“Sense of urgency is not the natural state of affairs. It has to be created and recreated.”– John Kotter from his book “A sense of Urgency”
Leading Digital Transformation at any level requires an ability to create an atmosphere of urgency. An atmosphere that can motivate and keep the team focused on a daily basis. Only in that atmosphere digital transformation becomes an urgent and highly needed change.
Why to create sense of urgency?
Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value. — Jim Rohn
It will spark the initial motivation to get things moving and then keep the momentum going for digital transformation.
Who should you work with to create sense of urgency?
Ideally you should work with the top leadership and then it should come from top to bottom. This is only possible if currently a tornado like situation exists in your company.
Realistically, you will have to work with early adopters both at your level and some at senior leadership level. These are people who:
- Trust you and your motives,
- Willing to understand your vision for digital transformation to some extent,
- Willing to work with you and
- Have a good influence inside the organization.
I will talk more about this group in my post next week.
Please don’t go overboard and try to convince everybody. Start with creating sense of urgency with few who are critical and important to your digital transformation change.
Objections, low trust and demotivation are common to this phase. During this phase I hear things like:
- Someone already tried this few years ago and they failed. Good luck!
- This is going nowhere as we have seen similar things many times.
- This organization will never do it that way.
- We are already invested in IT and I cannot understand why we need a digital transformation.
Thanks to such advisors as it helps me to identify them as not early adopters.
How to establish sense of urgency
(all examples are from digital transformation of marketing use case)
Only crises, potential crises or big opportunities can help create a sense of urgency.
Identify crises/potential crises and use data to define the threat:
Here are some of the examples that you can focus on:
- Examine market and competitive realities: Your competitors may already focusing on digital transformation. Best place to get this data is:
- their job sites,
- competitive analysis platforms like SimilarWeb,
- conferences where your competitors may be presenting digital insights e.g. MarTech
- Vendors in your industry as they may be also serving your competitors.
- Risk of disruption: Do I need to talk on this topic?? A good book on this topic is Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation by James McQuivey
- Understand and quantify the risk of privacy or legal lawsuits: At large companies organizational and data silos may lead to vulnerability from privacy lawsuits. The case for digital transformation is worth alone just to handle this risk especially if you are in the European Union.
Identify major opportunities and define opportunity using the power of data:
The best place for marketing teams is to start with an opportunity assessment of all your digital properties. It is easy and can be achieved in 3-6 months. Tag all your digital properties with same analytics tag so that you can understand:
- How the traffic flows within and outside your digital ecosystem
- Type of customers/prospects that frequent your digital ecosystem
- Identify some high value prospects
- Identify the associated opportunity if you are able to properly engage them across all digital properties
I have seen this analysis work wonders and can alone help you get the buy in for digital transformation from the top executives.
Other sources of data for identifying and defining the opportunity are surveys/voice of customer, cross sell, up sell, cost savings from platform, agency spend etc.
Try to focus on opportunities that needs short timeline and has a strong ROI. I will talk more about this when I write about generating short-term wins.
This article is Part 1 of the 8 posts that I promised to publish in my recent post:
