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We live in an era of transformative change. New developments in technology are coming in at a speed never experienced before. Artificial intelligence, robotics, blockchain, connected devices are just examples of technologies with the potential to disrupt entire industries. Often referenced as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, this latest wave of technology breakthroughs has enabled the emergence of completely new ways of delivering products and services.
As direct consequence, customers’ expectations are changing. Customers demand more from businesses: from on-demand, personalised services to seamless experiences across channels. At the same time, competition is increasing significantly. Nowadays, the littlefish can eat the big one, no matter where it comes from – and this is the new “businessas usual”. This shifting context is creating great pressure on companies to change the way they create and deliver value to stay competitive in the market.
BUT HOW DO ORGANISATIONS TYPICALLY RESPOND TO THIS PRESSURE AND NEW REALITY?
We see two emergent organisational needs and consequent approaches:
Need for digital transformation – Through the digitisation of internal tools and processes, organisations try to increase efficiencies, accuracy and reduce internal costs.
Need for agile culture – Through the adoption of methods and processes such as lean, scrum, agile, or design sprints, organisations try to become more entrepreneurial, innovative, decrease time-to-market and avoid the risks of sinking time and money into products or services that people don’t want.
As much as we recognise the good intentions behind these approaches, we see a big missed opportunity here. By oversimplifying digital transformation tomean digital tools and agile culture to mean new methodologies, companies fail to put these initiatives into the bigger framework of the need for business transformation in order to be able to respond competitively to today’s changed reality.
At Fuse, we believe that by looking at these two priorities as two connected parts of the same whole, you create a virtuous cycle that leads towards the future-proof organisation you want to be — not just delivering bottom line ROI, but also top-line growth and unexpected new potential.
KILLING TWO BIRDS WITH ONE STONE
So how do you create this virtuous cycle to unlock the full potential of your efforts and reach your organisation’s vision and strategic goals? We believe that, to succeed, business transformation requires alignment of multiple organisational factors: strategy, people and culture. Only once alignment across these three elements is found, organisations are in a position to identify the best enablers for change – be them new IT tools or innovation methods.
FIND ALIGNMENT BETWEEN STRATEGY, PEOPLE AND CULTURE…
…THEN IDENTIFY THE ENABLERS TO GET YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO BE
To do so, there are few considerations we think companies should make:
Strategy
Where are you now and where do you want to be at a specific time? How can you get there? How can digital transformation and more agile ways of working help you in the process? How do you best manage the change across the organisation?
People
Where do your employees, partners and clients stand now? What are their motivations, needs, challenges but also level of commitment to the brand and trust in management? How prepared are they for the change to come? How can you better engage them throughout the process? How would you like them to behave in the transition? How can you unlock their full potential and empower them to become leaders?
Culture
What are your current values, beliefs and ways of working? What is core to your DNAthat should be kept, and what are bad habits you need to shed? What are behaviours and mindsets that the transformation should enable? How should groups and the company as a whole operate? Ultimately, how do you create an environment that amplifies the ability to collaborate on shared business goals?
Enablers
What are the (digital) tools, (agile) methods and processes that will help you achieve your goals faster and better? What does this mean for your organisation today? How do you guarantee all efforts are geared to becoming a future-proof and competitive organisation?
These are the questions we believe organisations should ask themselves to ensure that the business transformation journey they are about to begin has clear objectives and direction (strategy), fits within the true nature of their organisation (people and culture), and all activities and investments (enablers) are optimised for this well-defined change.
By looking at agile and digital not as ends unto themselves, but as enablers of a necessary business transformation, companies can define clear goals to stay relevant in a constantly changing world, and identify which initiatives will help your strategy, your culture and your people to achieve transformational goals better and faster. Putting people in the centre of these efforts ensures that you understand what they need, how they can contribute, how to gain their buy in to significant organisational change, and that you also meet the baseline benefits of efficiencies, reduced time to market, and higher responsiveness to external shifts.
If this topic is important to your company right now, or if you would like to know more about our programmatic approach to preparing organisations for the future, please contact us.