Are You Prepared for What’s After Digital Transformation?

Welcome to Leading Disruption, a weekly letter about disruptive leadership in a transforming world. Every week we’ll discover how the best leaders set strategy, build culture, and manage uncertainty all in service of driving disruptive, transformative growth. For more insights like these, join my private email list.

You know what doesn’t work?

Making a significant and disruptive change and then staying the same.

It sounds like a no-brainer, but many organizations think transformation has an endpoint. But transformation, by its very nature, has no end. There’s always something coming beyond the current transformation. 

If we learned anything from the global pandemic, it’s that you never know where the next significant change will come from. It could be a huge external force like Covid-19. But it could also be something persistent but small, like Gen Z wanting to work in a different way.

In each case, these “individual” transformations are not cut and dried. They reverberate for decades and generations, prompting subsequent transformation after transformation. 

So how do you prepare for change, dramatic or subtle? How do you adapt? On this week’s livestream, I shared what comes after digital transformation, and how to ensure everything in your organization is prepared for it. And it all starts with:

Creating a culture of change

If you want to be adaptable and dynamic, ready for whatever transformation comes next, you have to prepare your organization, yourself, and your strategies. You have to orient everything toward being ready to change. 

How? Culture is the foundation for transformation.

Let’s say your culture is geared toward maintaining the status quo. Everything’s about order and stability. Well, that’s going to make change very difficult!

To thrive in disruptive change and transformation (it’s coming for you no matter how much you’d like to resist!), you have to create a culture that supports it. You have to ingrain the ability to change deeply into your organization’s DNA, into your processes, into your leadership. 

That’s how you can take on anything that comes your way. But:

How do you create a culture of change?

The most important part of intentionally creating a culture that supports change is alignment. 

Everyone in the organization needs to know where you’re headed, how you’re going to get there, what the strategy is, and what their role is. And they need to clearly understand the future customer holistically. 

When you have that level of alignment across your entire organization, you’re poised to quickly adapt and respond if (and when!) your future customer, strategy, industry, or employees’ roles evolve.

Then, you can continue to fine-tune your culture and strategically:

Build core transformation capabilities

In my research, I’ve noticed some companies constantly go through change, seemingly without experiencing any major upheavals. How is that possible?!

It might sound like magic, but there are several core capabilities that allow them to disrupt and drive transformation without any fallout:

• Strategy: They create organization-wide strategies that help them see their future customer. Every person involved knows exactly how they’re contributing to this vision. They clearly understand their unique contribution — and its importance.
• Experimentation: They test observations related to their future customer. They continuously ask themselves, “Are our observations about our future customer correct? Why or why not?”
• Scale: Once they’ve decided what works, they scale the change across the entire organization — creating and adapting processes to support transformation. They ask, “How can we embed and ingrain change into our organization?”
• Sunset: When they start new things, they also stop doing old things – whatever is no longer working because of the situation (consumers, businesses, employees, suppliers, partnerships, supply chains, the environment, the community, society) changing. They have processes and procedures to do this in an open and transparent way, making sure that people are treated well, receive training, and are provided new opportunities inside and outside the organization.

When you have a holistic way of thinking about change, you have the freedom to bring big-picture ideas into places where decisions happen. You get to embrace new ideas, even if they’re not your own. You tune yourself and your team to greet change with excitement and possibility. This is how an organization positions itself to transform with ease — again and again.

Constant transformation means staying agile and intentionally creating strategies that move the needle toward new goals. It’s not just about a specific digital transformation — it’s about business transformation and the pursuit of constant improvement.

If you build that into your organization’s DNA, you’ll be prepared to successfully navigate any change your customers, industry, or the world throws your way.

That’s a wrap for this year! Thank you for joining me and sharing your thoughts on the livestreams. I’ll be back on Tuesday, January 4 at 10 am PT / 1 pm EST to discuss priorities for 2022. Mark your calendar, because you don’t want to miss this conversation!

It’s a good time to think about your focus going into the new year. For now, I’m taking some much-needed downtime, and I hope you will too. I’ll see you in 2022!

Your Turn

In the decade or so, we’ve all been working through some type of digital transformation in our lives — even ones as seemingly simple as e-signatures instead of paper ones! So, I want to hear from you: What’s the number one thing you’ve learned from digital transformation? And how do you plan to stay ahead of the curve? 

Thank you to Workplace from Meta for supporting Leading Disruption.