The old, the new and the opportunity

How to write about Digital Transformation without starting by defining it? I have got a lot of mixed messages and abstraction about what people mean from it, so I will stick to the high-level idea. Digital Transformation consists of the adoption of ever-changing information technology to tackle daily problems and improve collaboration, productivity and optimise costs. For example: to move from a local data centre to a hosted service in a third-party cloud, or to use web-based text editors in a pay per use contract model rather than licences acquisition.

With that in mind, I would split the Digital Transformation effort into the back-office and the front-office. Where the back-office is a technical exercise of implementing supporting solutions transparent to the users, and the front office requires active user participation and acceptance of new ways to work.

Traditionally Change Management has been a topic of study at least since the 60s, as changes affect employees and companies when not adequately managed. In this aspect, Digital Transformation is not so different from other changes, the leaders need to prepare people (including the leader himself) and reduce their anxiety towards handling a new paradigm. Anxiety which is often more a part of our subconscious than a rational reaction. That is where Transformational Leadership comes into play.

Rather than focus on the common ground of the importance of Digital Transformation or the merits of Transformational Leadership, I would like to go back to a more fundamental element that I believe is being overlooked. Something that most likely shaped the Change Management studies themselves: The Times and Motion studies, Taylorism and the Scientific Management theory.

Oversimplifying it a lot: In the 1880s Frederick Winslow Taylor started to champion an approach firmly rooted on the idea of breaking down the elements that compose a task, measure them, then optimise to tackle the inefficiencies he observed in his workplace. His theories brought a considerable change in the manufacturing industry and remained widely influential after his death in 1915. There is no lack of criticism to what the mechanisation of human work did for the workers, most notably in Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times from 1936. Despite the critics, the broader implications of the propositions in the Scientific Management theory permeate how we do management since.

In another oversimplification: the Systems theory proposes that certain systems may be more than the sum of its parts, causing an emergent behaviour as a result of its interaction, what we call synergy. It is hard to trace this back to its origins, and there are many studies on it, but suffice to say that Aristotle famously said: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. Just to illustrate how meaningful synergy can be, life itself is the product of the interaction of many things that are not alive themselves.

I do not intend to advocate for an absolute reduction of control over the workforce. It is widely accepted that such metrics and tools can be very effective to boost the productivity of teams, in particular for less creative tasks. Still, it is that all we seek in Digital Transformation? To change technology and our back-office while employees are compelled to work differently or with different tools?

Taylorism might have been adjusted for our Information Era, but in its essence it spins around measurability, repetitiveness and control. It grounds itself in the thought that if ensuring the minimum productivity meets an acceptable volume that will be a desirable outcome. So I argue that whenever we expect more than the minimum, inspiration, communication and trust must come before control. It is by letting go of traditional methods of control that we might see the Digital Transformation deliver that which we really seek: Synergy.

If a significant part of the importance of “going Digital” is the user adoption as a whole, then our current paradigm may not be so different from the one brought by the Information Era, so widely discussed in the late 1970s. If that parallel can be made, then we should also be able to take some lessons from this period.

Microsoft’s Windows 95 launch and the rise of the Internet were arguably the two moments of the most profound changes in our information society. The former brought about a shift in the paradigm of interfaces, while the latter promoted connectivity as we could never dream before. One common denominator among those two moments is that it happened purely because it made sense for people to do so.

The COVID-19 outbreak might be the push to make Digital Transformation in the front-office a reality. Not because people have no choice but working from home, but because the management might have no choice but to trust people.

So the question that remains to companies to answer is: What are we going to do when the outbreak is over? Do you want to go back to normal, or do you want to go Digital?

#digitaltransformation #transformationalleadership #changemanagement