In this episode we’re going to talk about transformation — digital transformation in particular. What is it? What do companies think it means? And what does it really mean. It’s a term that has been growing in popularity over the past 4 or 5 years especially. Awareness of digital transformation was especially driven up during the onset of COVID as many traditional businesses and industries scrambled to quickly reinvent their online presence and engage everyone from their own team members to their customers in an entirely remote, digital-first world.
Guest appearance
Christian is a business technologist with over 15 years of hands-on experience helping clients achieve their goals through the strategic use of technology.
Footnotes
Episode transcript
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:00:00] Welcome to High Agency, where we ignite conversations that drive change and spark momentum towards transformative action and professional mastery. In this episode, we're going to talk about transformation, digital transformation in particular. What is it? What do companies think it means? And what does it really mean? It's a term that's been growing in popularity over the past four or five years, especially. Awareness of digital transformation was especially driven up during the onset of COVID as many traditional businesses and industries scrambled to quickly reinvent their online presence and engage everyone from their own team members to customers in an entirely remote digital first world. According to Accenture, spending today is $880 billion on digital transformation. Projects is projected to grow to $3.4 trillion by 2026, with 97% of companies saying that the pandemic accelerated their approach to digital transformation. 74% of those companies saying that digital transformation is a priority, while only 35% report that their digital transformation efforts were successful. However, digital transformation isn't undertaken only in times of crisis. And truly, digital transformation can be done in different ways. well and it can be handled very badly. Quoting a research scientist George Westerman of MIT, when digital transformation is done right it's like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly but when it's done wrong all you have is a really fast caterpillar. So joining me today to talk about transformation and butterflies is Christian Nielsen. Christian is the principal of Must Be Human, a strategic consultancy that partners with executives and leadership teams to drive digital transformation through a people-centric focus on cultural change. His mission is to convert digital uncertainty into strategic clarity and drive transformative digital action. Christian's the go-to trusted advisor and strategist for corporate executives that are seeking impartial candid insights on all things digital and hands-on help in driving transformation. Christian, welcome to High Agency. Thank you Mo. Pleasure to be here. So starting off I'm asking everybody this, what does high agency mean to you?
Christian Nielsen
[00:02:30] That's a good question. I mean top of mind, I'm pretty blank honestly. I mean I have to be honest. I think it comes more to top of mind something related to personal integrity maybe. Like agency can be so many things and I think I'm a little bit biased about having worked in agencies so that's why my brain jumps to immediately it's like agency. Well that was the double entendre we intended as well. Yeah yeah exactly. I think integrity is probably one of the top words that comes to mind.
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:03:08] Yeah no I would gladly accept that. Yeah I mean our intention in talking about high agency and naming the podcast High Agency was to talk about um being able to shape and create your destiny and shape the world around you as opposed to just being at the effect of things. And integrity definitely definitely plays into that. So we're here to talk about digital transformation today and this is a field that you've been working in for some time. So maybe actually let's start with you. Tell me a little bit about Must Be Human and how did you arrive in digital transformation? When did it start? I'm not going to ask you when it when it ended because it's obviously still going. Yeah. But how do you how do you come into this field and why is it your area of focus and passion?
Christian Nielsen
[00:03:56] Right yeah um so I think I mean as many careers career trajectories by sheer coincidence. So I started in a digital agency in what must have had like 2013 or something and had worked in a tech industry. And I had enabled recruitment startup before that. So it was basically enabling agent recruitment coming back to agent and agency where a digital platform was enabling you to reach out and get candidates basically by referrals. But the digital product was accelerating the process. So you would have a field of candidates hand picked by a network of connectors like really connected people in weeks. um and this was before all the new modern and ai recruitment basically took place right so it's really really great and and then i worked in these agency on this agency called uh it's it's called shape and the danish agency and what we did there was effectively develop digital innovation the the company is focused on mobile apps particularly native so irs and android and it would it would in the early days of solve a business problem and it was often related to a consumer of some sort it wasn't so much on the enterprise side of employees being more efficient so it was way more in the heydays of marketing free marketing money and fund money to you know uh develop a mobile app where you can hold it up and kick a football and win a soda pop or something yeah and all those things and no users three months later back when it was novelty yeah yeah and yeah the real thing fun days of it um because there is nothing that to be measured um and then i transferred into um another a competing company at the time called notes and moved to london to help them turn around their office so it was a a little bit bigger had four offices in europe at the time and they was since acquired by a japanese company called monster lab as you know and uh and there is a little bit more scale wise and i started to be more mature in in these agencies and realized that we often got these you know requests for uh please develop this right please develop this new app and we were starting to uh ask more and more of but why why yeah because they would start with the solution first yeah right exactly yeah um and you started to realize having developed designed and developed many of these custom applications and solutions that it's like they never really worked as well as we had intended and it was not a matter of you know this this was badly designed there wasn't any user involvement or the code was hacked or it was actually oftentimes healthy budgets and good client involvement good customer involvement it was more a matter of the why it often led to there wasn't any particular good steer on the meaning of it like what kind of business strategy is actually driving this what what objectives in the business desire are we trying to satisfy with these technology means um so in the midst of 2018 i i convinced my um my executives that we were to start a strategy department because we did provide strategy advice but we didn't get paid for it so it's more part of a sales process and from there i started to realize the term digital transformation was starting to emerge
