I had just shared the impact and influence that Seth Godin has on me and my thinking. Here is his latest observation about leading.
On his blog, he writes and I quote,
Tug boats don’t usually tug. They push.
That’s because pushing is more mechanically efficient than pulling. When we pull, there’s tension and slack in the ropes, and the attachment between the puller and the pushed keeps changing.
But the metaphor gets far more interesting when we think about leading instead.
One bird at the head of the flock can lead 100 others if they’re enrolled in the journey. That bird would never be able to pull (or push) even one bird, never mind all of them.
– Seth Godin
In the world that inhabit, which is the world of Chief Information Officers and people who sell technology solutions to the problems that businesses face, a lot of times, the metaphor and framing is always around “driving digital transformation”.
This framing assumes that digital transformation needs to be driven or in other words forced on the business. The actions that follow from this frame are all within the frame. The leaders decide what journey they want to go on, decide what technology to deploy, engage a system integrator partner and buy the technology from a technology solution provider.
The project is kicked off, technology implemented. Before go-live, there is user acceptance testing (UAT) and a few key users are invited to test the technology for any bugs and if none is found, the project goes live with a lot of celebrations.
Then comes the real challenge of adoption by the people who are expected to use the technology in the first place. There is enough evidence in the research world that there are not many digital transformation projects (maybe even transformation projects, in general) do not achieve their original goals that they set themselves up when starting.
So, what went wrong? Things went wrong at multiple levels but most significantly, the framing of the entire project was not conducive to include all the people affected, right through the project.
When their voice didn’t matter, their acceptance wasn’t forthcoming.
– Mukesh Gupta
What this means is significantly low adoption of the technology deployed and therefore significantly less return on investment.
When someone is “Driving Digital Transformation”, they are being managers. When someone is “Leading Digital Transformation”, they are being leaders. People like to be led by people they like, trust and believe.
By changing the frame from “Driving Digital Transformation” to “Leading Digital Transformation”, we are suddenly creating space for involving everyone.
Just like Seth says, when done well, leading the entire organisation to adopt a newer vision of the future of their work is significantly more impactful – both from a human capital perspective and from a financial capital perspective.
Hoping to see a lot more leaders leading digital transformation than managers driving digital transformation.
