Blog Series Part 1: It's Time For A New Beginning

The Critical Distinction Between Being Prepared Sufficiently Well and Well Enough as You Can Be

As a Digital Transformation Leader, I have a big question: Are you prepared sufficiently well to embark on your digital transformation journey? No trick. You likely think you are. Statistically, you're not. But that's ok. A subtle yet very costly distinction traps many between prepared sufficiently well and well enough as you can be. Most inadvertently settle for the latter. You cannot, after all, know what you don't know. You've scrutinized your peers, team, analysts, consultants, and vendors and have satisfied yourself to the best of your ability. The consensus is comfortable; you'll set off, confident you'll learn what you don't know as you go. What else is there?

What Causes Low Satisfaction Rates in Digital Investments?

The current approach to technology adoption, honed and refined over the past thirty years, is today's default state of play. Modern approaches to implementing technology should make things easy enough by now, but they're not. Downward trends in satisfaction ratings from digital investments still need improvement at the Executive, Sponsor, and Business user levels across every measured dimension. From cost and effort to utility and adaptability, the situation is worsening. Why? — read on. As with patients undergoing a complex procedure with extremely high mortality rates, whether the status quo in digital transformation outcomes is acceptable — depends entirely on you.

Understanding the Risks and Rewards of Digital Transformation

In the context of spreading and accelerating digitalization, consider impact. Do you see a threat or an opportunity? Is failure to adopt dealing a structural weakness to your enterprise, or is successful uptake developing a leading competitive strength? Given how fast digitalization is spreading, connecting, and empowering automation, augmentation, and experiences, constantly changing everything, where do you stand? How confident and able are you and your team to fulfill your side of the obligation? Are you and your teams nervous and frustrated with how your programs play out? Are you left stunned by how we didn't see this coming? Are you and your leaders constantly left renegotiating the terms of delivery — with an ever longer list of lesser acceptable excuses?

You Are Accountable for Your Digital Transformation Success

The hard truth, as the leader of your initiative, you — are accountable. No amount of risk transference to any number of third parties can alter that fact. No matter — the outcome is yours to own. You must rely on professionalism and expertise to form a sound judgment to succeed. In this case, you are the patient, not the doctor, and the risk is on you. Until you become the expert, it's hard for you and your team to evaluate the necessary quality against unpracticed dimensions. You sign the medical waiver, undergo the procedure, and live or die by the outcome. You all naturally do your best — this is not in question. Statistically, that's not enough.

The good news is there is a better way to improve the odds of success and likely stack them in your favor.

Gain Confidence and Control Through Understanding

The potential benefits of completing this digitalization journey are immense, depending on your situation. Herein lies the problem. It's no secret that the transformation journey, in part or aggregate, often brings debilitating hidden risks and dangers that severely diminish resources, outcomes, and reputations.

Navigating Challenges with New Understanding and Practice

As a digital transformation leader charged with steering your transformation ship, you may naturally harbor mixed excitement and overwhelm by the difficult-to-navigate opportunities, challenges, and obstacles ahead. The lack of confidence, faux bravery, or over-caution are symptoms of uncertainty. While much of what lies ahead for you remains unknowable, your journey is made much safer with the proper understanding and approach. Consider your commute to work or visiting an infrequent holiday destination; you don't know many individual journey specifics, yet through set conditions, practice, and experience, many of the risks and issues causing you the most significant challenges can be predicted, preempted, mitigated, and managed.

Developing Authority and Transparency to Reach Your Destination

With this new understanding, much like an improved MRI over X-ray, or a Sat-Nav with traffic, over an analog map, you and your team can yield new transparency — heightened confidence and an authoritative capability — that puts you firmly back in the driver's seat in control, all the way to your destination. Contrary to popular belief, due to how the money flows — most delivery partners value your ability to fulfill your obligations.

The Value and Fallacy of Predictability

Speak with any leadership team, and they'll tell you consistent results and predictability are prized skills and valued attributes. From stakeholders to employees, everyone respects stability—the more hostile the outside, the more appreciative the inside. A premium is a reputation for getting things done in a measured, predictable way, even in hostile, unknowable, impossibly challenged conditions. We want certainty and convince ourselves we have it. We are subsequently blindsided; when mitigating uncertainty, we construct beliefs with a flawed process that leads us to see what we want to see.