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:07:29] yeah and i'm pretty familiar with that type of strategy because it was probably really just um you know as quick and as valuable a recommendation as you could make in order to sell the solution rather than understanding that most of the work is actually in the strategy and deciding what the solution should be yeah exactly
Christian Nielsen
[00:07:47] and and coming back to your last question right so why why have i said i must be human and and what's what's unique about that well what's unique about that is that i think in order to for technology to be an efficient investment for for your company you need to start with the human element like is this employees who is supposed to be more productive through autonomous solutions is it consumers that that want to consume your service or your products in different ways more efficiently more conveniently that's where we need to start that's where competition is actually
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:08:26] fought between companies um and the experience yeah so maybe let's let's start with the definition first right because i feel like there's some definitional problems where um we have a lot of context coming into the conversation we've both worked in digital transformation spaces at skyrocket we've done a number of transformation projects yeah um you know and some of them actually are more even brand and cultural transformation than even digital even though digital is a component of it yeah but we'll we'll get to that okay um but you know what is a digital transformation meant to be because even geographically you've worked in environments that um have different levels of fluency with the term um so i know you know whether it's parts of europe the fact that monster lab was born out of japan but they're like in 800 pound gorilla of a consultancy yeah that swallowed up a bunch of smaller firms and now is actually undertaking digital transformation projects around the world yeah and now a public company yeah and now a public company um but there's a different level of fluency depending on where north america that you're located yeah right yeah so what is digital transformation uh let's maybe you know talk to the definition first yeah and then maybe get into why there's a different amount of fluency
Christian Nielsen
[00:09:43] and see depending on the market that you're in right right okay yeah uh definition wise what i usually try to go about is not to get bogged down into the details of um i usually call it modernization of a company and it happens to be enabled by digital technology but it's also and that's where it often misses that it's it's it's just as much about capability within a company so if we were to say um something else is happening in an industry you basically need someone with the capability to do it out in the market either internally where you need to be able to understand what's happening on the consumer side or on our client and customer side or somebody who's out phasing and understanding what's what's really happening from outside in the company and and modernization is the best catchphrase around digital transformation that i can i can think of because if you say modernization in other means people understand it really well yeah it sounds like a virtue right who does who doesn't want modernization yeah i mean it's it's because like uh oftentimes you hear growth being thrown around a lot like it's it's to um it's to accelerate growth but many things accelerate growth and and i think digital transformation in the end of the day comes down to creating and sustaining competitive advantage and it's a never-ending process because you can always improve i think again modernization and improvement with technology is is really what it's about so it's it's i think it's a bit of a bad word or phrase to say transformation because it sounds like let's do this for six or twelve months and then surely we're gonna be there and then 12 months down the line and you sit at your internal meeting and somebody's knocking on your you uh on your door and saying like so where did you spend that million dollars yeah like what happened to show for right and and it's like well we got we got off the grounds really well and and it's like well when is the return on investment yeah and and i just want to close with that because that's i that's one of the things that's really also acting against digital transformation right now when you you know you had some great um insights and quotes from accenture and some of the other big companies it's it's still really early days yeah really don't know if it's worth the investment in short term i'm sure you have little pet projects that actually doing well in isolation but from a bigger perspective it's super hard to measure whether you have succeeded so i'm always a little bit dubious when when i hear or i think it's a little bit wrong to say you know 70 of digital transformation projects fail like well how do you measure yeah uh and and that also means that it's often hard for companies to find the the
