Don’t throw technology at a broken process

Welcome to Ryan’s Rant, my weekly newsletter aimed at helping companies drive customer-centric growth.

Why is it that all we ever talk about is technology? 

When we have something to fix or change in our organizations, we tend to jump straight to thinking about what tool can solve the problem. 

Have we forgotten about the constants that are never going to change?

What never changes is what makes people, people.

People are often resistant to change — especially in large organizations. It’s easier to keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them than to get a whole group of people to start acting differently.

It's crazy to me how often we forget about this. We continue to buy tools and then throw them into a broken process.

Instead of starting with technology, we need to think about the humans. We need to think about how we enable them, how we coach them, how we upskill them and how they work with each other so that their processes enable them to be successful. 

Then and only then should we talk about technology.

Technology can perpetuate bad behavior

It might seem a little crazy for me, President of a technology company, to talk about how technology isn’t going to solve all our problems. But I want to make sure we’re realistic about what technology can and can’t do.

If you aren’t willing to do the work in your organization needed to transform insights, no technology is going to do it for you.  

Over the last decade the market industry has automated a lot of stuff with technology, but the technology itself didn’t change the way that most organizations run research and use consumer data.

In many cases, automated technology has just given brands a faster way to be reactive. And in some cases, a faster way to test assumptions. Marketers can come to insights teams in a rush and get their final ads tested a day or two before they go live. They haven’t had to change their behavior to incorporate consumer feedback earlier in the process to iterate and optimize as they go. 

If you want to change, you need to focus on the people 

If I look around all the businesses I've worked with, very few are truly connecting all the dots and actually having their insights people sit above the data so they can be strategic and think all day — rather than running projects. Why?

Because businesses aren't prioritizing people. Their jobs are changing, but we're not spending time enabling them.

We need to enable them to do their jobs differently. To interact with internal stakeholders differently. To infuse consumer feedback earlier and often throughout the creation process. 

We’ve been throwing automation on top of the same stuff for a decade, and we’re poised to continue to perpetuate the same bad behavior with AI if we don’t change our ways.

As David L. Rogers said in his book The Digital Transformation Playbook, digital transformation isn’t about technology.

We’ve got to do something different.

If you missed it

This week’s Inside Insight episode featured Nataly Kelly, Zappi's new CMO. Subscribe to Inside Insights to get notified every time I release a new episode.