Digital leadership is key for achieving digital success!

Even though a study from Harvard Business Review shows that the agriculture sector is the least digitalised out of a total of 22 analysed sectors, it has become clear that digital transformation is picking up momentum and disrupting today’s food production. [1]

“The agriculture sector is the least digitalized out of a total of 22 analysed sectors”

One challenge remains the same across all sectors; digital leaders are few and far between, and not well understood in many companies today. Only about 3% of 3,100 companies in an SAP study confirmed that they have initiated complete digital transformation across their organisation; and the rest has some serious catching up to do. [2]

Common for those who has embarked on their digital journey is that they are investing in digital leadership to spearhead their digital transformation. So, what kind of leadership skills are required to manage the challenges and opportunities that comes from the unavoidable digitalisation in the food production industry?

Skill 1: Fundamental Leadership Transformation

(Digital leaders look at themselves and embrace a fundamental change of their own leadership style)

Leadership today and in the future is more about the challenges’ leaders are facing than the theory of how to be a good leader [3], and in relation to digital leaders this entails that they master – not only – the strategic view, but also an innovation and organisational view when addressing digitalisation:

· Strategic view: Have a strategic understanding of the business segment they operate in

· Innovation view: Understand the shifts (behavioural, economic, social) that new technology drivers are creating

· Organisational view: Understand how to implement digital change in their organisation

And as a mean to being successful in driving digital change, the digital leader needs to think, act and react differently in the future. [4]

Skill 2: Digital Fluent Workforce

(Digital leaders promote digital competences across the workforce)

As we get increased access to improved data-driven insights, we also need to improve our own skills to take full advantage of the added business process transparency and traceability.

A successful digital leader encourages all employees to develop their digital competencies. The more digitally literate a workforce, the greater their potential to contribute to the company’s overall value creation.

Some of the skills that has shown to help create or take advantage of digital technologies include analytical thinking, global operating, strategic thinking, leadership, innovation, decision making etc.

Skill 3: Willingness to Innovate

(Digital leaders accept risk and initiate innovation projects)

Accessing the potential that data offers requires the willingness to experiment, including accepting loss of control by relying on what new technology offers. That means that digital leaders need to embrace risk, and adopt a fail-fast, agile and resilient approach to investments into next-gen technologies; in other words, integrate digital innovation into the company’s DNA.

“Digital leaders invest more heavily in next-gen technologies”

Digital leaders invest more heavily in next-gen technologies: [2]

Skill 4: Promote Collaboration

(Digital leaders break down siloes and share knowledge to increase collaboration)

Digitalisation concerns all parts of the organisation as well as external partners across the production value chain.

Many ambitious and promising digital collaborations have simply failed because it hasn’t been clear to the different parties “what is in it for them”? Just as it is human nature to think about how you can benefit from a relationship, don’t forget to think about what drives your counterpart to work with you? If the collaboration isn’t built on a win-win business case for both parties, it will eventually fail.

“If you use garbage data, then you only get garbage results”

Finally, one of the main collaboration challenges is the exchange of information. As an example, linked to raising livestock; if you feed a broiler chicken low quality feed, you will likely produce a low-quality product. In the digital world; if you use garbage data, then you only get garbage results out, which make collaboration adoption difficult and foster incorrect business decisions. [5]

Skill 5: Focus on Actionable Insights, not Technology

(Digital leaders don’t get blindsided by new technology, but understand that people and identifying real problems drives digital transformation, and not technology)

Perhaps the biggest step to crossing the digital divide concerns the issue of data science and understanding how to transform various technologies into actionable insights that improve business performance through data-driven decisions. A digital leader can look through all the technology hype and identify the most relevant technologies to solve a specific business challenge.

“A digital leader can look through all the technology hype”

For example, predicting the broiler slaughter weight is important to minimize downgrades and giveaway in the slaughter house, and for the prediction to be actionable it is – as a minimum – required to be accurate, consistent and timely. What is less important is the actual Internet of Things infrastructure, big data and cloud platform, multiple datapoints and machine learning techniques chosen to provide the individual slaughter weight prediction; these conditions are merely means to reach the end goal – producing an actionable insight that enable the user to select the right broiler batch for slaughter at the right time.

Skill 6: Commercialising Digital Solutions

(Digital leaders understand how to build business models that convert data streams into profit streams)

“Data is only truly valuable if it can be transformed into actionable insights that creates additional value to the user”

Everyone knows that data can be valuable; just as Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Amazon etc. as proven to all of us. In the same way farmers and growers have been told that their data is valuable too, so they are of course looking to get paid for it. However, data is only truly valuable if it can be transformed into actionable insights that creates additional value to the user. So data in itself is not particular valuable; today we are “swimming” in data stored without purpose and if these data are not utilized they will slowly turn into what is known as ”data swamps” (inaccurately stored data without context, resulting in the inability to analyse and exploit the data efficiently).

A digital leader is therefore concerned about building business models to commercialise data. There are currently 6 main methods to convert data streams into profit streams split between 2 main approaches:

Summary

High-performing leaders today need different skills and expertise to address the challenges and opportunities from digitalization, yet most companies have not moved rapidly enough to develop digital leaders, promote young leaders, and build new leadership models.

As digital transformation starts to sweep across the food production sector, leadership capabilities are in general not keeping pace, and companies need to build a new breed of innovative thinking, agile, digital-ready leaders. [3]

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More information, questions or comments

Thank you for reading this article "Quick guide to UNs 17 Sustainable Development Goals”. For more article please visit me on LinkedIn to find topics covering:

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Special thanks

Special thanks to below sources of inspiration and references:

1. Source: Harvard Business Review: Which Industries Are the Most Digital (and Why)?

2. Source: SAP: 4 ways leaders set themselves apart

3. Source: Deloitte University Press: Global human capital trends 2017 

4. Source: Forbes: How to be a digital leader

5. Source: Ernst & Young: Digital agriculture data solutions