Speaking of organizational transformation, there are topics that are a bit like perennial favorites in the sense that with every major technological innovation, we see the same mistakes being repeated despite the same warnings, and in the end we will draw the same conclusion until the next time.
New collaborative tools, systems overhauls, and now automation at all costs… There are countless projects launched at breakneck speed with a lot of hype and announcements that are sometimes a little too flashy. Technology is everywhere, omnipresent, sometimes imposed, often misunderstood. And despite colossal investments, the results rarely live up to the stated ambitions.
Why? Because digital transformation is too often confused with technological transformation guided by tools. In one case, we transform ourselves to take advantage of the technology, which then serves as a catalyst; in the other, we hope that the tools will generate the transformation.
- Transformations often fail because they are guided by technology rather than the real needs of employees.
- A tool does not create transformation if it is not part of a process overhaul and a clear vision.
- When misused, technology reinforces dysfunctions instead of correcting them.
- Successful transformation requires first identifying objectives, obstacles, irritants and obsolete processes.
- Technology only works if it is supported by the business lines, integrated into management and aligned with usage.
The myth of the self-supporting tool
Change is difficult, that’s true, but more often than not it’s the way we want to make people change that is wrong (Manage change or change management? and Change and transformation need a new approach).
Fortunately, technology is here and it is going to change everything. Above all, it will free us from having to question too many things because employees will be forced to change in order to use it and, as they are demanding modern and user-friendly tools, a miracle will happen.
But technology is never self-sustaining. It is only an extension of ourselves that helps us solve problems (Technology Doesn’t Solve Problems), but if it does not correspond to the way we want to solve them or the way we are asked to work to solve them, we will not get very far.
Technology that does not solve employee problems the way they want it to ends up in the trash, and exhortations from management have never changed anything (Letter from a wannabe digital employee to his CEO).
We might as well remind ourselves once again: for 20 years, we have been hearing the same old story about hyper-digitalized customers and employees who, on the other hand, are not up to speed in terms of usage. But unless we admit that there are people whose job is to be customers and who do not work, we are talking about the same people.
The problem is not the employee who refuses the technology or the useless technology, it is the organizational context in which we want him to use it (We should not expect an application to work in environments for which its assumptions are not valid). The client, the private user of technology, does not become stupid and resistant when he walks through the office door : it is what he finds on the other side of the door that is the problem.
Technology does not transform anything by itself
A very simple truth is often forgotten: technology does not transform anything without a clear intention, without a redesign of processes, and without the support of teams. This has always been true and the lesson will be taught to us again with IA (Making digital adoption work):
“Leaders of transformation must look beyond the characteristics of the product and ask themselves ‘how does this solve the problem of the employee or the customer?‘
If you had to remember only one thing and have only one principle for transforming an organization, it would be this:everything comes from solving a problem.
Technology and change in general is a product that the employee buys with engagement and for 20 years we have been told, speaking of businesses and products, that everything starts not with a brilliant idea but with a problem to be solved.
Hence the interest, moreover, in not thinking “in one’s own little world” but in listening, in thinking about the customer and the employee. I myself have had ideas that I thought were great and that I ended up throwing in the trash because they did not pass the test of alignment with the employee and the customer (Do you have a delivery model for management?). This allowed me to classify them in the category “managerial fad”, to bury them at the bottom of a drawer, making sure they never come out again.
A tool does not solve a problem of operation, governance or culture: there is simply no app for that (Engagement, employee experience and well-being at work: there is no app for that!). Worse still, by accelerating poorly designed practices, it can exacerbate irritants and increase complexity (and worse, complication) by creating an illusion of efficiency.
I will always remember a speech given by John Chambers, then CEO of Cisco, to MIT students in the late 2000s (Enterprise 2.0 : the CISCO case) in which he kept repeating that the benefit of technology was speed and scale.
