It's ‘People Transformation’ not ‘Digital Transformation’
Strategies aren’t thinking about how to motivate and change the people
I’ve grown a bit tired of strategies for ‘digital transformation’ that focus on agile, team structure, customer research, architecture, continuous delivery and ways of working (lots of them quite good advice, btw) but don’t say one word about the strategies to motivate and get people to change. Agile, lean, software engineering and product development practices are the easiest parts to solve but the people aspect, buy-in and ‘stickiness’ of those changes are not as straightforward.
Saying you ‘need to take people on the journey’ is not enough, we have to think about HOW we do that: involving people in retrospectives so they tell you about the problems (and solutions), sharing draft solutions so they can give input, creating regular opportunities for feedback and critique before decisions are final, making it about them and not about your methodology, never pushing a solution top-down. These are some of the ways to create change ‘bottom-up’ and therefore that is ‘sticky’ after us consultants are all gone.
In one of the first engagements in Pragmateam back in 2015 (to change how a very large enterprise ran Discoveries), we spent more time talking about people and change than about any concepts for scaling agile as we knew those can always be solved but we needed to make sure people felt part of the change, not just ‘went along on the journey’. That was hard but that was also rewarding as people were then supportive and showed up because they could see it was coming from them too, to make their life easier and ultimately help them deliver more value.
If you think transformations are about the ideal end state and you don’t have a very good strategy and focus to get people to buy in and BE part of the journey, the end state will only ever be a pretty slide sent down to the troops by a manager or an illustration in a shiny consulting pre-sales pack but never a reality on the ground. We gotta start thinking and talking about how to make it about people, that is what we're changing.