…Because hands know more than you know!
Many organisations think that spending and investing money into new technologies is enough to grant a successful Digital Transformation. Yet, despite the exponential increase in technology spending, only 1 in 8 companies are getting digital transformation right.
Why is that?
Everyone is talking about digital transformation: the news are filled with data and stats around massive investments in digital technology and in the need to transform businesses.
The IDC report 2017 estimates that worldwide spending on digital transformation technologies will grow to more than $2.1 trillion in 2019, while a Forrester study says that 57% of organisations say that implementing key digital technologies is critical to enabling their digital business. Nevertheless a Sloan Review Survey shows that respondents rated “current IT systems” as the third biggest obstacle to achieving digital transformation.
The relation between digital, IT systems, and digital transformation is still blurred in most cases. Today digital transformation is far too often confused with Digitalization or with Digitization with a strong focus on technologies or platform. In many cases, organisations still believe that digital transformation is achieved by implementing a single platform that could magically transform the whole organisation.
Unfortunately that is wrong and it’s misleading.
The news these days reports that poor CX is costing UK companies £37 bn, with retail and telcos losing the most in 2016. Ironically, the sectors who lose the most, according to a recent study by KPMG Nunwood, are also those which invest the most and get the best improvements in CX.
This looks like a paradox, but it is not.
Organisations have realised the importance of customer experience and they are moving fast into this space. Terms like Customer journey mapping, touchpoints, or ecosystems are words that abound in most business and strategy related conversations.
I have been reading a lot about Millennials, this new breed stemming from the digital age.
Were these Millennials so much different?
I, as a GenX, could easily relate to what I was reading and did not realise the real gap until I had the opportunity to directly compare the ways of thinking, the value systems, attitudes, and mental models, of Millennials and Baby Boomers.
The opportunity came through some workshops I facilitated to explore how customers felt about brands and their experience as consumer and shopper.
I decided to run the workshop using Lego Serious Play, a facilitation method that asks participants to build metaphorical models with Lego bricks to answer specific challenges and questions.
The method is based on narratives and storytelling, and participants are the only one who hold the interpretative keys to decode the metaphors and stories kept in their model. After building their model to answer the question, participants share their stories and their models with everyone, explaining the meaning of their models and sharing their views and perspectives on the issues I was investigating.
The relationship between business and design has gone through deep changes in the past years. We are assisting at a convergence between business and design lead by the formalisation and adoption of design thinking and the revelation that good design is good business: many approaches from design have migrated into business and management enhancing the potential of business focused companies.
But there is a very special case of a method that was developed as an answer to a business need that has successfully migrated to design practices.
This is the case of Lego Serious Play: developed from the ’90s to improve the quality of strategic development meetings it has now been adopted by design companies to enhance creative processes, collaboration among different department, promote co-creation and participative design that includes customers, users, designers, and stakeholders.
Presented at #CassCreativity Seminar series on May 4th 2916, you can watch the whole Storyfy from this Link.
Why Digital Transformation has nothing to do with Digital
IDC predicts that 2016 will be shaped by digital transformation, with availability, capabilities and business needs being the biggest related issues IT leadership will face.
With this announcement comes a flurry of buzz: from the media, articles about the latest platforms, apps, software and other tools that will lead digital transformation; from companies, vague references to ‘digital’ in press releases; and from marketing departments, campaigns touting CTO and CMO initiatives investing in the latest technologies, branded as the ultimate solution to deploy ‘digital transformation.’
Let’s take a step back for a second.
Markets are conversations (C) P. Bertini
One of the biggest challenges today, is to deliver meaningful experiences that create value to brands and are valuable for the users. As UX and CX professionals we are today responsible for the value generation processes, because an experience is created by the understanding of what does value mean for all those involved in the experience: the brand and the users.
I recently gave a speech at UX Denmark 2016, the theme was trust & emotion. If trust is the willingness to take risks, where does trust come from and how can it be useful in the UX field? Trust is generated by interaction, there is no trust unless the parts have had – or are in the conditions of having – an interaction that can build and support a relationship that generates positive emotions.
Interaction generates trust and relationships, and relationships generate experiences, and experiences are the real value in the experience economy.
Therefore, if relationships are the (metaphorical) places where value is generated between the interacting parts, then the only way to be in a relationship is through an EXPERIENCE.
Experience is generated by experiences, and the design of future experiences requires imagination and the understanding of the perception of the present experiences through narratives and storytelling of the past.
Unleash playfulness
Lego bricks are a fascinating tool. Mostly considered a creative and engaging toy, they are much more than that. What is a toy that enhances children’s creativity and imagination, becomes a tool to enhance understanding and explore opportunities in business.
There is an increasing interests in anything that is LEGO: from the business case of a company that employed co-creation and changed a negative trend in the ’90s into a global success.
And there are an increasing number of applications that are exploiting the simplicity of systemic bricks that can be combined in countless ways and gain a number of different meanings based on individual narratives and stories.
Bricks are natural story maker tool: children imagine adventures while playing and building objects. And so do adults, although they may need some help.
[Thoughts after Mex15, Slides at the end]
Markets are conversations
It was back in March 1999 when a group of forward thinking people published a revolutionary book based on 95 thesis that explained that the old business models were disrupted by internet and technologies. They said that markets were conversations,they explained that it was time to start listening to the consumers and to engage in conversations.
The book, The Cluetrain Manifesto, was a revolutionary and visionary text that clearly saw the direction technologies were taking society and the business. Internet and technologies dramatically changed in these 16 years, but every change reinforced the thesis of the Cluetrain Manifesto, proving how old business models were obsolete and could lead companies and business into a quick obsolescence.
The road to change – © P. Bertini
Markets are ever more conversations and the role of the user has dramatically changed in the past decade, shifting from a passive unknown being, into active part of the conversation.
We live in convivial times where technology has enhanced new practices and new opportunities for organisations and users to talk, to understand their mutual points of view and share knowledge, meanings and values.
Nevertheless, there has been a divorce between users and organisations and much of those conversations are today limited to the final stage of product and service design. Rather than taking fully advantage of the potential of co-creation, and engage users in conversations and creative exercises, today users are involved only in the very final stage, when it comes to validate an idea that has been developed using traditional approaches.
LegoViews 