It’s like trying to get a fat man to run a marathon
One of my favourite business analogies of all time is one used by IT expert and advisor to CIOs, Owen McCall. He likens most organisations IT efforts to ‘trying to get a fat man to run a marathon’. He suggests that IT teams often get ahead of themselves, they become so obsessed with the end goal, the marathon, or the transformation, that they stop focusing on the individual steps required to achieve it.
As Owen points out, the first step to running a marathon is just getting off the sofa, the next one might be to go for a walk, the next one might be to go for a longer walk, then perhaps a jog, then a longer jog, then a run, then a longer run, then a half marathon and finally after months (or perhaps years) the previously fat man might have done enough preparation to line up for his first marathon.
Maybe we like to focus on the end goal because when we break it down into steps it seems like so much more work. But the truth is, if we miss the intermediate steps then we are bound to fail anyway.
We also need to realise that the goal was only ever symbolic, the real objective was not to run a marathon but to get fit, and perhaps to lose weight. This is not achieved in the running of the marathon but in all the preparation that happens beforehand.
This is exactly the same when it comes to digital projects. We are obsessed with big game changing, future proofing projects but more often than not they fail because organisations lack the ‘digital fitness’ to complete them. Worse still, in the pursuit of what might be considered unobtainable outcomes, we are likely to discourage people from engaging in the next digital transformation project when it inevitably comes around.
If you want to pursue big digital projects, then the logical place to start is with much smaller ones. Smaller projects help develop digital skills and create a sense of achievement and confidence with technology. It is a longer path and involves more work to slowly build towards your big projects but this is the work that will make your organisation ‘digitally fit’. And just like with running a marathon, you will realise that in getting digitally fit you will have increased agility, reduced costs and made the improvements to quality that really mattered anyway.
