Take stock, what is next... (and what is repeatable from 'before')

Being in a new role allows for a moment of reinvention based on reflections from what has gone before. As I get close to the end of week four in my new role and as we build up for that end-of-year “look back” moment it's good to take stock and really plan for what’s next.

I have had a couple of ‘Soap Box Moments’ already, I keep reiterating some of the same things I have had as issues in the past. I am trying hard to time-box my own thinking on this, nobody wants to hear constant stories of what I did at my old place I am sure! Its hard to bring your learning without being stuck in your past and reminiscing on what went before, I don’t want to be that bore!

Pushing hard on the OUR business phrasing rather than THE business is one of those moments though. I know I have pushed this one before and I wonder why it’s so necessary in 2024 to go back to this basic premise. As digital leaders and champions of transformation, we must keep reminding ourselves that to some degree we are here to serve our business. The other moment has been something I have taken from my most recent role and want to apply again, a constant connection to the business outcome that transformation has at its ‘soul’, for me this feels so important and has become a mantra that I have taken from my time at DWP and want to apply in my new organisation with a renewed rigor.

I was recently given a guide to the types of digital delivery we could shoot for. Each type need not be a permanent state but a version of you and the team that can be used at the right moment and in the right situation. The key I was told is to know which mode you are in and create a set of behaviours that sit alongside that mode. By being clear yourself as a digital leader which mode you are in it becomes easier to take your colleagues with you, I liked that thinking:

Order Taker: Primarily focused on implementing and maintaining existing technology solutions as requested by business units without an expected outcome other than perhaps ‘faster horses’.

Strategic Advisor: Provides guidance and insights to the executive leadership team on leveraging technology for competitive advantage.

Change Maker: Actively drives technological innovation and digital transformation initiatives to support business strategy, collaborating closely with business leaders.

Visionary Leader: Deeply integrated within business strategy, sets a clear vision for the future of technology within the organisation and inspires teams to achieve ambitious goals that redefine how business outcomes are achieved.

Of course, we often want to be at the top of the pyramid and be seen to always be the Visionary Leader but in reality, it's okay sometimes to ‘just’ be the order taker, there are some parts of delivery that need us to be more operational. I have been trying to link this to my much-loved SAMR Ladder (Substitute, Augment, Modify & Redefine) too in recent days and I think in the new year I will get that out as a way of thinking and doing in my new team which I am excited to see what they think.

With all this in mind in a new role I have a personal goal when it comes to making a difference, to move faster, maybe even just a bit faster than our business so we can get ahead of the ‘game’. How do we move from capacity to deliver to capacity to absorb the needs and asks of our business are a challenge and one that is not resolved simply by adding resources to my team. We have a new attitude to create, in the past I have talked about moving to a ‘del Monte' attitude, the ‘man’ who likes to say yes. With experience, I get that is not always the answer but showing up to look at problems together and seeking a digital-first solution feels like it is something we should aim for still.

The appetite to test and learn needs to be …tested!

The attitude of different parts of the organisation to take risks I think is best described as the difference between Lifts and Escalators. The failure mode of the escalator allows you to keep moving but the failure mode of a lift could lead to that Die Hard moment, when it all goes wrong and you go tumbling down that digital innovation lift shaft. We need new mechanisms and cultural levers to pull that allow us to manage the risk appetite when we need to use the lift as we need to go further and quicker to the top of the pile. I think we need this to be how we interact across our business as much as it being a framework or innovation funnel. We need to get alongside our colleagues more and more and hear what they need to ‘fix’ about their day job so we can go after the answer together. In my previous roles, this became known as a Digital First approach, maybe it needs a new name to be more inclusive of the whole of our business but as a route to the top, I think sharing the button pressing for which floor is going to be essential.

The work that Vineet Nayar from HCLT has done on Employees First, Customers Second is fascinating too in its application to my new role. The theory is that if we focus on the wellbeing, capacity and capability of our colleagues and make it easy for them to do their job then looking after our customers becomes second nature. The tools our colleagues out on the front line of our business need are quite significant, they need access to a relatively complex workflow that has legislative elements to what must be done. They need fast, accurate and wide data that they can quickly turn into local information so that they can apply their insight to it and make decisions that will be wise and focused on a positive outcome. If we as digital transformation individuals put our colleagues first then I think we will see a significant difference happen. I guess though as I write this the same can apply to so many businesses, the focus I used to try to bring to a definition of our customer when I was focused on digital delivery in the NHS has huge parallels to where I am now, our customer is every part of our organisation and they have a variety of needs that change based on the point in the year we are at and the geography they are working in, so no mean feat to get right in 2025.

One of the tactics deployed in this theory is to encourage employment dissatisfaction and seek it be open and transparent. We need to support colleagues to come up with their vision for answers to problems with us sitting alongside them. We then need to ensure we find ways to align this with the overall vision and outcome of what we are trying to get to. Some of this plays back to one of my favourites the Growth Mindset as Satya Nadella defines it in his book Hit Refresh. The guiding principle he puts forward is that a Growth Mindset is one where we move from ‘know-it-all’ to ‘learn-it-all’. In all of the changes he has made at Microsoft, this is the core principle the need to learn collectively from mistakes and perceive challenges as opportunities for growth.

If we can find a way to do this as an organisation, a collection of minds that know where they want to grow to, then we will be on to a transformation winner I suspect.

It is a journey though and maybe we need to accept that simply a few people doing the transformation dance will not be enough to get the whole organisation moving (immediately) in the same direction. I recently was given a way to categorise my audience when presenting and I wonder if I can use the same for my colleagues to help me know what sort of effort I need to apply to my ‘dance’ and when. True Believers, Lost Souls and Fence Sitters were the categories that I think we could apply. They play in some ways to a ‘tool’ I have used before in the Republic of Ireland, where we had Optimists, Pessimists and Pragmatists across the clinical and patient domains. We used these ‘classifications’ to work out what effort needed to be applied.

If I take my new types then I can see already the True Believers, they are not always the Digital Transformation people but tend to be those that have had a recent good experience in that space. The Lost Souls tend to be those that have had a bad experience or feel ignored by the transformation agenda and lastly, the Fence Sitters tend to be those that believe they can do this job best with digital interfering the least. Once we work out where each category is then we can temper our engagement to be the best we can deliver and move the whole machine in the right direction, the job is not always to change the type of personality in this space but to use that traits of that type to help make transformation land, to get the dance moving even if people are dancing a slightly different style to the same musical beat!

So there you go, four weeks in, some of how I think I am going to tackle the new challenge in the specific area of engagement of our people and the style we need in the team…

As always would love to hear what you think of this and any advice you may have.

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