Transformation consultants: it’s your job to make yourself redundant
A mildly disconcerting thought has been rattling around my head, the more time I spend doing digital transformation.
As a consultant, your job is often to introduce new habits; to disrupt the old ways of thinking and doing. In digital transformation, we’re trying to move organisations from a place where they stop thinking of digital as a separate entity — something that ‘other people do’ (one you can safely outsource) to a culture and structure that’s capable of designing, producing, and maintaining digital user-centric services itself.
It fits Clearleft’s trajectory as a company — we’ve always been influencing the way design is done, but recently we’re less about production of a product or service, and more about helping organisations get better at delivering on their own.
Often, we’re opening the door so that others can walk through it. Doing just enough design in partnership with a team onsite that the organisation gets to see the value in working in a digitally-native, user-centred way.
When I take this consulting work to its logical conclusion, then the true goal is to make ourselves redundant. Organisations don’t need more consultants. They don’t need external teams handling their principle channels. They need a structure and culture that means they can do it themselves. Once you’re done, you’re out. Yes, they do need outsider thinking to innovate and change, but if you internalise the process and empower people, then you don’t need it as much of it.
So the job of a modern agency or consultant in digital transformation is to help mature an organisation to the point where they’re not needed.
The messy reality is, of course, a little different. I hope I’m still useful to most of the orgs I work for. Culture change, after all, is a cloud problem — you’re never really done — it can take years. As Jared M. Spool says about Disney’s 20+ year shift:
“For an organization to move beyond the UX Tipping Point, it must first become literate in user experience, then fluent in how to produce great experiences. This doesn’t happen all at once, it can take years.”
But anyone serious about transformation must face this humbling thought: if you’re successful shifting an org, then you won’t be needed any more.
