How do top transformation executives improve success?

Highlights of my presentation at the @Future of Financial Services, Sydney 2024 organised by FST Media, addressing Senior Transformation Executives, in partnership with Thoughtworks. Thanks to Manu Iyer and @Wayne Te Paa from Thoughtworks for inviting me.

My key learning from designing and building TMRW by UOB is that transformation must be holistic and rarely succeeds if not. What does holistic mean? It means adapting and managing the 19 drivers (within the circle) you see in the diagram above.

It’s much harder than it looks, as every dimension and element shown interacts and affects each other.? So, as senior transformation executives, you must manage these interactions.? Which ultimately results in right trade-offs, sequencing and iterations to perfect and improve your probability of success. This is the pivotal senior transformation executive(s) role, and, in my view, this task cannot be delegated downwards to the working level.

Few organisations are managing complex transformations holistically.? So, we should not be surprised that so many fail. So, where do we start if we want to master a holistic approach?

The 1st task is improving your ability to evaluate ideas for innovation. In large incumbent organisations, t’s very hard to discern what idea is desirable, viable and feasible to get to that sweet spot called innovation. The 2nd is to train top management to view the transformation as a system. As executives, we have grown up honing great powers of analysis, but most organisations are made up of complex interrelated components. Transformation requires breadth and synthesis (as well as analysis). When most operating executives are introduced to such a holistic approach, they often say “well this makes a lot of sense”. Well, then why don’t more companies adopt such an approach?

The answer lies in the distractions we have, the overdrive for easy answers to complex problems, the self-imposed lack of time and hubris, internal infighting that is often passive aggressive, etc. Constraints also distort our view of priorities, e.g. do we solve the spaghetti of legacy systems at the back or do we resolve the poor experience at the front. Often tempting to do it all is just that - tempting but usually results in overly complex initiatives that fail before they start. And it may just be that incumbent executives seldom need to adopt a holistic approach in their day-to-day, business as usual activities, and so face challenges when they need to, when they must transform.

TMRW by UOB was the most complex initiative in my 30-year career with more than 12 different streams of work, 500 new features and 1M lines of code at launch, multi-national in nature and multi-million in investment, exacerbated by the complexities of operating across ASEAN. How did we avoid the low transformation success rates? ?

By first appreciating that not all transformations are similar, and can be categorised into breakthrough, experiential, transformative and insufficient value (to understand this I greater detail, refer to https://tinyurl.com/y978p755 - another LinkedIn article) or https://medium.com/@dennis_47963/what-business-are-you-in-7075192625a9 for more information.

In my view, building a digital bank in markets with high standards, is experiential, which meant, design and attention to small details would be paramount. There would be no 1 or 2 things you can do to produce a 5x improvement in performance versus price. You're lucky if you can find 10-15 pet peeves to fix.

Understanding these fundamentals go to the heart of strategic design, not just design thinking (which is an approach within the Methodology driver and distinct from Design, a separate driver in the capabilities dimension). This allowed me to get on the right footing from the start.? If I need to boil TMRW's success down to one thing – it’s about taking the time to achieve great strategic design through a holistic approach.? This allowed us to create a simple, but powerful CVP coupled with a path-to-profit.

Most transformation soundbites, e.g. fail fast, go enterprise agile, haven’t improved success rates.? Why??Because they are the antithesis of a holistic approach.? Moving too fast is the enemy of design, often resulting in poor experience. Enterprise agility, often degenerates into "just delegate and let the working level run the show", and you just "tackle their obstacles when they arise". But what happens when you send the most junior staff to a bank’s (or any large complex company’s) process discussions?? It quickly turns into a mess! Fail Fast and agility have their value.? But they are not the shortcuts to success that we wish they could be.

As top transformation executives, we are not asking the right questions that address the necessary dimensions and drivers and the related sequencing, trade-offs, iterations and interconnections. You don’t need to have all the answers, your team is there for this.? Don’t fall into the fallacy of thinking you do.? You just need to ask the right questions.

We rationalise that we don’t have the time, we are too busy. But our ability to discern ideas from innovation and to thread and manage the entirety of the complexity of transformation is, I believe, vital to large corporate transformation success. So, if you want to improve your organisation’s odds, first transform yourself towards taking a holistic approach to transformation.

For more information on how to adopt a holistic approach, refer to Driving Digital Transformation: Lessons from building the first ASEAN digital bank (https://tinyurl.com/3hyuatst from Amazon Australia) and A holistic approach to Transformation and Innovation in a complex world. Also available at all leading bookstores (https//www.alldigitalfuture.com/store).