Our Manifesto: The Story So Far

A couple of weeks ago, HSBC Technology?launched our Technology Manifesto 1.0 . . . and started the conversation that will help us create version 1.1.?The 40,000 of us in the Technology team are now busy discussing what this means for us, but we can already share our thinking with the world: HSBC Technology Manifesto 1.0.

I’ll explore some of the thinking in the Manifesto in later blog posts, but to start off, here’s the story of how we got here.

Ambitions

About 18 months ago, we were part of the way through our adoption of Agile and DevOps across the enterprise. We had made big changes to the way we worked and the speed at which we moved, but we knew that we had a long way to go. We had ambitions to not just be better, but to be among the best. And we realised that, in order to achieve those ambitions, we needed to describe our vision in a way that resonated with everyone in our huge global team.

Learning From Others . . .

Of course, our desire for a manifesto was inspired in part by the Netflix manifesto, famously one of the most downloaded documents on the Internet. The Netflix manifesto inspired us in two ways. Firstly, we were inspired by its contents: its honesty, its clarity, and its focus on talent and excellence. Secondly, we were inspired to avoid limiting our ambitions to the standards of our industry, or even of large, traditional enterprises in general: we should judge our technology capabilities by the standards of some of the emerging technology companies shaping the world.

We therefore immersed ourselves in learning from others, read many of the recent books which have helped shape thinking about the culture of technology organisation (and organisations in general), met some of the people who wrote them, and tried to understand the companies they worked for.

And then we thought hard about how and whether these ideas applied to us.

. . . While Being True to Ourselves

We thought hard partly because this is work that deserves hard thinking, but also because we didn’t want to lose what makes us special. We wanted to develop, enhance and transform our culture, but we also wanted to respect our heritage.

We have been in business for over 150 years, we care deeply for our customers and the services we provide, and our team unites many countries and cultures. Our technology team has an identity founded on building systems which connect the world. We didn’t want to become someone else: we wanted to become a better version of ourselves.

Finding our MTP

One of the insights from our research was that the most successful teams in the world are those that unite behind a Massive Transformation Purpose (an MTP).

HSBC already has a purpose, but we wanted to make sure that we defined the special mission of the Technology team.

It took quite a while to figure it out, including a lot of passionate debate amongst the Technology Leadership team, but we finally settled on a purpose:?together, we transform the world’s banking experience.

The Manifesto 1.0 describes this MTP in more detail, but I can give my very personal view of why every word resonates with me.?

Together, we: we mean we in the biggest sense: the Technology team, our colleagues throughout HSBC, our partners and, of course, our customers.

Transform: we are not just setting out to improve banking: we believe in the power of technology to transform what banking means.?

The world’s: at HSBC we are privileged to serve customers in countries around the world.?

Banking experience: not just UI, not just UX, but the whole experience of banking.

There’s a lot in that short phrase, and it’s hard to achieve, but that’s the point of an MTP.

Healthiest Human System

At the beginning of 2018, John Flint became our new CEO. One of the first things he did was to say that HSBC would aim to establish the ‘healthiest human system’ in our industry:

This organisation is a collection of human beings . . . a human system that wakes up every day with the intention of doing good things for other people. It’s nothing more or less complicated than that. When we’re at our best, we make great things happen.?

John invited all the teams in HSBC to think and talk about what the healthiest human system meant for them: it didn’t take us long to work out that, for us, it meant the values and culture that we had defined in ther Manifesto.

Refining the Message

By this point, we had a pretty clear view of what we wanted to say. We were also conscious that we had been staring at this Manifesto for a long time, and that we were getting a bit word blind. So the Technology team, the HR team and the Communication team worked together to make sure that our vision and our messages were clear. That triggered some interesting discussion about the best way to communicate with technologists: while we wanted to make the message clear, we were conscious that we were engaging with an intelligent, technical audience with an appetite for detail.

As result, you’ll see that the Manifesto has plenty of words in it, but is headed by a simple vision which is worth quoting at length:

Building a bank for the future is a job for the bold.

We are the team that takes on some of the world’s biggest challenges for our customers.

We use technology to power the world’s leading international bank.

We are world-class technologists who drive new ideas in an environment that demands deep expertise.

We are resilient and relentless in our pursuit of excellence.

Finishing Touches

At this point, late in 2018, we thought we were done. However, when we read the Manifesto through, it still didn’t feel quite right. Something was off.

Fortunately, it was time for the Christmas holidays and our Group CIO, Darryl West, packed the Manifesto and a red pen for his break. When he came back, he had added a couple of extra pages which set the scene: described clearly, in Darryl’s voice, what kind of place we want this to be.

Now we were done . . .

Continuing the Conversation

. . . at least for version 1.0.

We believe in continuous improvement. As soon as we had launched the Manifesto, we started work on version 1.1, by inviting all of our Technology team, across the world, to read, reflect, think and tell us what they think. We’ve already found that we’re going to be frank and blunt with each other about the difference between aspirations and reality; and we’re confident that we’ll be enthusiastic and energetic in bridging the gap.

(And, of course, if this sounds like the kind of conversation that you would like to be a part of, maybe you should think about joining us.)