Designing leadership and digital transformation
Well, he would say, what would it look like to design a conversation on leadership and digital transformation?
For any conference and top-down setting, « know your audience » is the single tip that everyone has in mind. In a conversation, whether you silently or explicitely agree to it, you build a moment that is likely to never exist again. As there might only be this one set of stakeholders, at this time and place, at this given moment. And this conversation should be co-designed.
The greatness of that moment is the set of stakeholders contributing to that conversation. The ones that can participate physically and the ones you can refer for. In a given organization, any collaborator brings a set of knowledge that will contribute to both topics, as in our case leadership and digital are both enablers and drivers for strategic transformation. But as in any conversations, there are different kinds of players to play with, such as active contributors, listeners and contradictors, clear communicators and live brainstormers (confession that one is likely to be me). Know who they are to make the best of the conversation.
If we were to design such a conversation …
First, when thinking on leadership and digital transformation, it is unlikely that those stakeholders will have a common imaginary. I mean, a common and desirable understanding of it. What would be yours? That’s where I’d like to start, shaping whatever diverse views have been built by the stakeholders of that conversation to build an aligned imaginary.
Their definitions underline as many opportunities and features that leadership or digital transformation represented for them so far. Their divergences and convergences set the path for many explorations of what those could be, for which you have to quickly and systematically explore to decide which explorations to go for.
About leadership
Don’t confuse Leadership with management a friend of mine recently said to me, leading HR transformation in an industrial group. Some are great at one or the other, few are great at both, but both can be learned.
Management is written in the organisation chart, Leadership is earned and embodied. If there’s one rule of thumb I would like to stick to, that’s leadership by example, either for me or my teammates. Two books that inspired me on both of those topics were Search Inside Yourself , learning to manage my emotions and Scaling up. My next one will be John Maeda’s thoughts on leading MIT media lab in rough economic times. The tempo, the goals and the environment of that conversation, be it offline, online or a mix of both, will contribute to it’s quality and success. There are also plenty of tips to keep in mind to facilitate such moments in the organization, such as motivation tips ,worth repeating.
Conversations can be designed and leadership is in a way designing great conversations, sharing passion and purpose for action. Deciding on which conversations to start, which ones to pursue and which ones to end. But, if finally, Leadership and digital transformation is not applicable anymore in your organization in an existing context, then change the context. Keep in mind that every stakeholder involved is responsible for the quality of the conversation.
Going on Digital transformation
Few years ago I was spending the New Year’s eve in Australia and among the friend’s crew was a country manager of a famous mobility disruptor. He was not partying at 4am but rather sharing pricing models and customers behaviors between the first cities entering the new years eve and the latest cities about to do so on the rest of the world. I would later discover that continuous learning really was a key driver for digital and operational excellency in this organisation. Any team member from any given city at the time could share a new process and if more than 2 cities rated that process as “great”, then it would be applied to the rest of this disruptor playground.
From tools to culture to behaviors, digital transformation challenges so many organisations where digital was not baked in the first place. Either it is for adoption or habit transformation, with a business or social impact in mind, it all ends to designing great conversations between humans, systems technology and processes. That disruptor had few % on technology and many on operational excellency to account for it’s success. Your company and internal decision makers will need proofs of impact!
Designing the conversation is half the work of designing the action
Adhesion, cohesion and strategical alignment are success indicators for innovation management and all come from well designed conversations. The ones that set stakeholders on the path to the right problem to solve, the ones that lead them through healthy systematic explorations, the ones that shed light on hidden or new relations of knowledge and conditions of actions, either offline or online.
At the end we should not fear such a conversation, either as oneself or as the organisation, leadership and digital transformation both being great personal and collective journey where anyone could be tomorrow’s ally.
Culturally, the goals, motivations and styles of conversations tend up to be really different and so it is for leadership expectations across cultures.
Having a few tools to move on objectifying both Leadership and digital transformation could help you:
For leadership, it might range from leadership measurement tools, such as GELI Measures (done by INSEAD pr Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries) to building data through empathy technology (still in their infancy but worth exploring). For Digital transformation it might be aiming for continuous learning improvements and building new actionable KPIs. Such as the % of right knowledge to acquire and build along your digital transformation on your organization readiness, and their desirability, feasibility, and business value.
Leadership is a long ride and I am looking forward to it, as there is only that much change you can provoke upon you or your environment, you should better enjoy it (another good friend of mine recently said). But digital transformation does not have to be a long ride, we are here for that.