Mastering the art of fusing new digital technologies with ingenious business capability under rapidly evolving and always-changing conditions is precisely such an endeavor. A complex cocktail of moving parts, a potent mix to propel you forwards in unimaginable leaps or explode in your face. Fundamental mastery of change, in this age of digitalization, where advancements occur at an unprecedented rate, we must shift from dark art, hope, and alchemy to science.

Even though it can be challenging to narrow down bold moves and concrete, repeatable actions that will yield predictable, consistent results, there are emergent patterns of success. As with your commute, these, in time, when practiced, become learned behaviors and essential capabilities for safe, predictable, and consistent passage. Crucial attributes for any digital leader, team, and organization, regardless of nature, form, purpose, or size.

The most significant finding is, developing these abilities requires minimal effort on your and your team's part to gain a significant positive upside to achieving predictable scaled outcomes. As with any industrialized, continuously improving process, you will, in all likelihood, do much more with less to infinity. You must first understand the principles and apply them to your unique circumstances.

Achieving Adaptive Leadership for Sustainable Competitive Edge

The friction present today in most digital transformations at the initiative level or in the aggregate is unacceptable from an industry practitioner's viewpoint.

As noted earlier, with a high-risk, high-demand medical procedure where mortality remains consistently high — is the onus on the patients to stay brave and hopeful or on the profession to make operations safer?

Building a Framework to Prepare and Arm Your Team

After several years of studying the main reasons for endemic digital transformation failure and writing about these persistent hurdles, we have developed an exciting breakthrough. It's too early for a prescription to guarantee outcomes. Still, there is a better way to think about and approach modern digital transformations in many cases. Once you and your teams understand this process, it will uncover and explain away the many too "obvious" issues that persistently surface late in post-mortems and lessons learned.

After numerous conversations, I am confident that the knowledge gained from this approach will help you and your team prepare for whatever phase or stage of the adoption cycle. As the adage goes — Forewarned is forearmed.

Unlock the Keys to Adaptive Leadership

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of transitioning from an outdated technology delivery model to a modern, sustainable, and adaptive system? Are you trying to understand the mistakes you're likely experiencing today to take the next step but need help knowing where to start?

Consider using the Transformation Pyramid model to orientate yourself. Where ever you are on your journey — you will be at one of these stages. The question is, are you taking the right actions for the level you're at? Many organizations are not, and this is the source of their challenge.

For example, one common mistake without first visualizing the journey in the model is trying to get to your vision in reverse order. Many organizations have the concept of what they want — usually advanced capabilities, then start with the wrong actions as they have no grounded context for where they are. It's easy, to begin with designing standardization and simplification, synergy and orchestration, and assume with the necessary effort; they can accommodate the essential lifeforce at the lower levels of their organization. Accommodating these needs is rarely the case, and the whole transformation effort is compromised.

In the upcoming blog, we'll explore all the challenges within each stage of the journey. Get ready to take your team on a progressive path of adaptive leadership, enabling you to gain new insights and set yourself up for success now and in the future.

Empowering Your Organization for Adaptive Leadership

Remember, we are on a learning journey, not a destination. From the knowledge you will gain from these blogs and the experience you will have from approaching your journey from a new perspective, I am confident that you can pose more salient questions and make better-informed decisions when presented with vital strategic and situational choices. You will ultimately lead your team and your organization — to the summit of adaptive leadership, where rapidly adopting technology can become a growth advantage over competitors struggling with their old ways, allowing for sustainable success in both present and future business endeavors.

Getting Started on Your Adaptive Leadership Journey

I am excited to finally introduce this groundbreaking approach — designed to induce the mindset and thought processes needed for you and your team to transition from an outdated technology delivery model into a modern, sustainable, and adaptive technology adoption system.

My next blogs will focus on the following:

• Understanding the Pyramid. Exploring in more detail the challenges of each stage in the journey pyramid and enabling you to set in context the mistakes you're likely living with today.
• From this foundational understanding, the following blog will address the mindset you need to view the world from a fresh perspective that will, in turn, enable you to reset your current reality to a better trajectory.
• From here, we can start working toward the solution approaches that will carry you along the right path to success.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

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