Why are you shouting from the mountain-top?

Authentic Transformation Comes from the Bottom Up

If you’re like me, you know that executive commitment and sponsorship is critical for any digital transformation to succeed. It’s important to ensuring that individuals and teams have the time they need to ideate, that funds are available for investment in new technologies and process, and that big ideas move beyond the whiteboard to tangible implementation.

But employees need more than a bullhorn from the board room. Transformation by its very nature is organic, and often occurs in small, surprising ways. Your plan should be nimble enough to pivot and adapt as you start to implement. And just as you would with any Agile project, you anticipate a non-linear path to completion; you expect that feedback will initiate change. This is why digital transformation is disruptive, and yes, hard. The process is not an end in itself; it’s simply the means to that end. So it should come as no surprise that it’s not the CEO’s or the CTO’s ideas that will take you all the way – it’s the ideas that come from front-line employees who see the opportunities for incremental impact that are so critical to achieving broader change.

"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it." –Chinese Proverb

The challenge is that far too many employees’ ideas end up in the abyss of the “suggestion box,” and die before they ever see light. If this happens too frequently in an organization working toward transformation, employees can become disengaged, feeling as if the transformation is happening to them, rather than it being a process in which they’re actively participating. They need to have an impact too.

For that to happen, an organization requires a disciplined process. A successful transformation journey is more than ideation and innovation – it requires both art and science. Art comes in the form of ideas, conversations, sparks, doing, building, and inspiring. How to manage all of that output is where the science comes in, and not just through end-game technology solutions – you can start simply by managing idea flow.

Here are FOUR guidelines to help your employees share their ideas effectively, and to improve the odds that all ideas – no matter how wacky – get fair consideration.

(1) Invest in a collaboration platform. Consider the power of Facebook. At its core, it’s an idea-sharing platform, but one that lacks meaningful oversight. By implementing a collaboration system such as Microsoft’s Teams or Yammer, you can organize and moderate the submission process, and have an audit trail which you can later search and archive. Both Microsoft solutions integrate seamlessly with Office365, but there are other options available too, like Slack and Jive. The important thing is creating a safe, automated space where employees can share and discuss ideas, knowing that they’ll have a life beyond the box.

"Either you run the day, or the day runs you." –Jim Rohn

(2) Create a submission framework. Even the best collaboration solutions will quickly become free-for-alls without a framework to manage ideas.

• Create channels to organize submissions by topic.
• Challenge employees to solve for a particular pain point or customer complaint.
• Encourage the crowd to evolve and improve submissions, and push for diverse populations from multiple disciplines to weigh in.
• Create a review panel of equally diverse members who can evaluate business benefits and greenlight ideas for investment. Make that process and the assessment criteria fully transparent to employees.

(3) Cast a wide net. “Digital” implies you’re solving for technical challenges, and that can be off-putting to non-technical staff. Digital transformations are really all about broader business transformation, and this involves everyone. How could you do your job more effectively if you had better tools? Greater mobility? More time to focus on meaningful problem-solving instead of repetitive, low-value tasks? Remind employees that they don’t need to solve for technology; they need to tell you how they think the business can be more effective and efficient, how to make your customers’ experiences more meaningful.

"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." –Wayne Gretzky

(4) Commit to follow-through. If you’ve gotten the first three steps right, you’re going to have a lot of submissions, and that means a lot of ideas to sift through before you find the winners. For your program to succeed, staff must believe you’re serious about it, and they need to see outcomes. Even plugging in a USB device has at best a 50/50 chance of success the first time out. Set a benchmark after you’ve had the process in place for a while – do you find the good idea in every 5 submissions? In every 10? Use that to frame the review process not as a needle-in-a-haystack exercise, but a treasure hunt.

Once everyone is focused on new ideas – and seeing what can happen if someone’s “crazy” concept gets put into motion – you move beyond the C-Suite to actively engage your entire organization in the transformation process. In today’s fast-paced, always-changing environment, having a steady stream of fresh thinking from every corner of the company could be the lynchpin in how you differentiate, and pull ahead of your competitors.

Katharine English is a Sr. Advisor for Digital Transformation & Innovation at Microsoft.

Follow me: @KEnglish