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:12:34] means for it like the capital and resources well the means for it and also like to your other point where the impact is um like we're talking about going into a traditional industry typically right like if we were to give like the absolute you know simplest use case yeah it's that you had some sort of you know company that was manufacturing widgets yeah right yeah and uh you know they process purchase orders they manage um staff scheduling yeah and it's clipboards and paper and probably some outdated accounting package in the background where they'll do you know month end or quarter end or year end and that's a big batch process where now a bunch of humans need to come together and as a team make sense of everything that happened and try to glean some data out of it yeah so in a situation like that a digital transformation project would typically say okay let's actually take your internal operations and work through technology so that people are better enabled to do their jobs that they were doing before anyways yeah perhaps even improve the experience of that but now the data collection isn't another their job it's not an add-on activity it's just something that's being generated and handed to us all the time and then on the revenue generating and the value capture side that we're going to process orders we're going to fulfill orders again through the tools and through the technology that actually empowers our people to do their jobs better but again the data is going to be collected passively rather than needing to be this Active activity yeah that's a good point yeah and and those instances you know the case for digital transformation makes a lot of sense and you know that's an overly simplistic you know case study obviously yeah but I think where that sort of failure ratio comes in it's probably in what you said about you know what is the length of time and what does that 12 month report look like yeah because if somebody in a company especially allocated the budget called it a digital transformation project yeah even at that point you would probably be kind of setting it up for failure because that means somebody put a limited cap on it and it's saying okay at the end of 12 months you know wagging the finger what have you done what did we get for it yeah and then if a project is over time or over budget yeah it's a failure right so technically you can call those project failures but there might be second or third order effects that come across maybe second third fourth year yeah where it's maybe improvement in culture maybe improvement in employee retention maybe in customer satisfaction yeah that the trajectory to actually feel the effects from these efforts is longer than I think perhaps a lot of finance departments have the appetite for yeah that's
Christian Nielsen
[00:15:16] probably a good point yeah yeah for sure and I think it it again also comes back to trying to find the source of why it so to speak failed like what what was the expectations not even talking about the actual measures of it but what was the expectation yeah was to understanding of what what was being invested in proper at the time that the decision was made to go ahead with some sort of a project and and and I think what we both experience quite a bit is that it often starts with something tangible it's a new sort of uh website it's an e-commerce module where there wasn't one or maybe that's more years ago but still or so tangible and and then as you have that tangible thing people can understand and it made sense which I actually think is a big word sense making for us human beings um is that part about well we invest one we get two back or three or five and e-commerce is a particular spot there because it's it's like you can really easily measure and it's it's tangible for us to understand so after three months after six months have we increased our sales with our e-commerce module um but then coming back to the capability again it also means like we need to do e-commerce and then it starts to get a little bit deeper where it's like well why yeah and our warehousing is that electronic do you actually know what's there imagine a consumer that comes into a website and they want to order a new shirt and they have no idea when it's going to show up these days you you're not going to order it right so you need feedback from your warehouse and all little little things that seems to be simple at first trickle down trickles down into the organizational level and that gets us to talk about the capabilities which isn't just a human element it's also uh you know we call it tech stack what kind of technologies do you have that stack together that's actually
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:17:16] layer up to create the experience yeah exactly um yeah so i mean there's you know instances i think where um we've definitely at Skyrocket taken on engagements that were digital transformation projects um specifically requested as such and tended to be very solution oriented and i think as result um there was a lot of investment and that went into even on the strategy side but i don't think there was necessarily enough maturity or understanding of what the trajectory of the impact would be yeah um and our most successful engagement has been a an instance where no one asked for a digital transformation project yeah right uh but what was asked of us was to actually um do the strategy piece first right right and so we work with a ocean conservancy uh runs a variety of programs from uh plastic reduction programs in companies and homes to shoreline cleanups to you know looking at supply chain for seafoods you name it yeah and they actually had the wherewithal to say well you know we don't want to start with a solution and start paying to build something yeah we don't know what we need right yeah so the first engagement that we actually undertook there was walking through an organization with like 11 different departments yeah um it's like a you know 20 million dollar plus charity um you know 100 plus staff and we walked through 11 different departments to understand what their needs were yeah right like who are your end users how do you interact with them where's your data stored today yeah and then move through right and eventually we got to a point where we realized um that they're this massive data collection beast of an organization only problem is the data is sitting on paper right or like a thousand excel files spread out over 100 different sharepoint drives yeah right and our pitch to the organization after the strategy piece was was we said um you know you're actually a technology company you just don't know it yet yeah right yeah and that was our sort of like inroad to say that um because most of what you're doing is data collection and most of your departments tell us that their primary need of the data is to actually report on the impact yeah right because you have you know foundations government agencies donors that are paying you to save the ocean therefore save the world and humanity yeah that's a pretty important job yeah yeah and so every department uh is telling us that our number one need is to take the data and be able to tell the story of the impact we made in the world and for that reason your data collection can't be a batch process right we can't