This might be heretical, but if there’s a phrase I want to see die, it’s this one: “Digital Transformation.”
This phrase – indeed, this entire idea – is doing more harm than good. All it once, it means nothing, but implies everything. It’s caused us to spend more money, waste more time, and destroy more morale than anything in recent memory.
It’s time for the death of digital transformation.
It’s time for us to start thinking more about “digital incrementalism” or “digital evolution.”
Hear me out –
Why It’s a Problem
What does “digital transformation” even mean? Do you know? Does anyone?
It’s one of those earworm phrases that we like, but can’t quite explain why. It reminds me of “information superhighway” – a phrase for internet that got stuck in all our heads back in 1995 or so. No one could quite explain what it was, but everyone loved the idea and the imagery it evoked.
And such as it is with “transformation.” Because everyone loves transformations. Before and after pictures of weight loss or home renovation are surefire attention-getters. We love the idea of something being a bad state, then in a good state, without seeing anything that happened in between.
(Notice no one talks about “digital transforming” – present tense, like something is in the process of happening. We only want to talk about when we’re transformed, and can mentally encapsulate the completed process as a “transformation.”)
But wait – did you know that “digital transformation” has a Wikipedia page? It reads like this:
Digital transformation is the adoption of digital technology by an organization to digitize non-digital products, services or operations.
Okay, that’s fair. If we’re talking about a non-digital process that we can bring digital tools to bear on, then sure, we can transform something digitally.
But that’s usually not what we’re talking about. Usually we’re talking about continuing to develop and improve currently digital processes. The web has been around for almost 30 years now. I’m not saying it’s penetrating every corner of industry and business, but there are a lot of digital-native organizations or already-transformed organizations.
And this all made sense with digital transformation wasn’t the norm. For a long time now, we’ve been transforming non-digital businesses and processes. So “doing digital transformation” was considered different than business as usual.
But here’s the current state of affairs –
We’re all digitally transforming. All the time.
What was once a special status – signifying moving from one stage to the next – is now just what we do.
And this is my main complaint. By fixating on concepts of “transformation,” we’ve taken our eye off the ball. I’ve seen organizations stuck in place, no moving at all, because they’re too concerned with burning everything down and starting over. Too many organizations think it’s “transformation or nothing.”
I’m reminded of software engineer, Joel Spolsky, who wrote about how programmers tend to want to rebuild everything, all the time.
…the first thing [we] want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds.
And this is true. It’s rare that someone says, “I could improve this a little bit.”
We’re addicted to revolution.
The Damage Being Done
Beyond me just getting annoyed at a phrase I dislike, I think the fixation with “transformation” has damaged organizations and employees.
Here’s how –
Transformation has caused us to not move when we should. I’ve seen organizations that could make their digital situations better right now, but they don’t because they’re waiting for something big to happen. “We have a killer strategy for next year,” or whatever.
If you claim the sky is falling too often, people will believe you. And every time they want to make something better, they’ll think they have to build something to hold up the sky.
I told a friend over lunch that I wanted to do an experiment where I asked people, “What’s one thing you could do to make your digital properties better? And why aren’t you doing it?” The key is that my research strategy would be to ensure candor by getting the participants drunk first. Freed from the shackles of the traditional talking points, I bet the responses would tell some stories.
Transformation is burning out employees. I believe that burnout isn’t caused by too much work. It’s caused by a mismatch between work and results. If employees are empowered and make changes and see results – no matter how small – they’re much more likely to stay engaged.
Take some small wins. Don’t bet the farm on a massive victory that’s so far off your employees won’t stick around to see it.
Remember that your organization is powered by humans, and they need to understand the vision and be able to wrap their heads around the specific steps to move forward. Don’t get too far ahead of yourself or your team
Transformation is preventing us from learning. You need to freedom to make small changes, even make mistakes, and learn from them. Your digital properties need to be in a constant state of flux – if you’re not agile, you’re not learning. Be right, be wrong, just be something.
