Digital Transformation Success – Icebergs and hothouses

I was reading a post from the fantastic Corporate Rebels which reminded me of an article I wrote just under two years ago for Housing Technology magazine. The Corporate Rebels article highlights that leaders need humility and need to engage with the front-line to really understand what's going on with in their business. I think leaders also need to do this authentically and recognise that driving change within the business is not just top down but requires cross organisational collaboration, especially in today's challenging disruptive environment.

My original article describes how bringing a diverse group of people together to collaborate on solving a business problem, with the right tools (design thinking and agile methods), the right motivation (teamwork with a competitive edge) and the right environment (the BT hoothouse) can be the foundation for transformation success. Here's the article ..

Getting started

There’s a humorous little Irish story about a man on a journey in Ireland. Just as he sets off for his destination, he comes to a T-junction but does not know which way to turn. So he stops and asks a local farmer who happens to be standing at the side of the road for directions. But the response confused him – “Ah now, sir, if I was going there, I wouldn’t be starting from here”.

Quite often when organisations set out on their digital transformation path they struggle to make the right start, lack inspiring vision and struggle managing change with their staff. Transformation typically ends up as a series of tactical projects sometimes aligned, sometimes delivering in silos and sometimes without the buy-in of their people who are trying to take-on change whilst doing their day job. They either fail or don’t really deliver the business benefits or outcomes anticipated. Most of us are familiar with the 101 (or however many) reasons why projects fail and when it comes to digital transformation the impact is no different. If it is driven from the top down, with an all singing all dancing 5-year plan without any context for your people’s roles or empathy that new systems and new technology might be overwhelming or seem forced upon them, then you may as well expect the transformation to bomb.

As a recent Garter article on creating powerful organisational change management states “Change happens one step at a time, and the first step is the most critical”. The article goes on to describe an analogy of a DIY home make-over show with driving organisational change. People need to part of the journey – the DIY shows are engaging because viewers become part of that before and after change story. Employees are engaged at the start if they know what they need to do to prepare for tomorrow’s change and can help shape it – DIY essentially.

What’s happening?

Whilst many digital transformation programmes can claim to put the customer first, sometimes bringing in external consultants to map out their customer experience journeys, organisations often forget about another important set of stakeholders – their internal customers, i.e. their staff. Your people are the real experts when it comes to understanding your business and your customers. Without them you’re only touching the tip of the digital transformation success iceberg – this leads to the iceberg of ignorance. In his acclaimed study “The Iceberg of Ignorance”, consultant Sidney Yoshida concluded: “Only 4% of an organisation's front-line problems are known by top management, 9% are known by middle management, 74% by supervisors and 100% by employees.

What about me?

In its 2018 CIO Agenda, Gartner said that culture was the biggest barrier to organisational change with certain behaviours in the workforce scuppering the chance of digital progression. When it comes to digital transformation employees often wonder ‘what’s in it for me’.

They are fearful of what new technology might mean for their jobs and fearful of losing control often with the best interests of their customers at heart. Within the Housing sector, this mind-set challenge has shifted from impact of channel shift on customer services staff to a worry that robots are coming and going to take over our jobs.

CIOs are often challenged with keeping pace with the rate of digital change, the excitement for new disruptive technology but fear they will be unable to get their employees to adopt it.

Innovation needs to be a component part of the organisations’ culture with staff motivated, encouraged and rewarded for coming up with creative ideas to solving business challenges. They need to be in the driving seat and not just passengers on the road to somewhere, or nowhere.

They need to be inspired that whilst technology can change their jobs it opens up new, creative and rewarding opportunities for ways of working. Regular awareness and education on how emerging technology is enhancing not threatening our lives should form a key part of staff training and development.

Burning energy and hothouses

Now that we’ve recognised we need to make the right start, include our people and learn from their expertise we must inspire them, not scare them with new technologies – how do we make this happen?

That’s where the Agile Design Sprint comes in - the perfect start that your programme needs. It can bring your people on board and introduce the possibilities for how innovative technology can solve your very own real-world business problems.

The Agile Design Sprint is an intense multi-day collaborative event that brings together a diverse group from across an organisation with external experts. Collectively they focus on solving a business opportunity by learning and using a range of design thinking and agile methods. The aim is to produce clearly defined innovative solutions to a stated business problem which could be anything from solving a specific business challenge to setting a future organisational vision and strategic plan. The event was hosted in a dedicated facility set up to encourage team-working, collaboration and healthy competition to come up with the winning ideas – the hothouse. That’s the text book description, but it is more than that – it is about inspiring creativity; it is about hard-work but fun; and about bringing together a diverse range of people. Entrepreneurial start-ups or other parties from outside the sector can be brought into the event to stimulate different ways of thinking and problem-solving. The more diversity, the greater the opportunity for innovation.

In November 2017, Optivo engaged in the sprint, bringing together diverse teams from across their recently merged AmicusHorizon and Viridian organisations, with the objective of setting their 2020 vision. The high-level business problem was “how do we create the capacity to build more homes?” But Jane Porter, Optivo COO and Jeanette Alfano, Director of Technology, both also wanted to test how disruptive technology such as IoT, AI and robotics could change their future business model as part of that vision. The important factor was to also achieve this in a way that staff could embrace.

“It was great to get everyone away from the normal office environment and working together in a different way. This has resulted in lots of amazing ideas from our staff that I don’t think we would’ve achieved if they were tasked in the same way whilst doing their day jobs. It would’ve taken months, even years”, says Jane.

We brought in our research experts to talk about IoT, AI and other emerging technology disruption to stimulate creative solution thinking. But not only that, our experts continued to work alongside Optivo staff over the three days to help them with the challenge. Three teams with a mix of Optivo staff, BT experts and other invited participants competed to come up with the winning solution, high level plan and business case which led to some fantastic ideas.

John Barr, Customer Services Director commented: “It’s been great to have so many different people from different departments and the guys from outside the company working together in such a challenging but energising environment. It’s been long days, a lot of effort but a lot of creativity for what we think are fantastic ideas”.

One of the key benefits of the event has been the feedback from many Optivo people who said they will be now be looking at technology in a different way and they can now see practical ways for how technology can be incorporated into their homes to the benefit of both tenants and staff. Taking staff out of the normal environment and allowing them to see and experience new technology as an opportunity and not a threat is critical for successful and visionary digital transformation. As Jane Porter says: “The added value in working with external experts is the huge amounts of knowledge about future innovation and things we might not be aware of to not only trigger ideas for the future but for those ideas to be created by our teams”.

And at the end of the sprint, Jeanette Alfano was keen that those ideas would be taken back into the business and put into practice – “We need to get down and make the ideas happen as our teams have put so much effort into creating our future”. Optivo have kept their hothouse team together and followed through on their commitment, not just with the winning solution but all the ideas put forward – they were all that great.