FOUR WAYS FUSE CAN DRIVE BUSINESS SUCCESS

As we look towards a brand-new year here at Fuse we would like to take a moment to reflect upon who we are and what we do best as a company, for as a certain Socrates once said: “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.”

At Fuse, we have long believed that to design and deliver experiences that customers and employees really want and value, it is imperative that we not only understand them, but understand how those experiences actually fit into their daily lives. This goes to the heart of what we do as an organisation. We maintain that it is not enough to simply understand people, rather, we must strive to understand how people make a home for themselves in a fast-changing and increasingly complex world. For although our world may be shifting, the things that unite us, the things that make us human – our needs, wants, and desires – remain the same. In this post, I touch upon the four ways that we at Fuse apply our uniquely human-centred approach to addressing these human needs in order to create business impact: identifying new opportunities; building customer and employee experiences; establishing customer-centric workforces; and anticipating credible futures. Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail.

IDENTIFYING NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Identifying new business opportunities is at the core of what we do as a company. Without opportunity, there is no innovation, and without innovation, there is no progress. From our many years in the field, we have found that most opportunities are actually disguised as problems, at least at first. Once we dig a bit deeper however, we find that hiding underneath this seeming obstacle is an opportunity area waiting to be brought to light. We help businesses uncover needs that they cannot currently see and earn them a valued role in their customers lives. Through our uniquely human-centred approach combining social science with experience design and business thinking, we help our clients uncover and explore new opportunity spaces and get separation from their competitors. As a tangible example of this process, we helped kick-start a global semiconductor manufacturer’s data monetisation strategy for wearables. By combining qualitative research, data analysis, and value proposition design, we identified a competitive new data strategy that steered them towards a five-year roadmap to success.

BUILDING CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCES

The philosopher of science Karl Popper once said of experiences: “We do not stumble upon our experiences, nor do we let them flow over us like a stream. Rather, we have to be active: we have to ‘make’ our experiences.” Since our very first days at Fuse, we have helped our customers build experiences based on a deep understanding of people. We recognise that experiences matter. Experiences don’t just deliver functional needs but create positive emotional impact and meaning. Where once goods and services held sway as the main mode of consumption, now experiences and emotion have emerged as key channels through which businesses can create value. Through our deep ethnographic research experience and customer-centricity we help our clients build experiences that are not only unforgettable, but relevant, timely, and delightful. The car buying experience is a case in point. Our client, a North American automobile manufacturer was struggling with low customer experience ratings and lacked understanding of its end-customer’s complete purchasing journey. Through in-depth interviews and dealership visits in three different U.S. markets, we reimagined the car buying experience to produce a strategy to improve the overall customer experience, align activities of manufacturer and dealers, and supported them in the creation of a new role tasked with “owning” the full customer journey.

ESTABLISHING CUSTOMER-CENTRIC WORKFORCES

To have sustained success in the new economy requires above all else, putting the customer at the centre of the equation. At Fuse we help to raise awareness and prepare workforces for a customer-centric mindset through establishing a common understanding within teams. To do this, we provide them the tools and metrics to build empathy and insights generation to create a relentless focus on their customers’ needs. We help companies create true growth, not just short-term gains, in order to prepare them for whatever the future holds. As an example of this work, our client – a medium-sized parts manufacturer in heavy industry – wanted to strengthen their competitive position and rethink their approach to innovation. In particular, they wanted to complement their advanced tech capabilities with increased user empathy to consistently create industry-leading solutions. Through an assessment of the organisations’ processes and systems, we helped them to create processes to identify the unmet needs of mining and construction workers and build creative solutions to address them.

ANTICIPATING CREDIBLE FUTURES

In a fast-changing and unpredictable world, understanding and analysing emerging shifts in order to anticipate credible futures has become increasingly important. At Fuse we help businesses navigate these shifts so that they may better position themselves to face the challenges ahead. However, picking up on the early signs of these emerging movements requires a culturally sensitive and human-centric approach. Through deep analysis of the social, technological, economic, and political we help inform our clients of what lies ahead. We provide the light that helps our clients chart and navigate the disruptions of tomorrow. The world is without doubt currently undergoing major changes in the way societies are organised. How will key factors (e.g. mobility, structure of work, housing, mental illness) impact the future of urban environments? Our client, a global technology and infrastructure company, wanted to identify the shifts that will define how European cities will evolve in the near future, and create scenarios of what they may look like in 2030. We interviewed over twenty-five topic experts and analysed industry reports and white papers to surface the most relevant shifts impacting urban living. Through ‘anticipatory thinking’, we fleshed-out the evolution of the most relevant shifts and potential obstacles over time to help them better collaborate with their partners and clients.

