Innovation Culture

In our previous article Data Analytics Challenges , I wrote about the challenges that the Data Analysis areas have. There, I told you that my biggest surprise was that after almost 75% of the entire agenda, they began to touch on topics related to clients and only on 2 occasions.

As in any Digital Transformation process, the main cause of failure is organizational culture. Likewise, we have written that building a data-driven and customer-centric culture is paramount. To be successful, organizations must align data efforts with their mission and objectives, have data as the backbone, be customer-centric, measure what matters, have adequate learning to fuel the talent engine, and create an empowered workforce that masters the art of "fail fast, learn and repeat", to be digitally ethically responsible, and embrace continuous learning, adaptation, collaboration, ecosystems, and technology.

But Manuel, aren't you contradicting yourself that the main cause of failure is due to the organizational culture and then that we must fail quickly, learn, and repeat?

Although this may seem complicated, it is not. Organizational Culture as we know it today is the root cause of failure. If we do not learn from that failure and repeat it, we fall into an abyss from which we will never emerge. And that is an unforgivable mistake. The New Organizational Culture must include:

• To listen to the human side (customers, employees, shareholders, partners, suppliers, and stakeholders).
• To have a vision, strategic planning, alignment and long-term commitment to business results throughout the organization.
• Training: have adequate learning to fuel the talent/innovation engine and create an empowered workforce that masters the art of “fail fast, learn, and repeat”.
• To challenge assumptions (why don't we change what we have been doing for the last 25 years?).
• Have empathetic leaders who actively listen, with excellent communication skills, promote agile collaboration, and understand the concerns and knowledge of their team to align their needs with the organizational objectives.

For this reason, major digital companies such as Amazon, Meta, Google, Apple, and Microsoft allow their employees:

• The opportunity to have ideas and make them come true.
• Their ideas to be reviewed and sent to the decision-makers in an agile way without any bureaucracy.
• More time to invent (change and propose new ways of doing things).
• Giving them everything at the service of invention, building new products, services, and processes (even internal ones) to serve customers better.

Innovative changes do not come from a single employee or manager, but from groups of people who adapt the system through an ongoing cycle of research, detection, and response to the results. Even if these results are not favorable (failures), they will be learned from them so they improve in the next iteration.

Use Case

This has been applied in one of the main global banking institutions for several years. During the CDAO FS&I conference described in my previous article, the Data Analytics Leader told us that this was difficult initially since all managers always expect important economic results for each authorized initiative. As in all organizations, not all of their initiatives gave results, but they learned from the mistakes made during their process and corrected themselves to obtain a better version of it. To the extent that when one of the initiatives had a positive outcome of more than 6 figures in profits, they accepted the way of innovating by mastering the art of "fail fast, learn and repeat", without having repercussions from the mistakes for the staff, as long as they learned from them.

Within banks in Mexico, this institution is now known as “the lighthouse to follow”, due to its degree of innovation. Of course, there is no perfect institution and they are the first to recognize it, but thanks to their continuous learning, their competition has great difficulty keeping up the pace with them.

Do you want your organization to resemble this use case?

I offer you to review your culture, processes, and technology to create a specific strategy and roadmap for your organization with a customer-focused approach, improving the quality of life of employees (innovating and being more efficient) through the use of data, all this enabled by the technology that best suits your needs.

#digitaltransformation #customercentricity #bankingindustry #innovation #organizationalculture