Digitisation is not Transformation: Lesson Five

This is part of a LinkedIn series by?Dr Keith Dear, Director of Artificial Intelligence Innovation at?Fujitsu Defence. The series covers seven lessons we can learn from transformations that fail.

Lesson 5: # Staff ≠ Status

Currently, incentives encourage leaders to ‘empire build’ maximising their number of staff.

To boast, in annual reports, on CVs or among friends of the number of people under your management or command is both status and a credential.

For years, having more people has usually meant you can get more done, so it’s also a practical concern, not just vanity.

This is a problem if you want to automate tasks in an organisation. There is an incentive and social norm running against your goal.

So digital transformation will be slowed unless you find a way to incentivise the adoption of new technologies, and give leaders something else to boast about. Perhaps finding a measure of ‘human hours or people power’ as a cognitive equivalent of an engine’s ‘horsepower’ to describe the organisation you lead might help shift both the social norm and incentives. But however you do it, that norm must change if you are to succeed.

Previous blogs in the series can be found below:

• Introduction
• Lesson One: Definitions
• Lesson Two: Business Strategy First
• Lesson Three: Design from the outside-in
• Lesson Four: Consider a Chief Incentives Officer

Lesson Six coming soon on the?Fujitsu Defence?LinkedIn page.