be waiting until the end of the year to now cobble together thousands of excel files and try to do some sort of analysis on this data set and figure out what happened yeah yeah uh but what if your data could be a dashboard right and then i think the lights went on yeah um and everybody realized that there was a lot of experience such that all these various departments are able to work through the tools yeah and now you know to my earlier example the data collection became a passive thing yeah and we're replacing reports with dashboards yeah it's live the impact is seen and felt yeah um but in this instance we were also working with an organization that had the appetite for it frankly um because when we talked about this sort of transformation project we purposely uh made a fairly ambitious picture of what was necessary right so it wasn't just an agency coming in and solutioning and saying you know here's a bunch of fees for services and what we're going to build yeah uh we also very much held up a mirror to them and said here's who you're going to have to hire yeah right here's the roles you're going to need yeah the type of data governance conversations you're going to need to have you have because guess what you're about to become a technology company yeah right and this is what tech companies look like are you ready for that and thankfully they give us a three-year window within which to actually get this work done to start moving in that direction yeah which gave them time to um get into some of the cultural change that was required exactly right because these are roles and departments that didn't exist before yeah and so suddenly you know the vibe internally is changing as well the things we talk about and what our orientation is yeah um and maybe it was the act of working with a company that is you know a non-profit right they're you know charitable not to say that they had money to burn but they didn't necessarily have the you know um quarterly ROI uh pressures right I mean impact is very very important yeah uh but not the same financial pressure so maybe that was one of the reasons that they had the appetite right to sign up for that sort of journey yeah but the other part of it was that you know they're also quite ambitious in what they're trying to do so they might be a 20 million dollar organization today yeah but their plans were very much that you know in three to five years we want to be 50 million dollars or greater yeah because the more resourced we are the better job we can do of you know saving the oceans right so I think that changed the appetite and I I think you know if I was to actually look at it it'd be that the culture was already ready for it but that's not always the case in private Enterprise or in public companies where quarterly
Christian Nielsen
[00:22:23] earnings right no exactly and and um I think it's a really good example that that you brought up because of of them having a clear burning platform or an urgency for change as I often like to call it there's a good reason why why specific employees and management and leadership actually wants change in their company um it's harder to get that if you're a public company and you sit and knock on on on everybody's desk and being like how are you going to give me 10 in the next quarter it's a little bit like well you know I know it's important because we've got some shareholders that I don't actually know but here it's like you open the news and and you look at the oceans or you can't get to the water for plastic right it's it's visual we see it all the time and I think that's a really important thing because technology has the impact and that's what I'm really motivated and passionate about in my business is to say when you start to get these Technologies into your company it changes the way you work and that's the best tangible example we have of culture you know the thing that the way things are done around here what does that mean like the best thing that is work processes right our our sense making workplace um and some of these tools enable people in companies to do greater things to do more with less and they still need that agency to come back to that word they kind of need to have that influence in saying actually I want to do better why would I not want to do better in my job but I would then also like some influence on how I do better so being you know having a tool pulled over my head uh makes me anxious because I don't know if it's going to replace me or you know some of these bad instant incidents that we sometimes read about or hear about where it's like you know Mo here here's a mobile app go do your job and you're like well I thought this was the knowledge economy I went to university for many years and I have huge debt to pay off for that reason and and here you micromanage me with a mobile phone now it's like no thanks I don't want to change I I also think um one thing that's interesting that I've seen over the last few years is that I've seen over the last few years is that I've seen over the last few years is that we keep saying and I've been saying that myself that change reluctance is just so big yeah yeah but then you see chat tbt come around and all of a sudden the adoption is just sky high because it was three steps to on board and you just start right off right of course it chat tbt has been around for years before it actually publicly launched a big scale but I just mean if it makes sense and the utility is there for an individual to use use it and experiment with it without much cost or friction it will happen yeah that's not to say that then you'll just grab it and start to use it in your daily work that's a little bit especially on the security and information sensitivity side well I think it's a great
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:25:21] example though because um you know the the friction like you pointed out was was low right the value was high yeah but it was also fairly non-prescriptive right because it was kind of open-ended as in this can create value in a lot of different areas so it created a sort of natural curiosity yeah of you know how could I employ this yeah and that's you know we're dealing with human beings myself as well I don't like to be told what to do right we do so much better with curiosity and Discovery than prescriptive uh top down process yeah right yeah um so there's an inside out uh component of it I think that's you know very important yep and that really speaks to that you've spoken about in our past conversations and that you're passionate about is the fact that every digital transformation project is actually if I had to put a ratio to it maybe it's 20 digital transformation and 80 of it is riding on cultural transformation yeah right so how do you have that conversation and bring that along when you have a company that is dated and process and tools but might also be actually dated in its appreciation of culture and how much that's impacting strategy
