The Efficiency Trap - Part Two

Leading into the first semester of The UNTHNKBL Academy leadership programme for senior marketers, in early May, I’ll be regularly posting snapshots from the programme. Here's Part Two of the short series "The Efficiency Trap".

Part One is here.

Looking past the technology

The underlying assumptions regarding the central role and future value of technology, in the business context that we are coming to terms with here, are not merely hostile to our ability to defend and grow the enterprise. They reflect and impose on our journey a map of the world that is already historical, before we even set sail.

The one thing that our technology will never be able to do, as long as it’s boxed in, as it were, by the intractable logic that we build into it, is unfreeze itself, tell us what’s changed, how it’s changing, and what we should do about it.

The turbulence of the environment will consistently throw increasing numbers and types of new, left-field questions at the enterprise and its systems.

Our technology, as long as it is exclusively guided by the historical strategic shapes we have built into it, is intrinsically unable to flex and twist to answer these questions, at least in a manner that provides the certainty of decisioning that is for now demanded of us.

This emerging conundrum, as I hope we are coming to see, is at the very core of the disquiet that leadership feels. Our growing uncertainty is not based merely on not being quite sure what’s going on – we have never, after all, had more information to work with – but on the far more disturbing realisation that even the most advanced tools we may have to hand are never quite fit for purpose.

We have, we could say, an abundance of ‘how’ but not nearly enough ‘why’ or ‘what’. If technology, in the end, can only process and provide certainty based upon the limited insight we are able to synthesise at any fixed point, and the context itself is chronically turbulent, then we can’t sensibly expect it to fully equip us for the future.

It’s the way we think about business, the way we do strategy itself, that needs to change.

Far from reacting with a Luddite rejection of the infinity of promise that new technology continues to hold out to us, we must, somehow, learn to live with and actively manage an eternal tension, between knowing and not knowing, committing and holding back, falling short and leaping ahead. 

Reframing transformation

When we come to understand and accept the logic of this challenge – with the feeling that far from reaching calmer water, we are casting off on a new journey that makes our experience to date seem relatively benign – we are immediately presented with pressing questions regarding the eventual validity of what we have been calling ‘digital business transformation programmes’.

This is a serious concern, in particular given the high levels of both expectation and expenditure that are currently vested in this approach to the future.

In the light of our thinking so far, is transformation, as we know it now, a major investment in precious resource and time that, far from preparing us for the disruptive future, to the contrary locks us into a comfortable but irrelevant set of redundant capabilities?

Both yes, and, to an extent, but only if we are brutally realistic, no.

As long as we imagine – and here is the danger of the magical thinking we touched on above – that such programmes in themselves offer a comprehensive, sustainable and predictable long-term platform for enterprise survival and growth, we are strategically putting the enterprise directly, and conclusively, in harm’s way.

The word ‘transformation’ is a built-in part of the problem here. The current discourse almost invariably assumes that the overall effect will be to move the enterprise forward, to liberate it from too-slow processes, inadequate and out-of-date customer profiles, and clunky product and service development and delivery.

When looked at through the lens of the present moment, and on the basis that the market, the customer, and the overall environment itself will remain more or less stable, this is not unreasonable.

But our turbulent context no longer allows us the luxury, let alone the time, to believe that this will be the end of our race to certainty.

At its least productive, digital transformation simply makes us better, quicker, more responsive and, perhaps most appealingly in the absence of more compelling fresh propositions, far more cost-effective, at performing what were, at the time of specification, critical business functions. 

Getting better, we could say, at the things we needed to be really good at up to the recent past. But eventually at the expense of the capabilities we need to build for what comes next.

Some of these changes will remain valid for years, and some will hang on and, with the necessary tweaking and reintegration, eventually give way. The rest will likely already be a weight on the business by the time the work is finally delivered. Let’s remember that the actual delivery time for even the most vanilla programme can easily stretch into several years.

Nevertheless, at its best, digital transformation delivers critical business efficiencies that provide the enterprise with a very necessary leanness, a certain amount of agility, and a temporary degree of improved customer service, along with the satisfaction of having introduced and integrated a range of fresh and exciting point innovations. 

About The Academy

The UNTHNKBL Academy is an invitation-only leadership programme, developed specifically to meet the most urgent strategic challenges facing senior marketers. The Summer 2023 semester runs from May through July.

The aims of the Academy are

• First, to reconnect marketing with the marketplace of today and tomorrow;
• Second, to bring that insight and clarity back in, to reconnect it with the business and the C-suite;
• Finally, to reconnect it to growth, as a credible and confident driver of real value - for brand, for customer, and for the enterprise.

For just one hour, once a week, we select, unpack and get to grips with a critical marketing challenge. 

Semesters are made up of twelve weekly one-hour online sessions, and timed for minimal interruption of the working day. Sessions are run under Chatham House rules, never recorded, and never published. 

Bespoke or private company-specific programmes and tailored coaching can also be arranged.

Contact me via Linked In message, via email at michael@bayler.com, or by phone on +44 7976 723720, to discuss the programme and to book onto the Academy.