Edition 8 - Everyone wants to be a beautiful butterfly.

Hey folks.

Been a busy week at 11:HQ - I spoke yesterday at the Finovate conference in London as their opening keynote. It was a real honour albeit getting up early enough to get there was a bit of a shock-to-the-system commute! Great fun though.

Thankfully the 2-hour train trip into London gave me some time to squeeze in putting this edition together which I hope you enjoy.?

This week I’m double-clicking on something I hear from the industry a lot when we are speaking to banks and insurer boards about what they want to be through their transformations: Everyone wants to be a beautiful butterfly.

Everyone wants to be a beautiful butterfly.

I get pulled into various conversations with senior folks at banks and insurers. It’s the part of the job that I enjoy the most and really it’s par for the course with what we do as a business at 11:FS.?

Sometimes I'm brought to scare them a little, sometimes to let them understand where the industry is going. Sometimes it's because someone smart in an organisation isn't being listened to so get drafted in like some sort of fintech plumber to try and unblock the situation and get everything moving again.

Often what you are trying to gauge in the opening gambit with the members of the board or senior leadership, is where they are on their journey. Do they get it? Do they get that it’s hard? Does their board get it? Are they digital tourists or are they really in this to make the types of changes that they really need to thrive and survive? What have they been previously told?

The truth is often somewhere in the middle. Some will, some won’t. Some think they have it when they haven’t, and some think it’s all a bunch of nonsense. More of this in a later edition.

One such engagement went like this…?

Recently I was brought in to talk to the board of a UK bank and got about 20 minutes into explaining my views on the industry and where I think it’s going when a NED of that particular organisation stopped me and in front of everyone there said the following:

“Our problem is quite simple. We don’t really understand anything that you’re talking about. Don’t get me wrong we hear the words and understand that it’s important and we get that we need to make change happen, real change, not the surface level things because we are a caterpillar that keeps going into a chrysalis and coming out again a caterpillar. We are not changing anything significant but we are making ourselves feel better through millions of spending and busying ourselves. But we are still a caterpillar after all is said and done.”

Stop. Read that again. That might be the best summary of many organisations’ digital transformation efforts that you may have ever heard. Seriously. That’s some MBA level, write a whole book on this, teach that to the kids, level thing. Cite this.

What that NED hit on so eloquently was two things in my opinion:

Firstly, most people are just trying to make themselves feel better rather than achieving the outcome that they really need to in order to make the outcomes different.??

Sadly, unlike the butterflies, financial services organisations don’t transform just by waiting. It takes huge amounts of bravery, honesty, hard work and talent with a handful of luck thrown in to make that level of success happen.

It also requires holding yourself accountable for what is working and isn’t, and altering to create the impact you want.

Secondly, and a very sad thing to reflect on, despite investment in digital for well over a decade the ROI that could have been seen from that scale of investment is just not there. People’s transformations are being hitched to ROI metrics that no one is measuring well enough, in order to track the resulting change and whether or not it’s sufficient enough against the path needed.

These failures are just layering more and more operational costs into businesses rather than stripping and streamlining out superfluous costs. Not a great thing for the business as a whole.

As caterpillars, the banks are brimming with potential but I’m reminded of this amazing quote from American poet, Maya Angelou that I think encapsulates the point that the NED was making:

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”

If financial services organisations want to be great, or even just good at digital, they have to admit that the transformation that they must go through will in fact transform them, and only if they stick vehemently to that course.

That course is hard work, requires many to rethink what they hold true all in the name of progress and in order to be able to take flight.?

Hope you enjoyed that. Now fly lovely butterflies.???????

If you did enjoy then please like, share and subscribe :)

See you next time.

Dx