Sam Button, Head of Growth, Roar Media with Susie Palmer-Trew, Former Director, Change & Improvement, Open University.
Roar Media welcomed Susie to last months Online Digital Transformation Conference as part of a global series, Sam has the write up with the key points from the conversation. We will be posting the presentation early next week here as well.
Everyone’s future of transformation will be different, yours should be unique to your organisation & function.
Sustainable transformation is all about connecting people with purpose, central to this is building a culture of collaboration, where people feel connected and can communicate with colleagues and teams. It is vital to promote the transformation strategy to all individuals and have them be personally invested and connected with the change.
This connectivity within an organisation is important and it takes time and effort to connect with everyone individually. However, achieving this enables greater innovation, underpinning the success of transformation. These connections with the transformation are at an individual, organisational & data level; all three need to work in unison and learnings throughout used to define strategy.
The reasons for transformation failure are common, many employees would have been through unsuccessful projects through previous experiences both together and with other teams. Understanding these experiences & why they failed are vital ingredients when forming a strategy and it is important to share these failures & successes in order to learn from them.
As humans we tend to look at the differences rather than the commonalities. We desire uniqueness which is great from a commercial perspective but from a strategic organisational aspect this hinders the ability to succeed; as we don’t take other research & other organisations learnings from their transformation projects. Working within a project is better as a team, individuals seeing the same thing differently and can assist each other in reaching a common goal through cognitive diversity, the input of various voices & opinions leads to a better designed strategy.
If we can start a project from a point of commonality where we have common goals, ambitions, expectations and desires but have cognitive diversity and various points of view and ways of thinking, there is a much higher chance of success.
Data collection can allow for continued success of projects throughout an organisation, every project collects data through experiences, testing and reporting. The challenge is creating a critical mass. We should look to pool our data and lived experiences together, to have a wealth of knowledge of what has worked and not worked in the past, this provides ideas for the future. Digital businesses we have a vast amount of data, we can use this to our advantage by applying innovation to our data rather than siloing this.
Generating insight into previous experiences, enables us to have a historical data point with a created critical data mass and we can keep exploring this further and build more data that can be actioned upon and further experimented.
The business of transformation is an interconnected ecosystem. Using digital to enhance connectivity of employees and data in order to harness this to drive innovation. Competitive advantage can be achieved through transformation, if we are innovating with purpose and triangulating our data & experiences to advance our project management process. Enabling better decisions, with a more substantial and lasting impact.
If we can take connectivity and put this at the heart of our projects, we open up to a common purpose with common learning and adventure. If we can identify how commonality can provide a shared starting point and how to yield the value of our data & context, we will see more diverse and colourful outcomes.
The future of transformation has to sit around harnessing competitive advantage, to build transformation as an industry and activity with an ecosystem supported by insight but is at the heart of our organisations.