And this might be the worst result of all: we’re teaching our employees that they have to be right all the time. Don’t take a small step to learn something. No, no – better plan out a massive “transformation” strategy to Fix Everything™. And don’t screw that up.
Somewhere along the way, curiosity died on the altar of transformation. Towards a Better Future
New Yorker writer Atul Gawande talked about how the work that primary care physicians do is so much more important than the work surgeons do. He said this in an article appropriately titled “The Heroism of Incremental Care.” He writes:
I was drawn to medicine by the aura of heroism – by the chance to charge in and solve a dangerous problem, [but] success is not about the episodic, momentary victories. It is about the longer view of incremental steps that produce sustained progress.
That last bit has always stuck with me:
incremental steps that produce sustained progress
Why do we almost actively avoid this?
I’m convinced it’s because we’ve reached an unfortunate inflection point in business and society where we feel like we need to be right, all the time. We’re become a generation repelled by the idea of trying anything small – either fixing a problem in place, or admitting that you don’t know if something will work.
There’s a humility to incrementalism that somehow fell out of fashion. We want to boil every ocean, rock every boat, transform all the things. But what if the solution is less glamorous? What if the solution is in the unglamorous, the pedestrian, the everyday?
No one remembers the meal you didn’t put on Instagram, and no one cares about your tiny success unless it becomes some pithy motivational story on LinkedIn.
Back to Gawande’s quote above-- it takes on more significance when you realize that Gawande is a surgeon himself. Yet here he is saying, effectively, “the best outcome to surgery is to work diligently to make sure you never have to do it.”
Could that be true of digital? I might not able to kill the phrase “digital transformation,” but let me say this unambiguously for the record –
The best digital transformation is the one you never have to do.
What We Can Do
Okay, everyone take a breath.
Instead of transforming our digital properties, we need to work at evolving them instead. Let’s look around, and make things better where we are.
There’s two ways to solve this, that – ironically – mirror the problems with digital transformation itself. We can go through a “attitudinal transformation,” which is where we transform our perspective on improvement. If you were enamored with the idea of transformation a thousand words ago, I hope that maybe you’re less enraptured by this point.
But more importantly, we can incrementally improve our ability to improve incrementally.
The solution for anything is concrete steps that move us forward. If there’s anything that The Four Disciplines of Execution taught me, it’s that you can’t do a goal, you can only do activities that move you forward towards a goal.
So, here are some activities that might help, but know that this list could literally be endless.
Find the right metric. What is your digital property supposed to be doing? Why do you have a website or an app? Do you even know? How is success measured?
There’s another phrase that’s old and tired, but still quite relevant: “move the needle.” We all love to move that needle, but what is the needle supposed to measure? Who knows?
Too often, we’re just trying to “make things better,” but we don’t even know what “better” means.
By what quantitative measure will your digital estate be evaluated? Only when you definitively know that will you be able to devise incremental strategies to improve it.
Start experimenting. You won’t know until you try, so find something you want to change, then change it and see how it performs. You need to reduce the friction of change – introduce systems that makes it easier to make changes, and easier to roll back from them.
I spent 15 years in professional services, and here’s a hard truth: on a new digital property, no one knows what works. You can theorize about it, you can make an educated guess, but the only people who know what your customers are going to respond to are the customer themselves.
So how do you ask them? You experiment. You ask by making small changes and seeing how they – in aggregate – respond. And then you cement good changes into permanency, and throw away less good changes.
There’s a humility that goes with experimentation. Admit you don’t know what works, and resolve to find out.
Refine the creative process. How does content get from idea to artifact? How do you go from some idea someone got in the shower, to a published web page or email campaign?
When it comes to creativity, we tend to downplay process. We want to live in a world where content just springs forth, unshackled from the constraints of the real world. But that’s not how it works – content is created by humans banging away at keyboards or Photoshop or Final Cut or whatever. It takes work, and and soon as you have more than one person involved, it takes process.
You need a common collaboration space, an editorial calendar, commenting, discussion, ways for your team to come together on content and improve the process over time.
The creative process itself is much more stable than the technologies used within it. There’s nothing worth more of a time investment than resolving how your staff work together.