5 Hacks to Accelerate Digital Business

it's easy to get lost in the big ideas behind digital acceleration and not know how to move forward in a tactical way in today's episode i'm joined by mary masalio distinguished vp analyst and we're going to talk about five different digital acceleration hacks plus mary's favorite all-time hack that you can start implementing with your team today if you want to see all nine hacks from her research head to this podcast page on garner.com to read the full article let's get started thanks for joining me today mary my pleasure casey so we've talked a lot on the podcast and also there's a town on gartner.com about digital acceleration but today's conversation we're going to talk a little more tactical with some different hacks that you can do with your organization to keep that transformation actually moving forward and in the research you talk about how the key is not only for executives to talk about new values or even double down on established ones but also they need to connect those values with expected behaviors and why is that so important at this point in the process i think a lot of what's happened during covid is that people have as you say either pivoted to a new set of values or because they're digitally accelerating they have a set of digital acceleration values or whatever or they're doubling down on their existing ones and executives spend a lot of time talking about that but they're not necessarily specific enough in and of themselves to connect to how people actually behave every day casey imagine for a second i said hey casey you're my friend in 2021 i really want to value more healthy eating so i really want to eat more healthy so maybe you think oh that definitely means mary's going gluten-free and someone else thinks oh no that means mary's going vegan and someone else thinks no oh actually eating more healthily means mary's going to go on the all meat diet you can see how the value of more healthy eating sounds really great we can all agree to it but when we actually get down to behaviors or in this case the actual diets we might adopt the the diets are deeply deeply different almost contradictory in some cases and that's what can happen when you talk only at the level of values so values are good in terms of being aspirational and directional and inspirational but they often don't lead to coherent behavior you know i hear a lot of executives saying we need to be more agile or we need to not lose our covet discovered agility when we pivoted last year at this time or we need more bold decision making or more empowerment or more innovation or more collaboration or more engaged workforce or more diversity and equity and inclusion there's all these wonderful sounding values but if you don't connect them to actual expected behaviors for your people then what you get is a lot of incoherence they interpret it differently just like i did the diets and i think this next point is probably connected to what you've been saying with having really specifically articulated actions but we're over a year into the pandemic and it just feels like people are dealing with a lot of just general fatigue and we've talked on this podcast about digital fatigue especially but how should organizations be thinking about this when they're thinking about digital acceleration and specific hacks i think we're in a almost paradoxical moment where digital leaders and cios are being asked to digitally accelerate so suddenly you know on ceo speed dial and a bit of a halo effect from pivoting last year and a hugely renewed interest in digital and seven out of ten board members increasing their investment digital and all this stuff right so on the one hand this amazing interest in digital and on the other hand a really really tired workforce and it turns out that the tactics required for digital acceleration are the opposite of the symptoms you get when you're fatigued when you're fatigued for example you become less proficient at solving complex problems so like casey if you hadn't slept all last night and then this morning i said to you hey casey what's 217 times 136 plus 54 minus 14 you would make more mistakes if you were tired than if you'd had eight hours of sleep and a good cup of coffee so you're less good at solving complex problems one of the big things in digital acceleration is you've got to solve a lot of complex problems lots of dependencies between business silos the ecosystem of partners outside how you're going to figure it all out you're less good at communicating when you're tired anyone who's listening to me and is a parent knows this you come out of your office after a really long hard work day you know maybe by just opening your door or taking your laptop off your kitchen table or something and you uh you know your three-year-old throws a tantrum and you might not get parent of the year or whatever right because you might just yell why because you're tired you know you're supposed to be patient and empathic but you're tired so your communication takes a hit we're less good at communicating we're less good at solving complex problems when we're tired we're less good at motivation and productivity so we get less done when we're tired there's a lot of bad stuff that happens and this is leading to anxiety and burnout and all sorts of bad stuff tactics for this here's some things we know from research number one this is gonna sound totally crazy but if you're tired do something for someone else to break the cycle of fatigue now listeners might be going uh mary if i'm tired i can barely get enough energy to do my own stuff how am i supposed to do something for someone else well it turns out that the energy hit you get from doing something for someone else exceeds the energy hit they get from receiving that thing and i'm not talking about a six month long project i'm talking about a gesture making someone dinner cleaning their car you know getting someone a coffee writing a really nice email whatever that can break a cycle of fatigue other things if listeners are in a position to dole out work dole it out in small chunks one of the things about digital acceleration is it's just really hard and long and laborious we're in this long laborious gray treadmill of slog you know our lives are unpunctuated by any kind of trip or commute or event and so it sort of feels like our lives are just one big long unpunctuated run-on sentence right so if you can punctuate by putting little bits of work that people can celebrate the completion of you know