Your digital transformation should be a customer transformation

Why are so many transformations failing (1)(2)(3)? Because they are focused on 'what' people are doing instead of 'why' they are doing it.

Changing the tools people use without changing ‘why’ they are using them will only burn out people at the receiving end. And then bring everyone back to where they started a few months or years later.

A connection recently told me that their company was going through their fifth wave of transformation, not expecting it was their last.

At some point we have to learn that we need to stop hitting and missing.There is a way to do this right, but not when every attempt starts at the wrong end.

What is the right end?

The customer is the right end.

Transformations are not about the ‘what’ they never were (we keep getting this wrong).

“A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools it happens when society adopts new behaviors” — Clay Shirky, US Now (4)

First of all the future has never been a faster cheaper version of what we are already doing. Never. The efficiency-stage is just a temporary transition we go through every time as we are starting to play with new things (e.g. technology and data) before someone nudges the new behavior that will change everything.

To quote Steve Jobs:

“Everything around you .. was made up by people that were no smarter than you .. and you can change it” (5)

E.g. Alexander Graham Bell initially started work on the technology leading to the telephone to create aids for the hearing impaired, the internet was a decentralized communication system designed to survive a nuclear attack, bubble-wrap was intended to be a textured wallpaper, coca-cola a medicinal tonic to treat headaches. …

According to Kevin Kelly (6) this is always the case:

The people inventing technologies offer them to the world only for people to use them for something else (the behavior change), the technologies then get updated to serve this new behavior .. and this circle continues until the technology eventually becomes ubiqutous.

So what does this mean for e.g. a company or organization?

One reason why transformations fail is because they don’t focus on creating demand. Nobody needs new dashboards, data or disruptions just to keep doing what they were already doing in order to deliver the same results they already are.

One reason why transformations fail is because they don’t focus on creating demand.

It’s like buying a pair of speedos thinking that now you will become an athletic swimmer … when you’ve always preferred playing Medal of honor in your man cave — only now you have to do it in your swim trunks.

Without demand whatever you’re offering is just going to produce pain. But, change the demand and people will start asking for the transformation.

How do you create demand?

Demand is connected to motivation, motivation is connected to why we are doing what we are doing (situation) and what we are hoping to achieve (measurable outcomes).

If my job is to publish two articles every week, then why do I need to change how I do it? But if my boss tells me that my job changed. Now I’m not making articles, but I am going to be measured on how many people are learning something significant, useful and current (the SUC-score) from the experiences I create. Now my work’s ‘why’ has changed: I’m not publishing content, but creating learning experiences for our learners, I can think broader than just putting words to screen and my work will be incentivized and valued differently. In order to do this new work I need new tools, new data, processes, technologies etc .. now I need the digital transformation

The digital transformation should have never started with ‘digital’. It should have started with the culture, the people, the leadership and the business asking:

why are we doing what we are doing? And how can we do better?

And the answer to this question is: let’s stop looking at the world through our products (or keep looking through them, but only in part) and start looking more through our customers:

What are the opportunities for growth we can discover if we start looking at the world through the lens of our customers?

The customer transformation

A ‘customer transformation’ asks the company to start serving its customers instead of “selling” its products.

It changes the why from “selling products” to “serving customer needs to drive business value”

Eventually we will see that the ‘digital’ transformation is needed. Because the portfolio of tools and things available today is pretty skinny, limits our opportunities and our thinking.

As soon as people start changing the why, the demand changes. They need completely different things to do completely different work.

Borrowing from Dilbert: a digital transformation is nothing more than “creating the illusion of progress” spending time and resources on doing the same thing (only faster and cheaper -ish) while your competition is racing ahead.

A customer transformation on the other hand starts where the change needs to happen: at the ‘why’:

Why are we doing what we are doing and how can we do much better?

Technology never answered that question, but your customers can.

Sources:

(1). Bain & Company, Peter Slagt et. al, The Three Common Transformation Talent Mistakes and How to Avoid Them, https://www.bain.com/insights/the-three-common-transformation-talent-mistakes-and-how-to-avoid-them/

(2). McKinsey, Perspectives on Transformation, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/transformation/our-insights/perspectives-on-transformation

(3). BCG, Patrick Forth, Tom Reichert et. al, Flipping the Odds of Digital Transformation Success, https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/increasing-odds-of-success-in-digital-transformation

(4). Clay Shirky, Clay SHirky — Future transformations, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Tlc8HyOqw

(5). Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs secrets of life, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw

(6). Kevin Kelly, What technology wants, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Technology_Wants