Having and holding to clear, aligned principles is critical

Digital Transformation provides the opportunity to create a seamless experience end to end across customers, across products, across channels. Where however, there is a lack of vision, purpose or external orientation the risk that emerges is that organisations simply digitalise vs transform.

Part of the challenge we have in our organisations is that the drive to manage complexity has led to compartmentalisation and this compartmentalisation of our organisations has led to silos and artificial boundaries between groups.

Walking the Talk’s experience with organisations all over the world is that silos and lack of cross boundary thinking as one of the most pervasive patterns of behaviour today.

To fully achieve digital transformation and AI it is the whole that matters over individual or sub group and this requires integration and holistic thinking. In order to do this 2 main challenges need to be overcome:

• Letting go.
  Integration requires someone, somewhere to ‘let go’ of their pet project and potentially something that has been very successful. One of the main barriers to transform is the inability or lack of willingness of people to let go of what they own, what they have built, what they are confident works and take a leap into the unknown or back someone else’s success.
  
  
• Just this once:
  The tyranny of exception is real and destructive for digital transformation and AI. For every ‘exception’, ‘just this once’, ‘we haven’t got time to do it properly’, ‘lets go back and fix it later’, a deviation occurs and a message is sent that we are not as committed to the holistic change. I am reminded of the Ernest Hemmingway quote "gradually then suddenly" - enough of these small changes and the integrated holistic vision is significantly undermined.

Leadership at the highest level, working in lockstep together towards a clear vision; having and holding to clear and aligned principles is critical for success.

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