Sustaining Digitisation Hinges on
Culture
Digital transformations
can be your Trojan horse for cultural change.
Throughout
this series, which is based on a study of organisations actively travelling on
the road of digitisation, we have observed that companies on the digital
journey face many challenges. From the people they need to the structures they
want, one lesson we have learnt is that digitisation is about integration. Our
working model features 10 checkpoints on the digital journey, and this article
deals with the last one, culture.
No
feature drew more nods, shaking of the head and exclamation marks in our
interviews than culture. Mentioned time and again, culture was consistently
referred to as a big challenge if not the biggest.
It’s
not that the cultural themes which managers professed to be important (or
simply desperately wanted to push forward) were completely new. Some of these
cultural themes will be familiar. What is important to recognise is
that the digital journey presents a great opportunity for cultural work.
Saying to an organisation that “we need to work on our culture” is difficult
and can be off-putting. But introducing cultural redirections as part of a
digital transformation can make these changes easier to swallow. Think of
digitisation as your Trojan horse: Use it to finally do the sort of cultural
work that you have sought for years but for which you never had the context –
the material changes to your business model – to boost motivation. The goal is
the same. However, the culture needs to align with the working model of
digitisation that we have described over this series.
Digital cultures
Our
interviews helped us to synthesise five characteristics of digital cultures
emerging at those companies on the road to digitisation.
1.
360° awareness
A
common yet peculiar phrase one hears often in local league French football is
“Lève la tête!”, usually being screamed by an angry coach at his or her
players. It can literally be translated as “heads up” or more generally “lift
up your head and have a look around you”. The gist is to be aware of what your
teammates and opponents are doing, so you can make better judgements.
Digital
cultures try to do the same. One interviewee told us, “I think one of the most
important things is that every employee have a view of the things that are
more...like an umbrella. Not only my singular, small business; I try to have an
understanding of the whole business.”
This
matters because the sort of digital initiatives and innovations we have been
talking about don’t emerge from basement labs, but from open exchange and
recombinant thinking.
2.
User’s eyes
A
good deal of digitisation is about (potential) data linkages and learning
between customers and company. It may seem natural that customer centricity
will increase, but managers' thinking is sometimes hijacked by “cool tech” at
the expense of user value. Having access to mounds of data can also turn into a
“gamification” exercise (e.g. attempts to spike sales that don’t necessarily
have long-term value). We believe that it’s very important for companies
to maintain or increase their customer centricity as they embark on digital
journeys.
One
interviewee told us, “In our company, we have this focus around the customers
first and [as] I always put it, ‘If it's their problem, it's our problem’. We
need to see it through and make sure we come out the other end successful
together.”
3.
The new cosmopolitans
Digital
cultures require an additional dose of cosmopolitan thinking as compared to
what we may have seen in the past. As we discussed in part two of
this series, our interviewees expressed demand for three main types of people:
“quants”, “digital natives” and “suits”. These are key roles in the
digitisation process, but also camps between which fault lines of cultural
tension start to emerge. This requires open-mindedness and acceptance for the
new diversity of skillsets that organisations need. As one interviewee told us,
“You need all the different specialists all the time…you have to adapt to all
these different questions and competencies. You have to learn, you have to…be
able to talk to all these new kinds of people, like the Facebook evangelists or
data scientists.”
4.
Fairness and meritocracy
Thanks
to the proliferation of data and measuring tools, organisations we spoke to are
putting more focus on meritocracy and fairness. Data enable firms to make
arguments based on fair process, not fiat and whim. This doesn’t mean
these organisations have assigned all decision-making roles to machines. There
are still managers making tough decisions, but with fair process in mind. This
helps organisations avoid power struggles over resources and budget. This also
makes workplaces more down-to-earth. “Before, it was top-down. It’s totally
different today. We have our innovation meetings. The right people come
together and share various experiences…we have a sharing in the management team
and look through the ideas. We are very close to the teams,” said one
respondent.
5.
Failure is OK, learning a must
Digital
cultures tolerate and even welcome failure, perhaps not exactly with “open
arms”, but there’s a sense that digitisation has finally created some space for
this commonly acknowledged "secret" of innovative companies.
Crucially, they also extract learnings from error. Too often we don’t do
the hard forensic work of learning from our mistakes. One interviewee told
us: “We actually organised a ‘F**k up Friday’…we asked people to come and explain
one of their biggest failures and what they’d learnt from it.” This
organisation started by asking a senior staffer to share their own experience,
which then led the way for others to share theirs. Failures without forensics
are wasted opportunities.
In sum, the
companies we interviewed have made substantial changes in how they work, but
also in how they think. It’s likely that these cultural changes, if sustained,
will eventually be even more useful than the specific digital changes made as
part of these companies’ digital journeys.
Charles Galunic, INSEAD Professor of Organisational Behaviour | April 11, 2018
Read more at
https://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-organisations/sustaining-digitisation-hinges-on-culture-8851?utm_source=INSEAD+Knowledge&utm_campaign=dfe834c3a3-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_04_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e079141ebb-dfe834c3a3-249840429#KMJCJZ6teVGDhvfo.99
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