Context switching and the Human Factor in Digital Transformation.

When I decided to leave my job at Microsoft Sweden (2010), and move to the Corporate Headquarters, I signed up for a role that I did not really want: I became the owner of role strategy for a couple of job roles that I knew very well and had some mixed feelings about at the time. The job sounded quite boring and highly administrative to top things off, but it was a foot in the door at the headquarters of one of the largest, most impactful businesses in the world… And that dream, to move to Redmond, was the reason I had joined Microsoft in the first place (2007).

I was practically hired to solve a very concrete problem: Our Engagement Managers around the world were extremely unhappy, the people turnover was high, and everything indicated that it was caused by a badly designed job description and unreasonable expectations.

When I left my job in Stockholm, I was an Engagement Manager myself, and I had all the scars and bruises. I had weeks on weeks that turned into month after month, of working 150-200% of my FTE hours and I suffered from multiple symptoms of stress and exhaustion. My personal life was suffering, and my relationship was close to breaking. Needless to say, I was reluctant for personal reasons, as well as professional reasons (boring job)!

It turned out I was wrong. Very wrong.

This job was one of the most interesting jobs I have ever had, and it laid the foundation for so much knowledge, that I am still using on an almost daily basis. It helped me grow as a person, accelerate my career, but most of all it made me appreciate the value of insights, data and analytics. But it also made me do a lot of additional research, from books on time management to technical papers on the practical implications and limitations of a CPU when it is forced to context switch a lot. It turns out there are many similarities in how the human brain and a CPU function, or dysfunction, when they are forced to constantly multi-task (or context switch).

The answer had been there all the time. It wasn’t that the role was too hard, or the tasks expected of the people in the role, too complicated. There were just too many tasks and too many processes. And even more importantly, there were too many stakeholders expecting too many things at once, causing constant interruptions.

So, when a couple of my old trusted advisors* posted an article on the negative effects of context-switching again here on LinkedIn, just this week, it got me thinking about this topic again. But this time I started asking myself different sets of questions:

If this is such a (fairly) well/known fact and so many books have been written on the topic, e.g. The Myth of Multitasking (Dave Crenshaw, 2008), then why haven’t we done anything about it still?

On the contrary, most organisations and corporations are constantly increasing the demand on their teams to do even more things in an endlessly growing number of tools – be they social platforms, administrative tools or content management systems. You name them – we all got them!

Wouldn’t it be clever if instead of having the people access all these different tools, to leverage all the available (and often unavailable) data in order to complete a number of different tasks and activities, instead the data would come to them – when, where and how they needed it?

It would be. And it can be done with the technology we have available in most corporations and organisations today – so what is stopping us? Time? Money? Lack of insights or knowledge? Or just that we haven’t come as far yet, as to understand the importance of people and the human being as part of our technology?

That is where I believe we need to put a lot more focus when we discuss “Digital Transformation” … On the Human Factor.

More to come on this topic – as always, all the work referenced here, as well as the opinions expressed, are mine and mine alone and should not be interpreted as a reflection on any of my employers. Past, current or future.

Thanks for reading! I look forward to your comments and the conversations I know we’ll be having ??

//Rebecka

*) As I always said that credit should be given where credit is due... Thanks @Maruxa Cabezudo and @Jesus Serrano, for inspiring me to start writing again.