives.

For example, do you know how pins came to be manufactured? Adam Smith ran one of the first brush factories. Someone saw the bristles could be cut off and made into pins. Most people would have looked at a brush factory and would have seen a brush factory. But the first pin factory was imagined by seeing a diverse perspective - seeing the world differently - seeing the world as a forest of pins - provided the seeds of innovation.

So, what does your team need to stay out of the software implementation failure chasm? Engage and partner with a new set of diverse senior advisors and specialists who are dedicated to your success, who use unrivaled expertise, processes and methods to make your business more agile. Make sure they are the kind of people who thrive on guiding your team so your team learns the key principles to create and sustain change.

And you'll want to choose the most powerful technology platform to be the basis to fuel your transformation for today and far into the future.

With all of that, and a collaborative team culture you can:

• Align key leaders around a digital transformation strategy
• Implement the right framework to move forward
• Create the agility needed in today’s digital environment and
• Adopt new technologies faster to keep pace with change.

Often it is –outside, diverse points of view-- that are just what is required to steer you clear of the failure chasm, and instead have an immersive engagement based on a proven approach that combines people, expertise, culture, AND technology. You'll want to be working with people who are uniquely able to help a business realize their visions and co-create the future by:

Exploring the art of the possible by:

• Leading with outcomes based thinking (OBT begins with defining a desired outcome, no matter how bold or provocative. It’s fundamentally different from problem solving, which looks at the current state and attempts to improve it)
• Inspiring design-led thinking (instead of solving a problem, your team becomes solution-focused and action-oriented towards creating a preferred future)
• Testing new strategies (vs. setting a plan and sticking to it for a year and then realizing they've wasted a year or more on something that isn't going to work; maybe even trying a little experimentation to see if something could even work)
• Sparking agility throughout the organization, igniting the whole culture's motivation in whole new ways, giving them a renewed sense of purpose and outlook on the future and feeling they have the dream job and a reason for showing up other than a paycheck!

Building your digital capabilities by:

• Improving your operating model (and maybe even shifting the revenue model to something you've never considered, but it was the innovation that was needed to grow the company exponentially)
• Growing the competitive advantage; as the Blue Ocean Author's would say, you'll want to create new, uncontested market spaces making the competition irrelevant
• Stimulating breakthrough ideas that transform business as usual and

Creating sustainable transformation by:

• Creating a customer-first culture
• Managing complex changes and
• Continuing the processes required to innovate, iterate, pivot and grow.

How do you find such a group? Look at their DNA. Is it digital? Are they a natively global, mobile, social, cloud, community-oriented company? Are they trusted advisors who put the customer first and teach them to fish? Do they experiment, try new things, iterate and pivot quickly when it doesn't work and tweak things till they hum?

Do other companies desire to be like them and wonder what technology they use to be so innovative and wonder, "How is it, they do what they do?" Are they super customer-focused? As my friend and colleague, Peter Coffee would say, "Do they create a sense of urgency, hope and glory? Or conviction, belief and desire in your team?

Are they all about (and seriously about this, it's not just some words on a website or a brochure) connection, collaboration and innovation?" If you want to learn more about how one group guides business through digital transformation, here's more info on that! Here’s to your team’s success in digital transformation!

@DrNatalie Petouhoff, VP, Program Executive, Innovation and Transformation Center

VP, Program Executive, Innovation and Transformation Center, Salesforce.com