i finished this report on friday i closed the book on this chapter i painted my whole office in one day whatever it is that sense of completion is also a really big fatigue fighter and the final one i guess is just giving people a really good why don't come at them with a really corporate speaking why like oh we know we really need to digitally accelerate because we need to transform into a digital first organization ready for the challenges of the 21st century explaining our ecosystem like not that you know not something really vague in corporate speaking give people a motivating why and it'll be easier for them to to stay motivated than something corporate speaking and really vague and generic yeah i really like the idea that it's something specific that you can focus on because these problems are so big and so complex that it's very overwhelming before we continue learn more about the emerging trends shaping it in business at gartner i.t symposium expo you'll uncover new ways to approach critical challenges accelerate digital transformation and become an even more effective leader you can learn more about the event at gartner.com

[Music] i know everyone's very excited about the specific hacks but really quickly i just want to talk about what are we talking about in terms of general behaviors for accelerating digital i think you can think in terms of general behaviors or the behaviors that would overturn general myths okay so for example everybody wants more agility right everybody i've never met a chief executive officer who said to me you know what mary the thing is it's just like our people they're they're just too agile you know like i just wish they would just not respond so quickly to change i wish they would slow down nobody's saying that everybody wants more agility no matter what sector they're in and some of that involves overcoming certain myths that inhibit behavior like the notion that more planning equals more certainty that's true in some cases of course where you deeply know how to do something and you really need a waterfall plan in place and huge deep dependencies and a chronology of events that's totally true but in a lot of digital acceleration you're doing things for the first time we don't know if customers are going to want this we don't know how users are going to consume this we don't know which feature is going to be the most important we don't know if this experiment is going to work and so more planning in those kinds of scenarios does not necessarily equal more certainty right doing the thing gets you to more certainty other things that where you need to change behavior are things like the notion that the myth that complicated equals worthy you know like oh my gosh i would never tell my bosses i would never show this to my boss's boss's boss unless i have 13 spreadsheets complete with pivot tables and color coding because that shows that i'm worthy i think kovid taught us that a lot of times simple equals worthy you don't have to be super complicated in order to execute something big and gnarly and important so so the behaviors that go with simplicity rather than being complicated i think are important just like busy doesn't equal valuable you know so the people who kind of do the humble brag you know oh mary i had 10 meetings back to back i didn't even have time to eat lunch much less take a bio break but what they're really saying is i'm so important you know but are you should you really be in 10 back-to-back meetings because that's not necessarily driving to a particular outcome people care about that's just 10 back-to-back meetings becoming more outcome focused rather than more output focused is i think another behavior that people need to work on a lot of the behaviors of this increased interest and agility are really about overturning some of the myths that have invaded corporate life for so long and we're going to talk specifically about five of the hacks in your research but if the listeners are interested in seeing all of them we actually have a full article on all nine hacks on this podcast episode page at garner.com before we get into the specifics i just want to ask because i'm very curious how do you you and your team come up with these hacks ah well that's not actually an easy process but certainly a lot of the hacks are seen in the real world in day-to-day with companies actually looking to insert these new behaviors in a way that's meaningful and visceral and immediate and tangible and now and so the whole notion of the hacks is how can you take these values that are really highfalutin and on the horizon and aspirational inspirational turn them into default behaviors that people actually can interpret and then insert those into people's day-to-day lives because unless and until you do that all you really have is really pretty powerpoint about all the nice sounding intentions and aspirations that you're going to execute on you don't really have real change unless and until you insert these nicely laid out assumptions into people's day-to-day work getting it down to nine was quite a was quite a process but the idea behind that was have we seen this work in the real world is it something people could practically use and does it have universal application those are really the ways that we were filtering what is your favorite hack so my favorite hack isn't actually on the list of ones we're going to go through it's just one that i i really liked which is a lot of organizations have you know meeting overload and people have their videos off and they're not really paying attention and they're kind of half present half not and we're all much more digitally distracted working from home and interacting in a non-physical environment and all the rest of it and so i came across this hack by a leader who was having this problem you know a meeting that had been set up monthly to have silo collaboration what are you doing what am i doing and the first meeting went well everybody's sharing the second meeting went well everybody's sharing third meeting what happened real life happened which is i'm gonna come to your meeting but i've got an operational snafu back in my unit and i'm gonna like pretend i'm paying attention but really i'm working on my thing undermining the exact reason for the meeting which was collaboration across silos in this case so you could if you were the leader of that meeting you could get together and stand up and go come on everybody remember that we're here to collaborate and be good corporate citizens and you know