KNOWING FOR BUSINESS SUCCESS

 I began this piece by reflecting upon the words of a certain classical Greek philosopher. But what does it actually mean to “know thyself”?

At Fuse we are keenly aware of how much more complex the world has become. Technology is advancing at such a rate that social conventions are struggling to keep pace. We are in a constant game of catch-up. Little wonder then that most people don’t take the time for self-reflection. Only by understanding oneself however, can we understand others.

We believe that one of the most effective ways of discovering who we are – our strengths as well as our weaknesses – is through the eyes of others. This is the crux of what we do at Fuse. We help businesses know themselves better through our expert outsider eyes so that they may truly flourish. We can only do this however by knowing who we are and what we stand for. In 2019, we aim to strive more than ever to listen, to learn, to examine our values and reflect back upon our choices. Let’s start the New Year together by getting to know ourselves better.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION TO CREATE A FUTURE-PROOF ORGANISATION

Search for “Age of Disruption” on Google and you’ll get over 74 million results.

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.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION: PUTTING PEOPLE AT THE HEART OF YOUR BUSINESS OUTCOMES

That title sounds embarrassingly obvious. So why is this not the strategic framing of every digital transformation project? We believe that the impact of your employees’ work — innovative new products, satisfying customer experiences, increased sales and profits — is intrinsically linked to how they experience work. You don’t get better at what you do if each step along the way is a gruelling struggle. Digital transformation can help you unlock people’s best potential while creating significant value for your company. For this to happen, your transformation must start by focusing on people.

Your people are not only your employees, but also your partners and customers. In this post I focus on how to make the people inside your company receive real benefit from your efforts.

UNDERSTANDING EMPLOYEES TO UNLOCK THEIR POTENTIAL

Employees inside your company are a collection of unique individuals, all with their own motivations, goals and preferred ways of thinking and acting. You need to recognise these myriad realities within your walls and embrace them to unlock the potential of creativity, critical thinking, leadership and autonomy — the core human assets companies need to cultivate today. And as executors of the strategy in the day-to-day, employees are the real catalysts for change, hence they should become co-creators in the transformation

CULTURE, THE MOST CHALLENGING OBSTACLE

As I discussed in my previous article, the most challenging aspect of most digital transformation initiatives is finding alignment or moving the culture to where you need it to be to successfully implement it. Over half of all digital transformation initiatives fail to deliver expected ROI due to cultural issues that include having no clear organisational objectives or understanding of how people think, act and collaborate; not engaging with people throughout the process from needs identification, to getting onboard with the value of these efforts, to piloting early experiments, to evangelising the shift.

These missteps often result in a paint-by-numbers approach that is not designed for your company’s needs and sadly prioritise the wrong digital tools and processes. All of these cultural obstacles arise due to lack of upfront recognition of who you are designing this transformation for, how new processes and tools need to work to fit their real constraints and routines, and why the company is undertaking this huge effort in the first place.

ALIGN EMPLOYEES’ NEEDS WITH ORGANISATION’S BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

At its core, business culture consists of the values, beliefs and norms that a group of people share to achieve specific goals together. Culture is not only articulated top-down through official processes, policies and rules. It is also expressed through bottom-upsharing of best practices learned within the working environment — the kind of habits and unspoken models of action that spread organically inside a company.

A successful digital transformation plan must recognise and incorporate both the individuals’ needs and the company’s business objectives. The key concerns of individuals will be how prepared they are to perform in this new environment, how they will create value using the proposed tools and processes, and how they will be acknowledged for the value they bring. From the organisation’s perspective, the key concerns will be how to equip employees with tools and knowledge that will enable them to make positive measurable impact for the company.

Failing to embrace all of this is setting yourself up for failure. Digital tools and processes need to be adapted to your people, not the other way around. Don’t think in terms of technologies and compliance standards; think about how you can better enable people to achieve their goals and at the same time unleash their creativity to experiment and create true impact throughout the organisation.

Elevating transformation efforts to being truly people-centred will create more value faster. Here are five aspects to consider when transforming people’s work:

1. Acknowledge that change is difficult. It’s difficult for organisations, and it’s difficult for individuals. Changing everything at the same time won’t work. Intentional, sequenced change that creates measurable wins for everyone to build upon is necessary.

2. Segment and prioritise the users of new digital tools and processes. How does it benefit them as individuals? How does it benefit the business? How do the two sides of this equation fit together?

3. Understand the human and cultural contexts that these changes must work within.What routines, working conditions, and embedded cultural beliefs will impact whether or not intended benefits will actually be delivered?

4. Collaborate with your workforce throughout the process. What can you learn from employees to scope and sequence your efforts? How can they contribute to creating use cases and testing pilots? Who can be key evangelists to create demand for these new tools across the workforce?