Christian Nielsen
[00:26:34] um I think I mean my general approach is is just like you you said in your example starts with a strategy process and any good strategy process has to start with some sort of an assessment and so I need to get a gauge on what is the current position of a of a company in a given landscape as to use the metaphor and that means I often say you know what is your digital or AI readiness yeah the maturity yeah yeah and I like to call it readiness because I think sometimes the maturity is a little bit of a especially when you often end up with low maturity it's a bit of a you're it's a hard conversation it's hard to say you're a corporate adolescent yeah yeah yeah you're digitally deficient Congrats like I can help like the good news is that you can make great strides with little effort because you're so bad off it's not exactly a good start I find um and I think there did um you start to also find out with your client cost the being or not for me, getting some company whether they actually have that appetite to facing the brutal facts so it comes down to are we actually ready do we have people the talent the people with the motivation the capacity to do these things like if we ask around and that's why i usually in my assessments i interview people individually coming as an outsider having a lot of integrity and and making sure that my interactions with them are anonymous you can very quickly get a gauge on where company culture is it's very hard to articulate what it what does that mean but you you you can quickly iron out like what are the three to five big brutal facts and then it comes down to you know things like we really want to do digital and then it's like is there a budget item for digital no okay um who's responsible representing digital or i.t at the table along your senior executives usually oftentimes none yeah i.t is often looked at as an operational thing yeah with support and maintenance right um it's not actually a strategic lever in the business so either there's no active
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:28:49] appreciation it's like a passive servant yeah for everything else but not an active lever yeah
Christian Nielsen
[00:28:54] i mean we all remember watching jess into jurassic park and the i.t guy who's the you know pizza eating coke drinking guy who messes up at the end because he did something terrible and and i.t has moved on greatly since those times but i think just like we're stuck in industrial ways of working on companies often with incentives and so on i think we're still stuck in that mindset a little bit because you know digital transformation digital is is a horizontal that basically crosses every function like the lawyers the marketing the organizational the operational part of your business to market you know so like that's the first thing to think about you know if whether it's digital transformation digital is a horizontal that basically crosses every function like the lawyers the marketing the organizational the operational part of your business the marketing is one aspect of IT. Marketing really needs to be involved in digital, whereas IT is usually a vertical function that has a very specific remit in the business and responsibility. And both need to work together.
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:29:43] That's a great visual, actually. And I think that's actually probably where a lot of the hesitation is. Clients probably just get interrupted in even their thinking and their perspective of it because they're thinking of digital tech, tools, software. They've been through the ERPs and the massive CRM implementations and all of that, but it's always been in that vertical. And now suddenly you have to think of it horizontally, right? And that's not a perspective that they're used to. Yeah, yeah.
Christian Nielsen
[00:30:11] And I mean, to also bring very concrete examples, you know, we spend, Canada spends $60 million on an ArriveCAN app and us who has worked in agencies look a bit on each other and being like, why didn't we get that contract? Exactly. Like the first seconds, we're like, wow, that's that. That's a lot of money for a pretty poor app, of course, not knowing the insides of all these IT systems it had to integrate with, but still, it's like massive. Let's just be honest about it. That was not a tech problem. Technology is readily available for whatever they actually had on the app you could have done with AI years ago. I'm not saying the complicated integrations on the inside. Take another example. I get prescriptions from my doctor once a month here. Legally. It's written into the law here in British Columbia, probably all of Canada, has to be a faxed prescription from my doctor to the pharmacy. I think they largely break that law by sending emails. Again, not a tech problem, right? It's a human problem. Yeah. It's a human adoption. It's a bad regulation or outdated regulation. And that's what brings me back to often talking about modernization, like little trinkets that is helping in this. I think Jim Collins calls it a flywheel. Yeah. So you build that little momentum. Yeah.
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:31:32] The virtuous cycle.
Christian Nielsen
[00:31:33] Yeah. And that's exactly what transformation has to be, digital or other sorts of change and transformation in the company. It's that part of a flywheel where you have to get some early successes. And that's often more where we would get in as an agency, right? It's this, let's do something in three to six months and prove to this juggernaut of an organization that you can actually do something. We come in as outsiders on the clock. And we don't succeed. Unless we deliver to that contract. We have nothing else in mind about their organization. We're not politically entrenched or anything else like themselves. And then once you get that little early, then you start to see these change agents in the client organization popping up and being like, that was great. And actually, I love that. Maybe I can get in on the next thing, right? And that's when you get that little momentum going. Of course, not without friction. I'm sure you have many award stories for that, too, once you start to get going. Yeah. And you get to these huge roadblocks where like, OK, somebody hasn't been asked. Again, it's like a human element.
