Digital Transformation and the Illusion of Progress
When I observe how enterprises pursue digital transformation, I’m often reminded of the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno’s famous paradoxes concerning the impossibility of motion.
Zeno’s goal was to show the existence of an underlying reality that runs counter to our senses. We only think we observe motion, he argued, but change is an illusion. Confused? Let’s look at one of Zeno’s most famous paradoxes: “Achilles and the tortoise.”
In the paradox, the famous warrior Achilles runs a race against a tortoise. Achilles is famously swift whereas the tortoise famously isn’t, so to make the race fair, the tortoise gets a head start. Still, no matter the length of the head start, the tortoise has no chance, right? Not according to Zeno.
Zeno reminds us that by the time Achilles arrives at the tortoise’s starting position, the tortoise will have moved some distance beyond that position, from Point A to Point B. Likewise, by the time Achilles reaches Point B, the tortoise will again have moved forward some distance, to Point C.
Zero argues that this series continues without end. Each time Achilles arrives at the tortoise’s prior position, the tortoise will have moved forward. Achilles the swift can never catch the sluggish animal because to do so, he will have to reach an infinite number of points where the tortoise has already been — and completing any infinite task is impossible.
This premise runs counter to both our intuitions and our observations of the world — and for good reason: Excluding specific scenarios in which Achilles and the tortoise move at specific rates and the race is a specific distance, the paradox is wrong.
Numerous philosophers and mathematicians have advanced arguments that to explain away the paradox and its error, with many invoking the concept of limits in calculus to demonstrate that an infinite sequence can nevertheless converge on a finite sum. For our purposes, the key issue is less the mathematical minutiae than this overriding concept: Endlessly subdividing a task into increasingly atomic units can disguise whether you’re actually making progress.
A similar paradox occurs inside of companies every week. For example, I once reviewed a strategy document created by a large company in the American midwest. They put considerable effort into identifying their aspirations as a technology organization. They assigned their goals to categories, then formed numerous committees and working groups to subdivide each category. Each category possessed owners and stakeholders, dashboards and readouts. We must remember that all of this effort was expended with the best of intentions.
They said the right words: change, innovation, customer-focus, product-focus. The purported goal was to make the company more competitive. They were so focused on reaching each spot that competitors had already been, like the fateful Greek hero chasing the obstinate tortoise, they might as well have called their efforts the “Zeno Initiative.”
Every time this company subdivided a category, formed a working group, and interviewed scores of people around the company, the tortoise lumbered ever forward. By the time the company created a proposal for a new framework or common naming scheme or new form of control over remote development teams, competitors had inched away from them.
The company’s approach evoked English mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell’s eloquent rebuttal to Zeno’s motion paradox. Russell saw that motion doesn’t occur in froze instants of time. Because motion occurs across an interval of time, endlessly subdividing the race between Achilles and the tortoise into frozen instants does not describe the real world. Motion is a change in position over time.
That was the company’s mistake: trying to subdivide progress into frozen instants, as if the very act of naming their gaps and shortcomings — of uttering platitudes in praise of innovation — would lead them forward. Instead, they arrived each month/quarter/year at the tortoise’s prior position. Their progress was an illusion. More committees and dashboards and bureaucracy only misdirected their focus. Instead of finding ways to reach a goal before competitors, they endlessly discussed, subdivided, and reacted to what those competitors had already done.
Instead, the business should have considered how Achilles would have defeated the tortoise — not by focusing on reaching each spot the competition had already visited but by focusing on reaching a goal ahead of anyone else.
With this attitude, the organization wouldn’t have tried to measure every subdivision of progress; it would have measured against the major goals it was trying to achieve.
Trying to impose outdated modes of governance and control on local product and development teams does not result in innovation.
Perpetuating yesterday’s communication structures in committees and subcommittees only prolongs yesterday’s agonies.
Instead of focusing on dashboards and apportioning credit while giving the illusion progress or attempting to iterate yesterday’s governance and communication goals into something more modern, the company would have been served by focusing on the real motion that occurs between two moments in time.
In other words, measure the thing you want to change. That might mean more apps, more partners, more developers or higher customer satisfaction. It certainly means emerging from the silos and subcommittees and moving toward concepts such as ecosystem and omnichannel. What it doesn’t mean is methodically moving from one subdivided concept to the to next, pressing forward but never making competitive progress.
Fleet-footed Achilles focused not on arbitrary divisions of his motion versus the tortoise’s motion. He took each step with the simple goal of making progress on the one thing that mattered at that moment- defeating the tortoise by reaching the finish line first.
How many companies might benefit by focusing on the two or three things that matter most in their context and measuring real progress between two points in time? If only they can resist the urge to freeze time, waste time, and create mountains of documents. Documents, committees, and governance are not their goal. Why do they focus so much energy on them?
[Looking for more digital transformation insights? Read our eBook, The Digital Transformation Journey.]
Image from Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zeno_Achilles_Paradox.png
