You might think your digital transformation is being guided by your desired outcome, but you’d be surprised how many organizations end up chasing the wrong kind of change because their objectives were too vague. 

If you’re headed out on a road trip, you generally have a pretty good idea of where you’re going, right? Even if you’re looking to take a wandering approach, you’re likely packing for a trip through the mountains or the desert, to a city or to a beach. It’s essential to have a vision of what your destination is to know if you’re packing the right provisions.

The more specific the vision, the more intentional you can be about making the right decisions along the way. The same can be true of organizational transformation – the kind of change needed is entirely dependent on why you’re making the change. And yet….I continue to encounter vague reasons for embarking on digital transformations:

• “We need to transform because of competitive pressures”

• “We want to be closer to the customer”

• “We want more speed and agility”

If you’re thinking those statements are detailed enough, you’d be wrong. Why? Here’s an example.

Let’s say you want to be closer to the customer. There are numerous ways to achieve this. In order to find the right way forward we have to dig a layer deeper. Is it that you don’t currently have customer-centric thinking at every level of the organization? Or, do you have rich data about your customers but don’t know how to take action against it? Depending on the answer, the process would follow different paths. Let’s play it out.

Scenario A

You want to get closer to the customer but you don’t currently have customer-centric thinking at every level of the organization. To solve for this you might:

• Examine mechanisms for getting feedback into the hands of more teams deeper in the org

• Staff teams differently so everyone in the org has access to research and feedback

• Implement human-centered design training or bring the entire org through an experience-design training program

This is an excellent approach if you don’t have the right data, but what if that’s not what you meant by “get closer to the customer”? That’s where Scenario B comes in.

Scenario B

You want to get closer to the customer but you don’t know how to activate your data against it. To solve for this you might: 

• Leverage agile product management in key experience areas to prove out shorter feedback/execution cycles

• Orient teams around hypothesis thinking and rewarding iterative, MVP-style planning

• Implement toolsets around techniques like impact mapping or opportunity solution trees during the design phase  

There are various scenarios we could explore here, and obviously these are very specific drivers behind the need for transformation and changing the way teams work. The point is this: each path gets you closer to the customer, but the road to get there is very different. 

When you’re too high-level about what you want to achieve, you risk sending the action plan haywire and building the wrong thing. By peeling back a layer we can get more specific about the actual outcome that matters to your business and, as a result, do the most meaningful work possible to arrive there.