On Wednesday evening we had the 24th Google Firestarters which took digital transformation as it's subject. The event had been well oversubscribed within 48 hours of registration opening, demonstrating the high level of interest that there is around this topic in agencies right now (this was supported by the IPA Future of Agencies research that I did which revealed the disparate range of agencies and consultancies that are coalescing around this burgeoning area). It's a huge subject but as always with Firestarters we wanted to take some different but challenging perspectives on the theme and we had four excellent talks that I think achieved that really well.
First up we had the brilliant Emily Webber, who has worked with people and organisations in both the private and public sectors to develop their agile capability for sustainable change, and gave a fascinating talk on scaling learning through communities within organisations. Developing a organisational learning culture in the context of transformation is something that I talked about a lot in my book, and Emily brought that to life through the lens of enabling better cross-functional progress and learning at scale within a business. She talked about how the number of connections between people in a team (and therefore communication traffic) increases exponentially as the team grows bigger, and how the organisational response to these kinds of scaling issues relies on hierarchy and the creation of functional silos.
Yet learning across the organisation is an essential element in achieving real transformation: 'learning is done better when it's done together'. Social learning theorist Albert Bandura said: 'From observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviours are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action'. Collaboration is about building on top of each other's ideas, and yet so many organisations treat learning as an individualistic thing. She referenced Simon Wardley's concept of Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners, making the point about the different types of people needed in an organisation to bring innovation and transformation to life, and Dan North's thoughts around Delivery Mapping, talking about 'skills liquidity' and the cross-over of business need, current skills and desired skills. Emily's concept of 'Communities of Practice' enables learning horizontally across the business, and a collective intelligence that is greater than the sum of individual intelligence. When combined with a 'safe to fail' environment, fast feedback loops, and an empowered supporting network, people can really fly, it allows for decentralised learning and scales good practice.
Tim Malbon followed with a witty, insightful talk on how the process, practice and culture of building digital products and services can support business transformation. In that sense, the product is the means to an end, with the process actually serving to impact a wide range of organisational practices including workflow, resourcing, processes, hiring, training, learning and so on. If transformation is the aim, the product is the how, with multi-disciplinary product teams learning (he echoed Emily's point about how people learn better together, so agency and client staffers are combined) how to prioritise, innovate and iterate - how a lean/agile product innovation team works. This becomes particularly important when you consider that real transformation comes from not only customer experience,
but employee experience as well.
I'd thought it was important for this event that we had a client perspective, from a company that is undergoing digital transformation, and so was happy to have
Johan Enstrom, Digital Transformation lead at Pentland brands (Speedo, Canterbury, Mitre, etc). Johan adeptly captured just how hard the change process is in reality within companies, particularly in managing priorities across disparate levels of maturity, knowledge and capability in the business. He talked about the importance of qualities such as honesty and humility in enabling the culture that supports change and inspires creative solutions, and of understanding the nuanced levels of skills needed at each level of the organisation, and how decisions are often hard in this context because they are not always binary choices. But a shared sense of purpose that allows more fluid application of strategy is key.
Our final talk was from transformation consultant
Lucia Adams who drew a lot on her experiences transforming a big global media owner. I've
written before about Lucia's wisdom in saying that:
‘Digital is 10% tech and 90% human. Organisations talk about digital as if it is 90% tech and 10% human’. Her talk built on this premis, describing seven myths of transformation (drawing a lot from Steven Johnson's excellent book on
Where Good Ideas Come From) . Change management, she said, is often an expensive, waterfall beast that treats people as objects to be shifted this way or that and the effort that goes into ‘transformation programmes’ is usually met with an equal and opposite cultural force. Change is not single thing, it is a 'swarm', and yet a leader needs the courage to set a direction. Eureka moments and epiphanies are a fallacy - true insights require you to think something that no one has thought before in quite the same way, serendipity needs unlikely collisions and discoveries, and error sets off the truth. Platform building she said, is by definition an exercise in emergent behaviour.
The event was broad-ranging and extremely insightful so my thanks to our brilliant speakers, to Google for hosting, and all those who came on the night and joined in the debate. As always,
Scriberia did a great job of visualising the talks. If you have any themes that you'd like us to cover in future Firestarters, do let me know.