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:32:35] Yeah. And it's never, yeah, the recurring theme here is that most of the obstacles and roadblocks in a digital transformation project is at the end of the day, you're implementing the best of software and tools to improve people's experience, whether it's internal or whether it's external. And the roadblocks are never tools or technology, actually. Yeah. And once resources are allocated, the roadblocks aren't even budget. The only times that we've stumbled and fallen into issues is where the culture of the organization didn't necessarily support what was happening. Yeah. And so, you know, it can go either way, even in those scenarios, though, because even if you have a culture in an organization that's hostile, if you have a opportunity to incubate the idea in some sort of protected environment, so maybe it's a small organization, I don't know. task force yeah that's got some executive sponsorship some of the key people that are kind of cutting across these horizontal lines yeah but they're off to the side left alone for the most part yeah and allowed to experiment innovate try to prototype a new way of working yeah and when that starts to show some signs of life then almost transplant it into the host yeah and i use the word transplant on purpose because it does feel like a sort of foreign organ that comes in but it improves the situation right yeah and then you have organizations where you work in them but you don't have that protected environment so then you're trying to innovate you're trying to try new ways of working and you know early even early in the process just experimenting with new approaches and you're very much treated like a foreign body in a host organism that treats you like a pathogen right yeah and the immune system sends antibodies to like kill off the infection yeah right yeah and those are the places where you know budgets timelines everything will suffer because everything is treated as if somehow you know the host has been infected with new ideas right yeah but if you can actually incubate those ideas in a protected environment and transplant them in yeah that's probably i think the only way um of actually getting any type of innovation happening in organizations of a certain size yeah yeah i fully agree with that and and and again i think
Christian Nielsen
[00:34:53] that comes down to having some of the right uh what i like to call the change agents in in the organizations um i did this uh course with mit about change management and one of the very interesting things we learned is that social capital is actually one of the most important things uh to to go after in any kind of change process and it often comes down to finding the actual connectors in an organization so the people uh you know who will do the work that they do and who have the power to get stuff done. It's a very intangible thing to talk about, but it's like, who do you go to? You know, we always go to this and this person because they know so many and they have to progress and to a social capital to get things done because they can ask favors. People give them favors. It's almost like this little barter economy within a company. But also the social element of saying, hey, you know, should we go out after work to have a bite or something? And then, you know, if someone, particularly in the company, says that and two people follow and then somebody else says it and then 20 people go, right? You kind of start to get that gauge on who is the person and the people in the organization with all that kind of prowess. It's hard for us as external parties to come in and see that immediately. It takes time. And it's one of the reasons why in my work that I also embed myself deeply with my clients. I can't just sit in my own office and do something. I like to sit with them a couple of days a week at least. I usually engage on a fractional basis where I'm considered an employee. But I don't, being fractional, I'm not in the political system. My employment is not based on the political hierarchy or, of course, my performance if I want to stay and so on. But usually it's more project basis. Like you guys at Skyward.
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:36:50] So you're embedded enough, but not so much that you'd be affected by the internal politics of an organization.
Christian Nielsen
[00:36:56] And I don't go to all the internal meetings as well. I can still remain, I would like to think, a little bit more effective with the time I have at hand.
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:37:04] Well, with the time, but also with the perspective. There's a lot of advantage to not being so fully immersed that you have the same curse of knowledge as everybody else there because then you're going to share the perspective and see the same things everybody else is seeing. But your role is actually to see what they can't see. And on the lunch invites, I mean, that's an interesting one because what you're really speaking to is, at the end of the day, that's an indicator of trust. So how do you detect and then later enable a high trust environment? Because you need to create a space where leadership, where finance, where other departments will be safe enough to say, here's the real points of friction and failures in our department and in our work together so that they can be addressed. Yeah. Right. Because in a low trust environment, what do you get when you do a discovery or ask for feedback? Everything's great. We're working great. Everything's fine. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But in a high trust environment, they'll be like, well, here's what's working, but here's where we have a lot of friction. Yeah. Right. Or here's where we're really letting ourselves down. Yeah.
