Digital transformation and organizational culture

- You presented the vision statement for the AI transformational idea. Congratulations. The executive committee loves it. They want you to take the next steps and start planning the initiative. Getting people involved in big idea transformative initiatives is more challenging than in a well-defined project or program. Many people in organizations prefer the status quo and hold on to how things are done today. Changes and transformations can be incredibly challenging for people, even if they're not detractors. If your organization is new to transformation or previous initiatives were less successful, you may face challenges. On the other hand, as leaders and people experience transformations, the culture changes making it easier to always be transforming. Your company culture reflects how easy it will be to recruit enthusiastic supporters and work with people who embrace the digital trailblazer's core principle. You will always be transforming. Be humble as you approach people about your vision. The key is asking people to join your experiment. As you plan the initiative, you'll be testing ideas with customers, validating assumptions, and developing proof of concepts around technologies. By focusing on experimentation, you acknowledge that you don't have all the answers. Solicit people's input, experimentation, and data-driven practices lead to learning faster decision-making, and reassessing agile priorities. While sharing your vision, listen for ways people can contribute to your experiment. You want people to take on different responsibilities, have complimentary skills, and contribute to collegial debates. You'll want to identify early adopters, passive supporters, and detractors when describing your ecosystem. You'll also want to identify potential partnerships, consultants, and new skills to bring from outside into your program. Strong transformational cultures emphasize open and inclusive communications, vision statements, and agile ceremonies such as Sprint reviews are good starting points. As you document the ecosystem, learn what types of communications are needed to keep people informed and excited. As you start working with the leadership group and agile teams, you'll answer questions, prioritize capabilities, and define your solution architecture. This process requires collaboration between a multidisciplinary team of business data and technology specialists. Transformation cultures are highly customer and strategy-driven. Vision sets the direction, and agile teams use rapid experiments to get feedback on their course and speed. There are many aspects to transformative cultures, and I want to share two others, one that is within your control and one that may require help from your sponsor. One of the agile manifestos principles is that the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. However, self-organizing teams doesn't mean complete autonomy. Organizations that aim for transformation as a core competency will create self-organizing standards. Team share best practices, then influence and evolve standards. Fostering self-organizing standards is within your control and can lead to culture change and ongoing innovation. Now, at some point, you may need help from your sponsor to update people's incentive plans. When you're changing how things operate, aligned incentives encourage departments to partner with you to drive the outcomes you're after.