Creating a climate for change: the privacy conundrum

By Annelies Moens CMgr FIML and Chris O’Connor

 

We recently read an illuminating article by Jeff Kluger, editor at large for Time. At its core, it asserts that from a behavioural standpoint, we humans are going to find it very difficult to take action on climate change – until it’s too late. As he put it, “when it comes to the loss of the entire planet, well, we ought to take action. And yet we don’t; we never do.”

Why the widespread inaction?

Kluger rationalises that climate change falls into an ‘ignore-the-problem’ box as it doesn’t fulfil the criteria we need to be motivated to act. The same can be seen in how privacy issues are often treated ­– organisations are sometimes good at predicting future outcomes and identifying risk but fail to understand the relative potential of the risk and ultimately, do nothing about it.

When it comes to taking steps to manage fundamental human and economic rights, such as privacy, many organisations fail to appreciate its significance. Privacy is a building block that leads to the protection of other rights taken for granted in many parts of the world such as autonomy and freedom of expression (no chilling effect). The protection of people’s privacy is fundamental to democracy. Yet it is easily whittled away to the point that individuals no longer have control over their own personal information.

The common folly

The over-collection and misuse of personal information, as well as the ubiquitous number of data breaches, bear a heavy cost on society and business. Think of Facebook’s market capitalisation that dropped US$119 billion after announcing that growth had slowed since the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Equifax and Target’s well-publicised data breaches cost the companies approximately US$300 million each, not including all the indirect costs such as customer churn, loss of trust, identity theft and the illegal sale of personal information.

Despite this, many organisations fail to adopt basic precautions, such as two-factor authentication or minimising collection of unnecessary data points, such as date of birth or deleting data they no longer need for their organisation’s purposes.

Each quarter, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) reports on the causes of data breaches by regulated entities. The majority of data breaches are due to human factors such as falling for phishing attacks, which can be thwarted if secure forms of two-factor or multi-factor authentication are in place. Indeed, half of cyber incidents as the OAIC reported in its most recent quarterly reports were due to phishing attacks.

Despite climate change, data and cyber issues being in the top five likely to occur risks, privacy, like climate change, can be seen as a far-off issue, one that takes a back seat to more immediate and pressing issues. This is a mistake.

To motivate action our knowledge and beliefs must align

What do privacy and climate change lack in fulfilling the required criteria to motivate people to act? Here are some reasons:

  1. They lack the “me” component. As David Ropeik, an international consultant on risk perception and communication, said in the Time article, “Nobody wakes up in the morning and looks at the long-term climate forecast. They ask what the weather is today, where I live, and how it’s going to affect me.”In terms of privacy, the lacklustre response of senior leaders and directors to privacy issues show the failure of leaders to put themselves into the shoes of their customers. They prioritise shareholder primacy and profits over customer privacy (consider Facebook’s response to the privacy scandals) or give primacy to politics (consider the privacy problems surrounding the rollout of the e-health record in Australia).

    It is growing increasingly clear that customer and community values need to be accounted for. It’s not good enough to focus solely on maximising shareholder value, if long-term sustainability is a goal for shareholders (see “Innovate before it’s too late” by Mariana Mazzucato in Company Director pp.12-13, Dec 2018/Jan 2019).

  2. The consequences seem far in the future, so we discount the risk. Paul Slovic (University of Oregon psychologist and the President of Decision Research) said in the Time article, “When it comes to acting on problems, the lure of our current comforts and conveniences will often cause us to act contrary to our values.” When it comes to valuing privacy, numerous studies show that whilst people highly value their privacy, they often don’t take steps to trade it off for other considerations such as convenience. This is known as the Privacy Paradox.
  3. It can be hard to envisage how climate change or a breach of privacy will affect us – personally. What will our lives be like if there are two or three degrees of warming or if our identity is stolen? Ropeik says “if you ask even the most devout climate change believers how they think it’s going to affect them, they often can’t quite describe it”. If you can’t put yourself in the picture, it’ll be easy to ignore.

    Similarly, the nexus between a privacy breach, such as a misuse of your identity and the harm could be years apart. For example, you may only realise the impact of the misuse of your personal information when you can’t get a loan for the house you want to buy. At some point in the past, someone has misused your identity and has defaulted on a loan in your name, often seen in privacy complaints to the OAIC. The damage, in contrast to a plane falling out of the sky, is not instantaneous. Sometimes, we can’t even connect the misuse with the harm that happens down the track.

