Do you pause to reframe?

We at #BankingonKarMa took a break as we were in a time loop with similar ideas coming to us which we had already written about. The running joke between us was that we are living the same experience as Phil Murray from one of our favorite movies “Groundhog Day”, except that we were not waking up in Cherry Tree Inn listening to “I got you babe” on the clock radio ?? in the town of Punxsutawney. Our blogging “north star” Leda Glyptis helped us in her own way. “Why don’t you write about Pausing “, she tweeted to us.

Time trail cycling, the French course, Contre Le Montre (literally meaning race against the watch) a form of competition in which individual cyclists or teams are sent out at intervals to cover a specified distance on a road course. The contestant with the fastest time for the distance wins. Kristin Armstrong is the most decorated U.S. women's cyclist of all time and the best time-trialist in sports history. Kristin said & we quote

“It's not only moving that creates new starting points. Sometimes all it takes is a subtle shift in perspective, an opening of the mind, an intentional pause and reset, or a new route to start to see new options and new possibilities.”

This got us discussing, so if someone racing against time needs to pause, don’t we all need it then? If you are wondering is this a blog about #bankingonKarMa rationalizing their lack of discipline? It is not or maybe it is ?? … Please bear with us…

Pausing provides an opportunity to reframe the context. Given, we were discussing about people & context, the discussion steered towards banking transformation as with every other #bankingonKarMa discussion. ?As Sudhir (@sudkes) tweeted earlier & we quote,

“Most of the transformation is figuring the people part & the money part”

If only transformation execution was as easy as tweeting ??.?We will park the money part for now given our obsession with viability is well known. Velocity is table stakes in the digital world however we have seen velocity only led train wrecks in transformations. Many a times with the working teams & transformation leaders being the collateral damage apart from the loss of expensive dollars.

With our ongoing dialogues with our customers, we realize that majority of the organizations understand the need to organize as platforms & obsess about customer experience. They also acknowledge the need for convergence of business technology teams with autonomy & accountability. Balancing this with the velocity needed to thrive is the challenge. In our experience there is a gap between people understanding & accepting the new ways of working as people always don’t respond to logic. Even now, People believe digital will rob them off their power & hence their skills will no longer be relevant. People do believe Digital will overshadow individual contributions. One of the Chief customer experience officer we work with told us an interesting story; there was sudden spike in customer service complaints for accounts opened digitally, on analyzing the data they discovered that branches had turned away customer(s) from servicing their request(s) given the accounts were opened online albeit leveraging the same tech platform which was used by the branches to open accounts. She then went on to add that they had a re-look at the KPI’s to work out an incentive model for the branches to service the customer(s) who were acquired digitally. She also narrated how she went about addressing the span of control issues between the head of branch banking & head of digital customer acquisition.?

Moving away from managing people to managing outcomes is a continuous journey & success or failure is determined by leaders helming transformation. Do they continuously pause & reframe their problem statements aligned to internal organizational response & driven by external context?

Phil in Groundhog Day summarized the predicament faced by leaders helming transformation with:

“When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.”

We will end with our favorite dialog from the Groundhog Day

"Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn't one today."

We believe this aptly emphasizes the need to “pause & reframe” on an ongoing basis during any transformation whether it is personal or enterprise wide!

Cheers,

Shankar & Mala

PS: Views are ours and only ours, whilst we draw a lot of inspiration from our conversations and dialog with people!!!! A big Thank you to you all know who you are!!!!