you could appeal their better selves it might work but what this person did was they said right new rule the note taker for this meeting will be named at the end of the meeting yeah you're laughing right but it's so cruel i know it's me but it's so effective right that changes behavior so much more quickly and more efficiently than just exhorting people to behave well so that is like a classic example of a hack super easy to implement not i mean it's not low courage but it is low efforts not a huge budget not tons of people immediate effect visceral response highly visible and immediate behavioral change so i i think that is kind of my favorite hack of all time i love that one even just you saying it gave me like a little spike of anxiety like oh wow that would be super effective so the first hack from the research that we're gonna talk about which is funny because it's actually something that the content marketing team here gardner is focusing on is the idea that no isn't allowed and can you tell us more about the thinking behind that yeah so this came from an innovation team at a really large engineering firm where they were trying to they were trying out really big new ideas so they're almost like an internal venture capital organization looking for big new businesses and of course the thing about big innovation is that most big ideas appear you know crazy and or dangerous and or stupid and off the wall at the beginning otherwise they wouldn't be crazy big ideas it would just be obvious and everyone would do them and so the problem they had was that they had to get approval from the governing council for this big innovation effort and the governing council is made up of lots of senior bigwigs who'd been around for a really long time and what they were doing was using their experience to say no really early you know this won't work you know so i might present a new big idea and they'd say oh listen little grasshopper i've been in this sector for 25 years and i can tell you that regulatory is never going to say yes you know and they would kybosh big ideas based on their experience which is a bad way to go about innovation and so procedurally in the process the team came up with wait a minute what if we make it illegal to say no so you cannot say no until point x in the process if you have a concern before then you have to reformulate your no as a question so not no regulatory would never say yes but hey mary i'm concerned about regulation can you do more research as a way to breathe life into some of the new stuff and innovation that comes with digital acceleration and the next hack which seems like it kind of ties into that one as well is to seek resistance first and it's basically about finding the person who you know is going to give you a hard time and starting with them which sounds tiring but what's the idea behind this one yeah so it does sound kind of soul destroying to just go to the person who's most likely to be the cynic or the skeptic and start with them but the idea here is to be really efficient so you find the person who's most likely to disagree with your proposal or decision and you ask them to tell you everything that's wrong with it why is this a good idea because if you address the concerns really early on then hopefully it won't blow up after you've put a huge amount of time and effort and blood sweat and tears into it and so essentially what you're looking for is this agility right speed up decision making and avoid the decision being reversed by seeking out the resistance first as opposed to doing all the work and then finding out that it all blows up later on and the next one ties into what you just said about sort of speeding up the process and it seems really on point given the conversations about accelerating digital and we're constantly talking about how can you be more agile it's the idea that you need to limit the time to 24 hours which doesn't seem like a very long time so how do you go about doing that okay so first of all like if if an organization says to me hey mary we are really innovative one of the early questions i will ask them is can you go from idea to prototype in under 48 hours and the reason i ask that question is less to know about their prototyping process and more to see if culturally they are allowed to have what's called low fidelity prototyping so high fidelity prototyping is oh my gosh casey is my boss's boss's boss i would never go to her i would rather have my finger nails ripped off than go to her if i didn't have an absolutely perfectly polished logo in exactly the right place 25 slide deck with all the font right no spelling errors and exactly things just so about this really early idea that's high fidelity prototyping right it's got to be just so low fidelity prototyping is the opposite it says i feel comfortable going to management with something i schlep together on the back of an envelope so to speak because i trust and i know that they will be evaluating me based on the essential quality of the idea not on the trappings around it because you don't want people polishing a prototype for 16 weeks that's more likely than not to go nowhere that's what prototypes do they mostly go nowhere and so giving people a time limit of 24 hours to create a first draft or a prototype says you can't do a high fidelity prototype you can't make this perfect i am going to create or manufacture urgency so that you can make the impossible possible in a very small amount of time you can you have to kind of schlep this together to create that environment of what's called low fidelity prototyping i trust that management is going to look at the essence of my idea instead of whether there's spelling errors or things or just so that's the idea behind that one so that seems like it requires more effort on sort of both the side of the employee but also management has to be less focused on the polished version and more able to identify like the essence of this is good yes this is absolutely as much about management innovation as it is about prototypes what's the best way to scope scale and lead digital transformation download the gartner it roadmap for digital transformation the roadmap provides cios and it leaders digital business transformation best practices to deliver financial results look for the roadmap on this podcast page at gartner.com so the next one we're going to kick it back to our childhood and those of us who have kids can probably relate to this next one which is play red light green light to prioritize your tasks when you're