I want to tell you a story about Luis. This is not his real name, as I need to protect his identity. But it’s a real story, and one that is typical of the phenomenon of digital leadership and change in many organizations.
Luis was a highly successful entrepreneur. He had set up his own digital marketing organization, advising major multinational companies on how they might best transform their organizations by using new digital marketing strategies and tools, improving their customer experience.
Then, the inevitable happened. Luis was headhunted by one of his clients, a leading multinational retail company. He was given the title of chief digital officer (CDO) and a seat at the board table. He had the exciting, if daunting task of digitalizing the organization’s marketing, while at the same time aligning sales and procurement to create a fit-for-future organization.
Luis’s story is repeated in many other organizations. What’s remarkable about the story is not the beginning, but the ending. Just over a year into this promising role, Luis resigned in frustration. He moved to an emerging market to take up the position of CDO with a purely digital player. He hasn’t looked back since and he is currently living his dream.
No real plan at all
So, what went wrong when so much promised to go right? In many ways, the seeds of failure were sown right at the beginning. The company’s digital ambition was poorly scoped and lacked any clear plan. In fact, the plan was simply to recruit a CDO and ask him to drive an unscoped transformation, which isn’t a plan at all.
As so often happens, the senior managers got carried away using the language of digitalization without knowing what they were really trying to say. And as Luis began to implement digital change and the migration from legacy systems, it quickly became clear that the potential disruption to operations and revenue generation had been significantly underestimated.
Digitalization is not a plug-and-play activity. It requires a series of carefully coordinated migrations, often leading to an initial increase in costs as the legacy and new systems run in tandem.
Gradually, Luis’s digitalization turned from being a technical process into a more emotional and beliefs-driven one. This is very typical. Digital innovation brings changes to many people’s working lives. But this often comes without the necessary levels of engagement and logic that will inspire collaboration along the change journey. And without engagement on the part of those affected by the change, resistance is natural.
A battle of beliefs
Involvement with digital change processes is challenging for obvious reasons. Analogue professionals often lack the expertise of digital specialists, and thus struggle to comprehend their logic. At the same time, digital specialists often lack the ability to communicate their expertise and generally lack understanding of the analogue realities of companies’ current operations, and of the complexity of change. It’s a perfect storm.
What generally follows is a battle of beliefs. Those who are more digital are convinced that their perfect future can be achieved at record speed. Those who are more analogue are convinced of the need to slow things down, focusing on mitigating the potential destruction of revenue-generating operations. Because people are arguing about risks, beliefs and future situations rather than hard facts, the arguments are unwinnable. Resistance drives emotion, emotion drives conflict and conflict results in failure, with everyone losing in the end.
With conflict, of course, comes opportunity. When beliefs and expertise levels collide, the smart thing to do is to recognize this as the moment when learning can take place, positions can be synthesized and innovation can be driven forward. Yet, conflict generally means emotional entrenchment and ego defence — and an end to constructive conversations. The immaturity of so many leaders carries with it a huge cost.
Life, not just leadership
Stories, Disney tries to convince us, have happy endings. In the corporate world, endings are much fuzzier. Lessons are seldom learned. Heroes and heroines exit convinced of their own righteousness. People walk away telling their own stories about the same story. Often, it’s unclear what happened at all.
In the end, perhaps, what’s so interesting about Luis’s story is that it’s not simply a story about Luis. Nor is it simply a story about the challenges of digitalization. Instead, it’s a story that shows the seemingly never-ending challenge that people face when working together. Some people are oriented to the future, others to the here and now. Some are oriented to innovation, others to tried-and-tested practices. Yet, all are committed to their own beliefs, struggling to understand what others are saying because they lack the necessary expertise. They struggle to communicate because there are strong emotions in the room. And this all takes place in a context in which there is a lack of data to show who is right and who is wrong.
That’s the story of life, not just leadership, you might say. Yet, I wonder whether we are honest and open enough to truly admit this. If we were, we might see different endings.