What are the challenges you might expect to encounter along a transformation journey?

What challenges and pitfalls might we encounter along the way of transformation? And how might we deal with those challenges? We reached out to various digital leaders from the field of innovation to see what they think. From bringing stakeholders together on the same page, to overcoming cultural challenges, and setting up the transformation scene - there's a variety of statements that we found. Listen to this special episode to get to know more.

Chapters

• 1:26 Crises of commitment, identity, and fights against the changes
• 2:20 People management and getting all stakeholders in
• 3:04 Conflict between operations, commercial and technology
• 3:52 Don't loose "Why" you're doing it and remember to prioritize
• 5:25 Convincing people to come on your transformation journey
• 7:02 Company strategy and leadership keep changing while transformation is a long process
• 8:02 Talent, ideation, governance and funding
• 8:50 Fear of something new in general
• 9:15 "Corporate anti-bodies" and tendency to maintain status-quo
• 11:07 Organizational culture, individuals action, and senior management approach
• 12:48 Communication and credibility of your transformation idea

Transcript

Christine: (00:02)

Welcome to the Lost in Transformation podcast series dedicated to the complex world of Digital Transformation. We feature guests from large corporations, start-ups, consultancies and more, to shed light on the success factors around Innovation, Transformation, and adjacent topics. 
We share first-hand insights and inspiration from experts for all the intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, and anyone curious about Digital Transformation.

Christine: (00:31)

What challenges and what pitfalls might we encounter along the way of transformation? And how might we deal with those challenges?
We reached out to various digital leaders around the globe to get their views and tips on this topic. And their responses fall into 3 different categories: One being the challenge of bringing different stakeholders together and trying to create synergy between people with different backgrounds. Another challenge focuses on the cultural aspects, and on getting people on board and committed to your transformation journey. And another one describes the challenge of getting the general setup ready for transformation, including all the resources, talent, budget, and of course making sure you don’t lose sight of why you’re actually transforming. 

What challenges do YOU expect to encounter on your transformation journey? Take a listen and get inspired!

Scott Anthony: (01:26)

So the biggest challenge you will encounter when you’re going through any kind of transformation is, there are 3 types of predictable crises that happen along the way: The first is what we call the crisis of commitment when people doubt that you’re really serious about doing things. The second is the crisis of conflict, where today and tomorrow begin to fight. It always happens. The third is the crisis of identity. When you’re transforming, you’re becoming something different. The way that you associate will be different. Those that have ties to the past will often feel lost as they’re going through these crises. The good news is because these crises are totally predictable, you can prepare for them. You have a good story, you have a good vision, you understand some of the fought lines and the challenges you’re going to face, you’re ready when they happen. But don’t kid yourself. This is going to be a hard journey and these crises will inevitably be things that happen.

Ee Ling Lim: (02:20)

You know, startups always say that the hardest part about running a startup is hiring, is people management. And I think it’s actually the same in an organization as well that’s looking to undertake innovation initiatives. This is, the biggest challenge typically comes from the people, at all different levels themselves. So you would want to be able to actually identify the key stakeholders at different levels themselves, including your board directors as well. And include these key stakeholders at the earliest opportunity. Also, you know, recognize that everyone has their own agenda, everyone has their own mission and purpose. And so, you would actually need to adjust to varying needs and their levels of understanding as well.

AJ Boelens: (03:04)

It’s probably the convergence between operations people, and the commercial teams, and technology. And so, these people need to work together in synergy to make great things happen and digital transformations happen. The problem is, these people, don’t speak the same language. So the technology people, they know the technology really really well but they don’t understand the business, and sometimes they don’t even know how to ask the questions in the right way, that you know their customers - sometimes they’re not customer-centric themselves. And they sometimes use too much jargon, they confuse these people, these people say, ugh, technology, you don’t understand our business. And so sometimes that becomes a challenge of how do you bring these different kinds of stakeholders together. That is a challenge that I’ve seen time and time again.

Wilma Gerber: (03:52)

The biggest challenge is when you lose sight of the Why. So why are you doing this? What problem are you trying to solve? This can happen when things get busy when we fall into the trap of roll-off. This is when our focus is primarily on rolling out technology and features and we miss the part about enabling new behaviors. Technology without behavior change is like having an expensive sports car but you only ever drive it at 30 miles/hour because you didn’t upgrade the roads or you didn’t develop new driving skills. So the thing is that driving real behavioral change is not that easy. There are many different versions of humans all responding to change, unlike a technology platform that gives you the same results whether you push a button in Singapore or in Tokyo. So enabling behavioral and cultural change takes empathy, takes creativity, and that takes time. So it’s a constant effort to listen and understand what is getting in the way of these new behaviors that you’re trying to drive. And it takes creativity to come up with new approaches when the current way is not working. When we’re short of time, empathy and creativity are the first to go. And that’s why prioritization is so important. If you don’t prioritize you won’t have time to do things properly, and you end up delivering a lot of shiny techs but no real value. 