Going faster and on a larger scale is the one and only promise of technology. Everything else involves a transformation of working methods, organization, processes and management. If we forget this, we end up in a well-known situation: the more the business invests in technology, the more employees complain about information overload and demands (Hyperconnectivity in the workplace: digital becomes a burden and Eliyahu Goldratt’s fictional interview on infobesity and bottlenecks in knowledge work), loss of bearings and incoherent processes.
Digitized chaos is bigger and faster chaos
I sometimes hear that the worst thing that can happen when deploying a new technology is that people don’t take it on board and don’t use it, but that’s wrong. The worst thing is when the technology makes things worse.
I was talking about speed and scale. When you slap a technology on top of a dysfunctional organization, on top of poorly designed processes or workflows, on top of a flawed work organization, the organization will dysfunction faster and on a larger scale.
I like to use the example of a machine that produces 1% defective parts. If it produces 10 per hour, it is tolerable; if it produces 1000, it is a disaster. In both cases, it is 1%, but in terms of volume and cost, it is incomparable.
Too often, the implementation of a technology boils down to the digital transposition of existing dysfunctions. A useless process, worthless reporting, a poorly thought-out process, and on top of all that, a layer of complexity is added to an environment already saturated with tools and notifications (A complicated IT experience. Irritant #7 of the Employee Experience)
And the result is familiar to everyone:
- a stack of poorly integrated tools,
- duplicate information,
- employees forced to navigate a digital labyrinth (Employee experience is sick of the software industry)
- more time spent fighting the tools than using them for what they were designed for.
Moreover, in 2022, a Gartner study estimated that 47% of employees suffered from “digital friction“, (The top digital friction blockers killing employee productivity and how to spot them), i.e. an increased complexity of their work environment due to an overabundance of tools that are often poorly designed and integrated.
One promises ease and creates friction, one promises speed and adds complication.
Before talking about technology, any transformation begins with four questions.
What are the operational objectives? If you don’t know what you want to achieve, a target vision of the expected result, you risk getting lost along the way.
What hinders performance or collaboration? Or, in other words, what prevents people from doing their jobs as well or as quickly as they think they are capable of doing.
What irritants affect the employee experience? Technology will never solve problems of work organization, culture or management.
Which processes deserve to be rethought, simplified or eliminated? I come back to the questions of organizational debt (AI Reasoning Is Cool, But First How Can We Tackle Organisational Debt? and How to Tackle the Biggest Threat to Your Team’s Growth). Over time, processes are piled up through reorganizations and transformations in the hope that one day they will settle and create oil, and in the end they add unnecessary constraints to an already complex process.
Once again, 70% of digital transformation projects fail to achieve their objectives due to a lack of strategic alignment, team engagement or process clarity (Flipping the Odds of Digital Transformation Success) which is significant enough to warrant attention.
Only once these questions have been answered can technology play its role as an accelerator. It serves an improvement project, not a strategic or managerial reflection, and once again it must solve a problem that employees face.
This also leads to a transformation of the management itself: technology cannot be entrusted solely to the IT department or to marketing, as is too often the case. It must be supported by the business lines, integrated into management routines, and accompanied by real work on usage, culture and skills.
We therefore come back to the basics and the “People first, technology second” approach of Thomas Davenport and George Westerman (Why So Many High-Profile Digital Transformations Fail): it is behavior, skills and human decisions that determine the value created by technology.
Bottom line
Transformation is not achieved because the right tool has been chosen, but because the right questions have been asked beforehand.
As one of my former eminent colleagues used to say, “technology is just the ball that allows you to play”. If we don’t agree on the game and the rules, the ball won’t be of much use: try playing basketball with a rugby ball and we’ll talk about it.
It does not therefore replace the work of analysis, clarification and organizational design, but supports it. It amplifies what works as much as what does not work.
An organization that is poorly structured, poorly managed or poorly aligned with its objectives will not become more efficient just because a new platform is deployed. On the contrary, it risks becoming more complicated, fragmented and exhausting for its employees.
Image: digital transformation by TenPixels via Shutterstock.
