Digitalizing culture

All firms that have started along the road to digitalization have found that the most difficult thing to digitalize is the existing “culture“.

The truth is simple: digital transformation has surpassed the periphery and floods with disruptions the value chain, the business model, the relationship with the client, the processes…. quite simply it has reached everything. It is no longer possible to fool oneself by creating a “Digital” department; one has to digitalize the culture.

“In the digital transformation the most difficult is the cultural change and changing the people”, Jesús Mantas, Global DG of consulting and processes at IBM.

Digitalizing the culture requires having a human team capable of creating new tendencies in businesses based on technology. A human team capable of changing the speed at which technology creates disruptions. A culture in which one of its main aspects is the capacity to change itself, in a permanent, continual and natural fashion.

In a Start-up this is straightforward: You sign up people who live, think and act in this way, people who have digitalization embodied in their own culture.

The question becomes more interesting when the company is travelling on the journey from the analogical to the digital and people are already onboard. Of course new profiles will have to be incorporated but that is not enough.

The persons who work in the “analogical” firm have innumerable strengths in the form of knowledge and capacities, many of which are essential for the business. How do you maintain the “best of what is” and at the same time generate a disruption in the culture? Changing the way in which we change.

The normal formula for change stresses the idea that if we offer a good analysis then we change the way we think and with it the way we behave. If this were like that, the sustainability of the planet would be assured.

In reality change works in a different manner. If we imagine a new future that we consider that is better for the group and for oneself, as well as, being appealing and at possible, we awaken a great amount of positive energy which we can use to modify our behavior.

What happens most often is that a few people give themselves the opportunity to imagine that future and always accompanied by brainy consultants who elaborate brilliant reports. Instead of changing the culture they frighten it. “Help what will become of me in this new world!!!”  With this image of the future installed in the employees one can only hope for one thing: Resistance.

We are looking for simply the opposite: a culture that leads us towards the strategy of digitalization.

What do we have to do for the culture to generate Digitalization?

We recommend two steps: The concentration of strengths and collective action.

Concentrating Strengths

The criterion to be used when selecting a team is the concentration of strengths in the form of capacities, knowledge and qualities.

To select the core/internal group it is useful to keep in mind these three criteria:

• It needs to represent the system in its totality, a large group of people numbering between 30 y 500 (depending on the size of the company).
• They accumulate between them the best of the know-how of the organization.
• They should be people recognized for their positive energy.

To select the outer/external group it is advisable to bear in mind the following criteria:

• They supply strengths and knowledge that compliments what already exists.
• They have a digitalized culture.
• They can become good fellow travelers.

The totality forms a “Full Power” team, with a high concentration of strengths capable of creating a digital future credible for the company in question.

The team has to be able to involve all the people in the organization because the digitalization becomes part of the job and is the responsibility of all the employees. It is a team that has capacity to execute due to its size, its ability to accumulate all the necessary strengths, its distribution throughout the whole organization, its social prestige, its shared vision and its capacity of execution. One has to inoculate the digitalization into the culture.

The next step is to have a Summit, a session which lasts three or four days, in which the team imagines a company totally digitalized and the way it influences many people, namely, the digitalization of the culture. The output of the Summit is the collective action towards a shared story of success.

Collective Action

One starts off by inquiring: The strengths, the know-how, the opportunities and the aspirations of the group. To inquire is to appreciate the potential which surrounds us with the aim of activating it. The result of the inquiry is the best of what is, namely, the raw material for the following exercise: imagining the company completely digitalized.

If we are capable of imagining a promising future, we have moved from resistance to change to desiring it: “I want to live in that world”. If there is something that influences significantly on our present behavior it is the image we have of the future. Culture goes from being a ballast to change to being a source of energy for action.

This image of the future will be ambitious and reachable because it has been created simultaneously by the participants, both the external as well as the internal.

Once a desired for future has been created it is time to bring it down to earth by creating a map of opportunities of that dream.

Each person chooses where they wish to put their energy and talent. It is not a question of obligations but rather of desired for action. Each team is assigned the experts most relevant to their area of opportunity in order to create “Full Power” teams, capable of creating doable prototypes as well as being innovative.

Once done, we have at our disposal a group of people, many of whom can transform the company through technology. Internal and external people with a common objective and a level of relationship capable of generating change. It is the new culture in which there are many thinking and acting simultaneously and leading the digitalization.

We have generated movement and collective action towards a common future. Now instead of pushing the organization it is a question of channeling that energy towards the best opportunities. It is the time to manage this movement coherently.