FAQ 12: The OTHER worst way to approach digital transformation

Lindsay Herbert, keynote speaker and author of the acclaimed book ‘Digital Transformation’ continues her series answering frequently asked questions on the subject of digital transformation. Here Lindsay answers the question, “what’s the OTHER worst way to approach digital transformation?”

Transcript

Hi, I’m Lindsay Herbert and Friday’s answered question this week is a “part two”, so watch last week’s if you’ve missed it. The question was “what’s the worst way to approach digital transformation?” and this week I’m going to say the answer is to expect people to do it off the sides of their desks, to just do it as a part of their job, as another item on the to-do list.

What this means is they aren’t getting the headspace, they’re not getting the resource, they’re not getting the time or the sources of inspiration to really critically look at what it is the business is meant to be doing for its audiences and understanding new ways that it could be achieving those goals.

So instead, what you end up with are people who will just optimize instead of innovate. They’ll make things a little bit faster, they’ll make things a little bit cheaper, they’ll make things a little bit easier. But be careful with this, because optimization can often look like innovation until you realize that you’ve optimized yourself into being disrupted by a major competitor.

So take, for example, Blockbuster. They optimized perfectly. They had a really great website, they had a really great social media strategy, their stores ran really well. They optimized and optimized and completely ignored the competitive threat that really required true innovation for them to be able to offset. So they optimized themselves into obscurity.

So please, if you’re going to approach digital transformation or if you’ve already started and you recognize anything from this video or from last week’s video, stop and rethink. It’s not too late. You can adjust what it is that you’re doing and it really will mean the difference between actual innovation and either optimization or even just people feeling disgruntled and fed up with digital.

Thanks!

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