Background:
An existing client had little success with digital transformation through technical experts. At its heart, the client felt that this was about ways of working rather than technical solutions. In order to adopt cloud capabilities new ways of working together needed to be appreciated and experienced. He approached us as we had already delivered deep, sustained change elsewhere.
Connecting:
Digital transformation was not our area of specialism, but we had plenty of experience in culture change and dealing with uncertainty. The client desired a culture of working that engaged uncertainty, experimented incrementally and co-created solutions with customers. We did not know what the solution would be, but we offered to adopt exactly the approach he desired in order to discover what that solution could look like. We would get him to the start line. We acknowledged that we might not have the capabilities he desired for whatever that solution turned out to be.
What we did
Digital Transformation
Where
Public Sector
When
Nov 20 – Dec 22
How
Organisational Coaching, Culture Change
Background
An existing client had little success with digital transformation through technical experts. At its heart, the client felt that this was about ways of working rather than technical solutions. In order to adopt cloud capabilities new ways of working together needed to be appreciated and experienced. He approached us as we had already delivered deep, sustained change elsewhere.
Connecting
Digital transformation was not our area of specialism, but we had plenty of experience in culture change and dealing with uncertainty. The client desired a culture of working that engaged uncertainty, experimented incrementally and co-created solutions with customers. We did not know what the solution would be, but we offered to adopt exactly the approach he desired in order to discover what that solution could look like. We would get him to the start line. We acknowledged that we might not have the capabilities he desired for whatever that solution turned out to be.
Consideration
We worked with other partners the client had already identified with technical experience in this area. Together we collaborated with the client to listen and discover with him what he wanted and how it might develop. We worked incrementally in short sprints, including workshops directly with people closest to the problems they were looking to solve. What emerged was a series of documents with which a change programme could be based. It included content areas, materials re-used from previous initiatives and new ways to measure cultural transformation. Having co-created this output in a way that reflected his desired culture, the client felt confident enough to ask us to continue and deliver a series of pilot programmes.
Change
Two pilot programmes were scheduled. The first ran in two parts. The first part brought a small group of random volunteers together, each willing to learn and experiment with new ways of working. A senior leader brought a real organisational challenge and over the course of 6 sessions the group explored the challenge alongside end users, pushing back the boundaries of normal working practices to prototype new approaches, test them with real users and present the data findings to the senior leader to inform further decisions and experiments. A second part then saw the same group work on challenges closer to home, enabling them to take their new behaviours back to their own areas and spread the new working practices there. We used a storyboard to shape the process and worked with them to develop their own story – an important cultural process for organisational change. See picture above.
Close
In a very short time people were surprised at how much they had achieved, how they had achieved it with people they didn’t know beforehand, and how their view on digital transformation had significantly changed – and they were the front runners. One person said, “I’m enjoying this. I’ve never worked this way before”, whilst another said that it had actually helped change the relationship he had with his wife because he had more open conversations with her now. It hit a very deep level of lasting change in an area that many organisations are grappling with at the moment.