Christian Nielsen
[00:38:06] Yeah, for sure. I mean, and I think that's also what we see because many of these things, it's still fairly new. Like in the whole lifetime of humanity, digital transformation is a very little fraction. Right. And so. But the reality is also that we're still finding our feet when it comes to what is digital transformation, what is best practice. Like for implementing technology, we've got years of experience and have a pretty good idea of what works and doesn't. We've got scrum, agile, all the methodologies, and you can easily take certificates and learn it. But when it comes to actual transformation, because it touches so much on the cultural aspect of a company, it is just so specific to each and every company that has to do it. So there is no one-sided. There is no one size fits all. Yeah. I think we can probably agree that there are some best practices about how to do it and definitely not how to do it. Right. I think this whole thing of buying some technology and starting with the implementation of some solution, you know, and trying to force it upon people in the organization or searching and or searching for the problem for the solution, is not a great way of starting. It is, to your earlier reference, it is more about making sure that, especially out where, you know, at the front lines in your company, whatever it is that you do, out where you meet your customers or your consumers, you know, at those front lines that you have a good idea about, how can we service them better? How can they get better value? What are the problems that's basically limiting us in doing better and then working backwards into the organization and the operational thing is usually a bedrock of challenges, right? Yeah. Yeah. And nothing is perfect. We're human beings and like I said, that's also why I'm saying transformation is never ending because we, you can keep running around the whole digital excellence. You can keep finding ways and because digital technology also advances and evolves, it'll always come back and two to three years later, you can say, well, let's upgrade this and then you get even better results. Yeah.
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:40:12] No, I mean, I would agree with that in terms of general adaptation because any, any type of transformation project like that should leave a company better able to adapt to change later, right? I still think there's some value in pointing to that breakthrough moment of that metamorphosis. Yeah. I'm going to bring in that butterfly example again. Okay. When you, you know, Caterpillar finally emerges from the cocoon. Yeah. But there is a point of metamorphosis where for a lot of organizations that just, you know, haven't thought in these terms before and sometimes it's because, you know, the industry didn't make those demands of them. Yeah. Like some of our clients today, apparel companies based out of the U.S. Yeah. Wildly successful, right? Started by army veterans like a decade ago. Yeah. Entirely bootstrapped and, you know, in one story, it's like they started with like $1,200 in the pocket and out of a garage, $120 million today, various, you know, private equity ownership, all this sort of stuff. Right. The industry never demanded these sort of transformation or thinking in those terms because it was, you know, founder led, founder grown. Yeah. Yeah. And that was it. And today, talking to them where they're already using Shopify, they've already got a CRM of some sort. You know, they've filled in the puzzle with the tools, but the entire picture isn't clicking together. Yeah. And so for them, some sort of metamorphosis is necessary to get over that hump. Yeah. So that this all becomes a seamless experience. Yeah. And then from that point forward, the adaptation is going to be more iterative and feel like ongoing evolution. Yeah. Rather than this one big period of pain. Yeah. Right. But today, I can tell you there. They're definitely feeling that period of pain of how are we going to break through because everything is kind of working. Yeah. But nothing is truly seamless yet.
Christian Nielsen
[00:41:57] Yeah. And I think that's you bring up a really important point, which is also the point about change being sometimes painful and transformation being painful. Like that's in innovation. We usually refer to that as creative destruction. If you want to do something new, something's got to give. And that's oftentimes, again, where. You know, people have some challenges because if something's got to give is me, then no, no chance, like I'm not moving over in another job. Yeah. I'm perfectly satisfied sitting in my digger and controlling the joysticks. I don't want a machine to do that.
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:42:32] And the human tendency is, you know, I want things to be different. Yeah. But as long as nothing changes. Yeah. Yeah. You can change, but not me.
Christian Nielsen
[00:42:39] And and I think that that's a that's a point you definitely run into. And I think the other thing that's also makes it for me so interesting. But also so challenging is that it's almost to your point is this whole symphony like you can say orchestration. Yeah. You can have the violinist be a great player, but then you have a cello right next to her and it's not really working right. And it sounds terrible. And it might takes quite a lot of training over days, weeks, years, months, whatever, to start to just see the aspect of how well it could sound once you get it orchestrated. And then, of course, you know, it's not a perfect picture. So then you just get it right. And, you know, then the main violinist leaves and you're like back to square one. You almost feel like and then you see that with sports teams, you know, and others where it's almost like let's bring in the, you know, the super player to change around the quarterback, the main, you know, attacker or whatever in soccer. And it never goes as planned. I mean, I think that's a good analogy for technology as well. Bring in that ERP. Sure. Sure. Maybe that's too much. That's the whole foundation. Maybe the stadium. But like, let's bring in that whole thing, the e-commerce Shopify module or something. And that Ronaldo didn't perform as well as you had anticipated. Because all of our hopes were singular in that one place. Exactly. It's like Shopify worked so well at one of our competitors. We've heard that from from the outside. And we kind of had that idea. And it's almost like it was proven. That's what the vendor told us. So we did the same thing. And I was like, why isn't it working? Well, because there's two different companies, right? This company is 130 years old. This company is 50 years old. This company is this. This company is that. And that brings us back to what you asked me before. What are the differences over the different world regions that I worked across?