5. Create measures of performance. During design, how can you create hypotheses of the best qualitative and quantitative measures of success? During pilots, can you challenge those measures to make sure they are as specific and meaningful as possible? How will you define and evaluate the cultural change in the short-, mid- and long-term?

Remember, digital transformation is just a means to an end, the enabler for strategic goals that will be activated by real living human beings. Without understanding people’s work styles, their prioritised needs and ways of collaborating, how much impact can mere tools and processes make? In my next post I will discuss using digital transformation to create positive impact outside the walls of the company.

Is your company getting ready to embark on a new phase of digital transformation? Are you not getting the desired results from previous transformation efforts? If you would like to discuss how a rigorous focus on people and culture can create greater value, contact us.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION TO ELEVATE PARTNERSHIPS

In our last article in this series, we pointed out that the biggest hurdles to successful digital transformation are cultural, not technical. Go-to-market strategy, culture, and individual employees must be aligned to identify the core purpose of a transformation. Once we develop a clear picture of where we are today — and where we want to go, we can then identify, design and deploy the digital tools and processes that people can and will use to achieve this future state. Many of the people in this digital transformationequation are partners, external organisations and independent individuals who help us deliver value to our customers.

YOU DON’T WORK IN A VACUUM

Previously, we have addressed how to align your own strategy, culture and employees. However, your business does not operate exclusively, or even primarily, as a stand-alone entity. Increasingly, business is networked rather than siloed. Unique offers are delivered to your customers through complex ecosystems, and value is not created in a top-down fashion from the centre of your company, but rather from the edge, where you gain access to new capabilities, partner your way into emerging areas of growth, and experiment with service models. 

For example IKEA + TaskRabbit collaborate to deliver and assemble furniture to appeal to a new segment of customers. IBM partners with startups to fill gaps in their offering portfolio in exchange for exposure and scale. FedEx integrates with eCommerce software maker Magento to make installation and customisation in clients’ storefronts and warehouse. In this completely new landscape, your partners’ strategies, cultures and employee experiences must align with your own — at least at key milestones and for joint activities — so you are able to work effectively together to quickly respond to opportunities before others. Then you can determine the key digital tools to support your collaboration.

It’s difficult enough to create new work practices within a single company; working across organisations amplifies the potential barriers to getting this right. However, if we see these collaborations for what they are — finite numbers of individuals coming together to achieve defined goals — it is easier to visualise how we can do this. If we create the minimum necessary alignment, we can develop the right digital environment to support cross-company teams.

VISUALISING THE “PARTNER JOURNEY” HELPS PRIORITISE TRANSFORMATION EFFORTS

Who exactly are we talking about collaborating with externally? That depends on the unique nature of every business, their needs and opportunities. Collaborators could come from any of the following:

Customers — B2C, B2B, B2B2C, B2G, B2E, channel partners
Contingent workers — seasonal and support support, gig workers, domain experts
Startups and agencies — who depend on SaaS tools like Dropbox, Trello and Slack
Key suppliers — providers of key raw materials, components or assembly
Strategic partners — who stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you to deliver solutions

DETERMINE WHERE TO START FOR THE GREATEST IMPACT

With whom can you generate the measurable business value through digitally transformed collaborations? How do you specifically expect to create this new value? Is it with one particular supplier, or should you focus on an interaction that is repeated frequently with multiple outside parties? There are many paths to designing win-win collaboration models with select partners like those above, from innovating faster and in more targeted ways, to integrated inventory and distribution, shifting from reactive commodity relationships to proactive partnerships, and dynamic workforce and capabilities reshaping.

Once you have prioritised opportunities to innovate your collaborations with select partners, you will need to consider their size, operating models, and IT environments and policies to determine what is the right level of joint transformation that will actually work. This might mean customisation of your existing tools, developing APIs to provide greater access to each others’ data and core systems, or shifting of your IT policies to allow secure use of essential SaaS tools. Getting to the right level of transformation may also require deeper organisational analysis of partner relationships lifecycle, touch points with your company, and their common way of working and communicating in order to unlock the most joint value possible.

COLLABORATING WITH EMPLOYEES OF BOTH ORGANISATIONS LETS YOU IDENTIFY THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITIES, SOLUTION REQUIREMENTS, AND ENSURES SUCCESSFUL ADOPTION

Any successful digital transformation comes from an alignment of strategy, culture and individual employees. To achieve this beyond the boundaries of your own business requires understanding of your partner’s strategy, culture and employee motivations and ways of working. In the spirit of agile experimentation, you can start with small experiments to deliver wins for both sides that is difficult for competitors to replicate.

WE CAN HELP

Is your business finding itself more deeply entwined with key partners than ever before? Do you want to explore how to analyse your opportunities to transform your collaborations with them? If you would like to discuss how we can design collaborative programs to find your opportunities, contact us.