talking to clients about this what is your advice yeah so some listeners probably remember the game red light green light for those of you who aren't familiar it's a game that kids played where one person acts like a stop light and when they say green light everyone can run toward them when they see red light everyone needs to stop the idea here is you find a kind of interesting and lighthearted way to discuss as a team like what should we be red lighting what should we be stopping what should we be green lighting like what should we be starting and maybe what should we be yellow lighting like what should just continue and why is this a useful hack because according to all of our research and you said casey at the beginning that you guys have done a lot of podcasts around digital fatigue so one of the things we know that is causing a huge amount of fatigue according to gartner's hr practice is the sense that leaders are not prioritizing the work of their people sufficiently they're just adding more of it creating this great imbalance with work and life and employee well-being problems and all the rest of it so for employees and a lot of organization it feels like a fire hose the tasks are just accumulating accumulating nothing's getting taken off there's a lot of tasks switching so priorities changing which can be really dispiriting and soul destroying no clear sense of what the end game is right and so this this whole situation of non-prioritization and just adding more creates a lot of distress and fatigue so like red light green light is a light-hearted way to introduce some of this prioritization that's the idea another hack incidentally is to use a physical board you know so imagine i'm the leader of a team and i turn my camera in my remote work environment to a physical board that has velcro strips on it of all the things we're going to do if it doesn't fit on the board it can't be added unless you take something off so for listeners who are in i.t organizations or or digital organizations where the business is constantly adding you can kind of lightly get them to prioritize by saying we you know we're happy to do that absolutely it doesn't fit on our board though so you need to be able to take something off because this is what we're physically able to do both lighthearted physical hacks or game hacks to try and get to the same outcome which is a greater amount of prioritization and thus a lightening of the fatigue and our final hack that we're going to talk about is to hold a weekly break the rules meeting so i like the sound of this can you explain what it means yeah so so one of the things that covid did is that it summarily overturned assumptions that were of really long standing you know internal assumptions like low-level people can't make important decisions it takes a long time to get to a quality outcome we have to be in face-to-face physical environments in order to get to a quality outcome right and external assumptions like people would never buy a car off the internet and customers prefer a face-to-face environment and if given the choice they'd always go into a store you know all these things that have been overturned and proven untrue as a result of covid right and so to preserve that notion of hey maybe everything we thought was true isn't you can have these break the rules meetings which are really about scratching policies canceling old procedures empowering people providing budgets for new ideas connecting people and kind of actively seeking to dismantle the slow bureaucratic creep that insidiously makes itself felt in all organization right and so this hack it sort of challenges toxic cultural behaviors like cynicism and negativity like you know i can't i don't have budget i'm not allowed with um this this active overturning or dismantling of assumptions and bureaucracy that's the idea behind that one so we just went through five of the hacks in the research plus one bonus hack that's your favorite to avoid throwing a ton more at people how can organizations even pick which one of these to start with should they pick a couple yeah so like here's what i don't want listeners to do i don't want them to go oh gosh that conversation with casey and mary was so interesting i'm going to formulate a culture hacking committee and then i'm going to get together to have a month-long work on what our process should be for culture no no the notion behind hacking is inserting the behaviors you want into day-to-day life with a minimum of effort a minimum of huge upfront analysis just try it the idea is for it to be really small so in terms of getting started you can use any other ones we talked about you know red light green light or the break the rules meetings or the 24-hour prototyping one but the idea is that it should be really easy really fun and you shouldn't have to ask for outside authority to try it you should also look for co-conspirators who can i bounce this off and see if we think it'll get the desired behavior the only final thing i would say is know what you are hacking towards you don't just get to culture hack willy-nilly according to some personal agenda what do you want do you want more agility do you want more empowerment do you want more collaboration more engagement more innovation a failure forward culture what is it you want and design a hack that will get you to that outcome and then recruit a co-conspirator to make sure you're right and then just get started yeah i think the thing that i really love about this research is that it's so actionable and you can see how each of them would make a change in your organization so do you have any final thoughts you'd like to share with the audience just go forth go be brilliant and be awesome culture hackers thanks so much for joining us mary thanks stacy see you next time gartner think cast is a production of gartner the world's leading research and advisory company equipping executives across the enterprise with indispensable insights advice and tools to achieve their mission critical priorities you can learn more at gartner.com all content in gartner think cast is owned by gartner and cannot be repurposed or reproduced without gartner's consent gartner is an impartial independent analyst of business and technology this content should not be construed as a gartner endorsement of any enterprise's products or services all content provided by other speakers is expressly the views of those speakers and their organizations

2021-10-28 06:19

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