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:44:32] Actually, it's funny you mention that because the apparel companies we work with. Yeah. One is literally, I think, 20 years old. And the other one is literally 120 years old. Right. Yeah.
Christian Nielsen
[00:44:41] Yeah. I worked with Avon back in the days out of the UK. And I think at the time, they were 130 years. And, like, there you could definitely talk about. And it wasn't unique to them. But it was just, like, still had mainframes running on MS-DOS. And they had very, very unique systems made by people who were no longer alive. And nobody could maintain. And they had all their business logic of how this whole peer-to-peer selling was working. And very, very sophisticated models. And it's like nobody dared to touch the black box in the room. Because if it breaks down, we're. We're effed. Right. And it's just. Sure. But it's also keeping you in the stone ages. Yeah. Safety. Yeah. You can't just say you don't want to do it. Yeah.
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:45:28] Safety. Inertia. Yeah. So what would you say. When I explore these topics for myself, I feel like something jumps out at me every time. Even when I'm hearing myself talk about it. What would you say would be your single biggest takeaway from this conversation? If you wanted. If you wanted somebody to listen to this conversation, hear what we're talking about, and if it resonates with them, what is the one thing you would want them to walk away with?
Christian Nielsen
[00:46:00] I mean, I think it comes back to, it's almost like a cliche, but it's like to win with this digital transformation, you have to go slow to go fast. Mm-hmm. It's a huge strategic cliche, and it's hard. Like, you say that at least you present your cases, you have a long-term engagement with a client for three years, and we both know that if they are on their toes, three years is great. But actually, usually when we talk about it, and I learned a lot about working in a Japanese company, like long-term is generational. Yeah. And we just don't see that in very few companies.
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:46:41] I was just going to say the fact that three years for us is long-term is kind of funny as well. Yeah.
Christian Nielsen
[00:46:47] And it is in the tech, like we're so influenced by working in digital technology where literally you get updates almost for the frameworks every day or at least every week. So things are changing quite rapidly. I would say a little bit less now, especially with the AI kicking in, but it is just ever evolving. Yeah. We've seen that. I'm sure you've tried that too, to, you know, send something to production and then, you know, three months later, nobody has been maintaining it or six months and then it's breaking.
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:47:15] Yeah. It can't. It can't be rushed. No. So move slow to move fast. Yeah. I think my biggest takeaway, and this is, might seem like a simple epiphany or, you know, the obvious to you, but I feel like I'm going to use this more in conversation with our clients. I don't think I've emphasized enough the notion that digital transformation isn't a vertical inside the organization. Yeah. That it's a horizontal. That's going to very much change how I'm communicating this going forward. Yeah. Because it's just so clear. Yeah. Right. That don't think of this as a department. It's not about that. This is horizontal. It cuts across everything. Yeah.
Christian Nielsen
[00:47:52] Yeah. It's definitely, that's a hard learned fact that I learned a couple of years ago, namely when I started this strategy department in London. Because I really struggled to get on the strategy agenda with our clients. It's almost like they were too far down the line to say, let's just think about why we're actually doing this. So it was almost like stopping the process when they were like, excuse me, didn't it say app development? Yeah. It was like, let's just say app development on the door. But then you're starting to realize that product management, which is still a strategy professional if you ask me. But there it became so clear. And in order to do good product management, you need a project manager and you need a designer. You need an engineer. You need a tester. You need somebody to represent business. Yeah. And then a couple of other things that's like fundamental to whatever you're trying to create. I think that really hit it home for me that when it comes to that, it's like, no. It is permeating horizontally rather than just sitting in a silo and then trying to work its way out. Yeah. And it's a great metaphor for the symphony and the orchestra as well.
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:48:59] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, that was Christian Nielsen from Must Be Human. Thanks for joining us, Christian.
Christian Nielsen
[00:49:06] Thank you so much, Mo.
Mo Dhaliwal
[00:49:07] It was a pleasure. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Well, hopefully we've given you a lot to think about. That was High Agency. Like and subscribe and we will see you next time.
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