Digital transformation is about people

Behavior change as the main key to cultural transformation towards being digitally agile
 
The evolution of technology is transforming our relationship with time and this affects business directly. Large companies, which have been a benchmark in innovation for decades, turn into obsolete operations in a few years. This new moment demands agility and mobility, which seems to be incompatible with traditional organizations, which end up seeing digital transformation as the solution to this paradox.

The topic is on the agenda of the world's top executives. And, in this scenario, the most common thing is to see traditional companies follow practically the same path: they seek inspiration from technology companies. They want to be fast like Google, to be able to generate experiences like Apple and to understand customers like Amazon. Whoever dreams big wants to be a combination of those three.

But the older and more successful, the slower the institution tends to be. Slow by design companies are built around large, complex, departmental and bureaucratic structures. Their culture typically aims at avoiding risks, reducing mistakes, and preserving territories.

For centuries, this model has been a winner, but loses ground when it needs to compete with a new generation of startups or companies that adopt this new operation principle (small groups of individuals around an idea, making use of available technology with cheap computing, running in an absolutely fast and agile module). And then the big question is: how to promote this agility?

Changing culture

Most CEOs agree that when it comes to digital transformation, the digital part is the easiest part. Large budgets allow you to hire the best teams and consultants, the most advanced tools.
The challenge of transformation is to have innovation projects run on a large scale. Here at CI&T, we know that the difficult thing is not about assembling the best innovation team, but to open the door of this department and get them out there. It is about having the team that developed a disruptive project try to convince the legal department to speed up the evaluation of possible legal issues; it is about defending the integration of the application (along the IT department) with the legacy systems; and also about showing the Marketing department the possibilities of interaction with brands' audiences. Anyone who has already seen this film knows that, in that process, great ideas ended up being buried or launched after the competition did.
 
Therefore, we say that the transformation needs to go as deep as the company's DNA. This process involves very complex issues and is not solved by executives visiting Silicon Valley, buying startups or hiring developers who work with Agile. These are isolated initiatives, which bring the experience of agility and speed that you are looking for into the company, but do not touch other teams. A deeper change is needed: a cultural change.

This is what happened at CI&T. We went through all these steps: from falling for Agile to the impossibility of applying its principles to scale. So, we quickly discovered that Agile is not enough to change the culture of the organization.

For us, the path to digital transformation is in Lean, that management philosophy created in the 50s that at first glance looks like Agile's grandfather, but, in fact, brings principles and tools with much wider applicability. Lean gave us fundamental insights in our search for an agile culture. One of them says that experiences change thoughts and not thoughts that change experiences.

Lean does not force the adoption of principles, it promotes behaviors that support principles. How to promote behaviors? Delivering more value and making people's lives easier. We must create processes to do that. It is the processes that change people, but for that they have to make a lot of sense and make their lives easier. From this learning, we developed the cornerstones processes, fundamental parts of our model of digital transformation; a Lean Digital Transformation.

Cornerstones processes

Cornerstones are small steps in a macro process, which, once implemented, promote positive behavior within an organization. This simple tool allows you to solve problems with ease, by looking for a faster way to solve them in the best way, to produce more results, and having consistent behaviors.

An example of a problem: the difficulty in prioritizing the features that should be developed in software. In order to solve that, we use value engineering based on and inspired by a Lean tool that leads people to define what is most important to their customer on a geometric scale of value. Having a visual presentation of priorities, they have the clarity to modify the order of development of the software according to their expectations. A simple solution to a complex problem.

That is, Lean starts up with what value means to the customer and has as its basic principles also the search for continuous improvement. The promotion of continuous learning, looking not only for success, but for the development of professionals and the encouragement of teams to work together are also powerful tools to achieve excellence.

In order to apply these principles in a sustainable and consistent way across the company, we created what we call people development cornerstones. In addition to achieving goals, these simple processes make life easier for teams and generate engagement in promoting behavioral change.

Managers, the last frontier

So, processes are working, teams are engaged, working together, however, the transformation flow slows down as it reaches the manager. Generally attached to traditional ways of doing things, managers follow team changes from afar and, because of their resistance behavior, simply wait for answers. But if an organization has to change, its leaders must change as well.

For us to break that resistance, we created the cornerstones management, something to help these professionals to carry out transformation. Always keeping in mind good processes, and when they make sense and are useful, can change the way we think. We apply simple Lean tools such as Gemba, which proposes the work of the manager alongside the teams, by learning, directing and investigating problems on the spot. All of it together. Another tool we make use of is the A3, a visual method that facilitates the identification problem causes and, from such clarity, solutions planning. A3 also assists us in people development by using the same logic of identifying opportunities for improvement and planning actions in a simple and structured way. That way, we have developed a way for our leaders to be truly prepared for change.

Closer to people, more aligned with the company's digital transformation goals, managers participate in the fluidity of their teams, in how agile techniques are, in the speed of changes and develop new ways to solve problems and lead successful teams, with people who are passionate about what they do.
The way we see it is that we develop people before software because they are the ones who make us great, they are those who make it possible.

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