If you are fortunate enough to be involved in the digital shift in some way, you might think this digital disruption thing is becoming knowable. Well, better get ready. By definition, disruption is unpredictable even when we plan around it.
Fig. 1 – how the pyramid organisation will fare in the next digital tech wave
The pace of change around “digital” is zooming up at a terrifying pace. How does HR get ahead to prepare organisations for the tidal wave of change we now know as digital disruption?
The next wave of tech adoption, happening now, will accelerate three major disruptive forces.
By definition, disruption is unpredictable even when we plan for what we know. The next wave of tech adoption, happening now, will accelerate three major disruptive forces
- First, the PACE of change adoption, in particular the cross-function impact that demands organisational re-think. (We can’t any longer ignore complaints about conflicting KPIs)
- Second, the ongoing emergence of competitive threats from breakthrough innovations
- Third, the cyber-security maturity model that is needed to be a robust reputation-resilient player; this is already a major governance risk, about to get more serious
These three forces will challenge organisations, even the most digitally invested and advanced. Those late to the digital game will be disrupted out of business altogether or will be forced to reinvent or even divest.
Anyone that has steered or reviewed the organisational side of a tech innovation project will know that too often senior management simply doesn’t grasp the extent of culture development needed to become a digitally smart organisation. There is a real and difficult to bridge adoption gap, causing many digital strategies to falter or stall completely. The bigger the scale and reach of innovation, the bigger the gap.
The real question here is: What kind of organisation will thrive in an era of digital disruption? What does it look like and how is it developed?
So, does the digitally capable organisation look like a group of nerdy-looking Millennials grouped around or individually bonded to a high-end workstation? No, quite the opposite. The single characteristic to look for is team engagement, with the right experience-focused outcomes.
Frederick Laloux (writing in Reinventing Organisations) gives a formative framework that he refers to as the TEAL organisation.
The TEAL organisation has 3 main characteristics
- Self-managing teams
- Engagement with and of the whole person working in it
- Purpose-driven yet with evolving purpose
A little elaboration might help –
- Self-managing teams have been decades in the making, but what may be new is the growing percentage of organisations that organise their service that way. It is now fairly widely accepted (even in the military) that the command & control/demand & patrol method not only drives performance down but makes people literally unwell.
- Up to now, the Corporate Responsibility programmes where engagement of employees as whole people has been fairly costly. The argument has been that this pays for itself with higher levels of productivity and low absenteeism. Now, digital tools make it easier to communicate with people, assess their connectedness with the organisation and keep the conversation going so that they express opinions and are heard.
- Today, leaders know that the whole person comes to work and so they need to understand WHY their role exists. (ref Simon Sinek). One way this shows is in the dramatically lower absenteeism rates in the non-profit sector.
Some stats on absenteeism, comparing two different sectors, tell the story:
And per organisation, total days lost annually is 294 for general versus a mere 75 for NFP (Source: HR Metrics Survey 2016). So where purpose is clear and easily embraced by the employee, guess what? We get far better engagement.
I insert here a quick thumbnail of 4 tech trends that are forcing a re-think of organisation, processes and customer engagement:
Robotics is an obvious one. The automation trend that has been ongoing for some decades will take a huge leap forward as the AI capability plus the mechanical engineering sophistication reaches a market adoption turning point.
Mobile apps are already dominating tech spending, but we’ve still to see the real advent of well connected touch-functional apps that provide a new form of customer experience. Customer relations as a digital-born function is now the ruling capability.
Then what’s called cognitive computing. Along with speech recognition and digital assistants these are tools that have been fringe and about to become mainstream and provide innovators with a massive opportunity to disrupt.
And as commented above it’s becoming increasingly acknowledged at senior exec and board level, that cyber-risk is a huge topic on its own It needs to be placed as a business function fully equal to the status of tech innovation, and connected to that competency rather than a subtopic of it. In other words the executive directors are going to need to allocate risk governance of cyber threats as a separate competency area to that of digital strategy.
The Net for Organisation & Culture
In this new tech wave, the action points for human resourcing in an age of digital disorientation include:
- Designing an organisation where collaboration thrives and boundaries are flimsy at best
- Co-creating a team culture of speedy communication, accountability to peers and continuous and iterative improvement
- Equipping people with superior communication and people skills
- Selecting only those who treat everyone with the utmost respect (Better still, teams doing their own hiring and releasing)
- Ensuring that ‘Purpose’ directs work (not a ‘manager’. Those who like to be managed probably will become a disruption to necessary flow)
- Supporting and advancing the organisation’s Technology deployment capability
Where this ends up is in the headline: does HR as a function have the credibility, the foresight and the C-suite backing to drive the heavy lifting required to literally turn organisations inside out?
Put another way: To think you can succeed in the Digital Era as largely a tech capability will doom your projects to failure. What more and more organisations are discovering, usually after the pain of under-estimated change impacts, is that success in the accelerating tech future is an organisation and culture capability, first and foremost.
About the Authors: David Gandar (Institute Fellow) and Cheri Holland (Institute Fellow)