Jerry Tso: (05:25)

So, I think that depends on the size of the company that’s going through digital transformation - I think different sized companies are going to have different kinds of challenges. I think for a big company, I think the culture aspect is probably going to be the biggest challenge. You know, how do you convince people in the organization, top to bottom, to becoming along with you on this journey. So I think that’s going to be a challenge. The smaller company I think they probably have more realistic concerns around the resources or budgets that are available to go through the journey. In terms of pitfalls we might expect, you know, as I mentioned in the previous podcast, you know, not everybody’s going to be with you. A lot of people are going to resist the transformation or the change that you’re trying to do. So you just have to persist through and leverage different ways to try and convince them, why it is a good thing. The benefits you could see down the road. And don’t feel like, along the way, if you fail on a certain thing, that’s the end of it. It’s not. You just have to pivot and move on. So I think that are some of the challenges people have to watch out for. And within our lab, we have dealt with them. We have experimented, we have gone through that emotion before. We thought it was the end of it but we took a step back and really fought through as, hey, there’s another way that we could get to our target. And we tried that and it worked and we moved on. So the learnings that we had is not everything that you try is going to be successful. You just have to pivot and move. 

Marie Cheong: (07:02)

You know, I think, this is an outsider’s perspective as somebody that was a consultant in the digital and innovation space. I think the biggest kind of pitfall is that a company’s strategy and company leaders change all the time. So a typical strategy cycle is like 3 years at most. And when we’re talking about the digital transformation it is really kind of a longer-term commitment. And it’s made up of many small steps and actions along the way. And bringing some consistency and longevity to our vision around digital transformation and making sure that it’s resourced effectively, is I think one of the biggest challenges. And I think linked to that is that people see digital transformation as also linked to particular solutions. You know so you introduce Salesforce and then you think that your sales team is digitally enabled. When in reality there’s so much more to that journey than just introducing a particular tool. 

Sam Hall: (08:02)

Talent, ideation, process, governance, funding. And I think the first one will be talent and the others will all float as you move along the journey. But focusing on the right areas, that’s ideation. Affecting your digital transformation is about playing an effective process to do so. And that’s developed through muscle memory of doing but also can be based around many effective frameworks as to how to approach doing this. And then governance and funding are incredibly important. If you’re building new businesses or affecting transformation, then it’s different to continually, incrementally developing the existing business. So operationalizing or improving efficiencies within the business. So the governance you apply to that is different and funding should be different. 

Jon Brezinski: (08:50)

I think resistance from those you’re ultimately helping resolving from fear of something new and potential negative implications on those individuals for the short-term. We generally focus on the greater good and try to communicate throughout the process to all adopters so that they understand it isn’t an attack on their livelihood but an improvement for their customer’s companies and ultimately, in the end, themselves. 

Thomas Jakob: (09:15)

Well, I guess we called it before "corporate anti-bodies." That’s certainly one of them. For a large organization of course it is easy to dismiss such new ideas upfront and to continue in the ways how we’ve done business in the past. That’s a natural reaction from any living organism. And so that’s something which we need to overcome as an organization. So that’s a pitfall and that takes very consistent, very long-term pushing throughout the organization from the top as well as from the bottom. You need to get at it from both sides and sustain that for a long time. People come into this digital stuff and say ‘great, I used that now and next year everything’s going to be better, right? We have a brave new world and suddenly everything works like a peach’. And that’s probably not going to be the case, right? There will be setbacks, there will be issues, there will be problems, there will be failures. And so we need to take a long-term view in that regard. We will go through the hype, we will go through valleys of tears, we will see certain things picking up and others not, and we have to accept that as part of the journey. Experimentation is a very important part of that innovation cycle, so I would suggest that we need to be very mindful of that from the outside and also accept that there will be stuff that is not going to work and that we will need to repeat the same mantra - and mantra is probably a good word in this context also - the same mantra over and over and over again until it takes hold in all the nooks and crannies of that large organization, that large living organism which we have there.

Florian Bankoley: (11:07)

So challenges and pitfalls for me, and this is my personal learning, are most of the people say ‘ok, we have a strategy established, and we have management buy-in on a, let’s say, headline level, and we have made organizational changes, we have the technologies, so let’s go’. But for me, this is necessary but not sufficient. So the pitfalls I’ve seen, there are 3 main factors in this transformation: So one is that you underestimate your organizational culture, meaning the processes you work with day in, day out. Because these are very, let’s say, important things that will shape this transformation journey. You need to tackle this, you need to work with it. The second aspect is that people underestimate the way that individuals act. So one thing is that a large team says "yes, let’s transform, let’s make a new way of working." And that’s totally fine. But the way people actually work day in day out when they encounter a problem is strongly going to shape if you are transforming or if it’s just the same old way of working but with a new name. And the third one is actually senior management. Because most the senior management has been successful in decision patterns based on former, let’s say, success factors. And if they carry this forward and do not shift, saying ‘I know that this is the way I decided yesterday, but today within this new transformation with this new challenge, I need to re-learn, I need to re-train how I assess things. And this is also a certain important factor. 

Frido Pflueger: (12:48)

Working in sustainability today, really the pressure is coming from consumers. And what’s at stake is your brand. And your brand has to be a credible, sustainable actor. Maybe industry leader or aiming to be that or at least a positive force in this field. But the key question really is credibility. And the opposite of that is greenwashing and it’s happening so much, all over the place, and it’s easy to do things like off-setting - not all off-setting is bad but it’s easy to make these mistakes. Especially the German public is very critical and really looks closely at your initiatives and you have to think about this credibility thing and it’s not just a marketing question about the red claims. It’s about what’s happening behind it. It doesn’t mean that you have to be where we have to be in 2050, of course. Nobody’s there. But it’s about really showing that you are on the way and that you are ready to change and that you will put some resources behind that, and then of course how you communicate it. I think that’s very important. 

Christine: (14:03)

Thank you for listening to this episode of “Lost in Transformation”. If you enjoy our podcast, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a review on iTunes. Join us next time for another episode of our podcast.