Org Transformation and the Digital Mindset
I’m a longtime advocate and enthusiast for digital transformation and have followed various company efforts to accomplish this evolutionary shift. It’s not easy, and the majority of businesses get it wrong or fail entirely. But the biggest challenge with digital transformation isn’t moving services to the cloud, getting employees to use chat, or even inventing new business models (which should be a major objective). The biggest issue is the lack of digital people in the organization.
The debate of learning vs fixed mindsets entered the transformation zeitgeist a few years ago, and I’ve often considered how you address this when mindsets are some of the hardest things to change. What are practical ways to think about mindsets, especially inside legacy organizations where I’ve been tasked with instituting change? I’ve seen it often aligns with those that think digitally and those that think industrially.
Digital people have mindsets based on learning, trying, and growing. Digital people know that nothing stays the same. They understand that for every way you do something today, a newer, faster, better way will pop up tomorrow. They are curious and want to learn every day. They know new tools, processes, and thought patterns remove old blockers and enable them to do more, better.
Contrast that to the non-digital Industrial Age mindset that hails predictability and repetition. Non-digital people want to keep things the way they are and do what they did yesterday. They seek known problems that have prescripted solutions. They see growth in minor step improvements and get stuck in a slow loop of optimization.
Often this difference of thinking and work style is associated with generations, particularly boomers vs digital natives. The latter grew up using technology that changed daily and naturally developed rapid learning skills that enabled them to put these tools to work as soon as they emerged. While age is a predictive indicator, it’s not the reason. There are technology change agents in their 70s and professional luddites in their 20s.
It comes down to a mindset that embraces learning and iterating vs one that prefers conformity and certainty.
We will always need processes that remain stable and predictable. But we must have people with those processes that question, learn, and try new things, that understand nothing is stagnant in this world and possibilities are endless if you constantly push forward and learn. These are your digital people and the ones that bring about the new outcomes senior leaders say they need. Unfortunately, they are also the people that get shut down the most in the daily work, in the project update meetings, and in the group sessions where decisions are made. The status quo assembly line mindset wins out when that is the majority voice in the room.
So what can we do?
Hire for digital mindsets
This is easy when hiring for digital marketing, UX, and software teams. But also look for it in every role. Ask candidates how they learn, how they keep up with changing trends in their field, and how they stay close to their customer, be that internal or external. People who do these things are the ones that push things forward, even in small ways, on a daily basis.
Be intentional with the balance in our teams
There will always be a core of people with the incumbent mindset, and they can be necessary to keep the lights on as you navigate change. However, as you assemble working teams, be cognizant of the mix of people. One fixed mindset can stifle forward momentum. But when more than half of the room has a “this is the way we’ve always done it” approach, progress becomes impossible.
Reward the behavior we want to see
Incentives are typically the last thing to change when we go through digital transformations. Leadership expects new behaviors and outcomes but keeps the same metrics and scorecards in place. True, it does take time and effort to change actual metric structures, but there are other ways to change incentives. If the senior leadership asks how we are balancing teams or what we have done recently to learn and iterate, people will collectively start to change behaviors in order to better answer those questions. Rewards come in many forms, and everyone appreciates approval for a job well done.
Mindset is potentially the hardest thing to get someone to change. We can explain the rationale for change and we can reinforce the behaviors we want to see, but ultimately a fixed mindset doesn’t budge. A digital mindset adjusts to change and even seeks better ways to implement changes as they come about. Do we see the future of success in assumptions and stagnation or learning and growth? Better to think digital first, then transformation is easy.