  4. There is a sense of futility or hopelessness. The inefficacy factor, whereby people think that individual action has no impact particularly on large problems. Slovic says that “we reason that we can curtail things we want to do – like driving or flying, but if other people aren’t going to do it, it’s not going to make any difference.”

    Consider all the information about us held by third parties or in the public domain or what our friends post about us on social media platforms over which we have no control. So, what does it matter if we hand out our personal information again? For example, what does it matter if I keep on handing over my personal data in insecure environments (such as HTTP rather than HTTPS on websites); or when the data is actually not required by the requestor (like a vendor asking for a date of birth when you are purchasing wine online, when all the vendor really needs to know is that you are over 18). In the latter situation, many customers would simply provide a fake date of birth to complete the transaction anyway.

So, what needs to happen to effect change in such scenarios? Let’s restate the conundrum outlined above in the positive:

Seven knowledge and belief statements that must align to get people moving to make changes

  1. I know this will affect me
  2. I can clearly envisage how it will affect me
  3. I am clear about the future consequences of doing nothing
  4. I am willing to make the effort today to make tomorrow better
  5. I feel confident that our actions today will achieve the desired outcomes
  6. I have the support, knowledge and tools to act

The last and most important factor that the Time article does not address is:

  1. Leaders must not just say they are all behind the initiative, they must reflect that commitment in their actions – every day.

Many people are very good at spotting inauthenticity and if they don’t believe their leaders are committed, they won’t be either. Accountability for privacy needs to be at senior leadership levels, with an ability to influence culture and practices organisation-wide.

We are entering an era of social climate change when it comes to privacy, as more and more people are becoming aware of the value of their data and what the impacts are of not managing privacy well. We still, however, have a long way to go to building in privacy by design into organisational processes and systems and making privacy core business.

In terms of climate change, the lack of leadership in some countries is concerning. The stakes are high and in today’s global political (rather than scientific) climate, we’re not even close to getting on the right track to managing our natural resources sustainably.

Is your organisation displaying symptoms of this collective inertia?

The lessons we’re learning on a macro scale about motivation, commitment and action are equally applicable within government, business or not-for-profit. You may recognise the behaviour described above when you consider the last failed initiative within your own organisation. It may have been that people just couldn’t or wouldn’t support it. That there wasn’t the “corporate will” as some call it, to make it happen.

So, for leaders that are starting to realise the significance of making privacy core business and developing privacy management frameworks, we would encourage you to consider the following questions to start assessing your level of privacy maturity:

  • Do we have a clear understanding of the data needed as opposed to the data we would like from our customers and prospects? Can we clearly describe how that will benefit both the organisation and individuals for whom we are their data custodians?
  • Do we know what the result of doing nothing is? Can we quantify the risks of a privacy breach? Can we clearly articulate this? What would be the risks or impacts for the individual and other stakeholders? How would we respond?
  • Is our plan of action credible and can we show that our leadership is united and willing to do the hard yards and realise that data is an asset or a liability depending on how well it is governed or managed?
  • Do we have a clear understanding of what resources staff will need to make change happen? Will they know what to do and how to do it? Can they measure success?

If you can say YES to each of these questions, you’re off to a good start. But it’s not a silver bullet – there are numerous practical issues that will stand in the way (a discussion for another time), however, without commitment and collective action, you have no chance to overcome the inertia.

For more information on introducing privacy management frameworks and privacy maturity models into your organisation, contact Annelies Moens at operations@privcore.com and Chris O’Connor at chris@ock.com.au

Annelies Moens is the managing director of Privcore and Chris O’Connor is the director, practice lead innovation & agility at O’Connor Kingsford.

Leading people through a restructure

A reorganisation within a business can be undertaken for a range of reasons — but understanding how to manage the human element is critical,
no matter why the project has been undertaken.

By Derek Parker  //  Illustrations by Dane Mark

once upon a time, a good manager was seen as one who kept things flowing smoothly and kept everything in its right place. But that era is past. Now the key role of managers – and of leaders – is to initiate, deal with, and consolidate change, in response to rapid movements in the market, disruptive technologies, and intense global competition. Every manager is likely, in the course of his or her career, to go through at least one major corporate reorganisation; most will go through several of them.
The irony is that despite the importance of reorganisations, they are often undertaken without the forethought, care, and deep thinking that they require.

As a result, many reorganisations fail to fully achieve their objectives, according to a recent book, ReOrg: How To Get It Right. The authors, Stephen Heidari-Robinson and Suzanne Heywood, former senior analysts with the respected consulting firm McKinsey, amassed a huge amount of survey data and empirical information as part of their examination, and the picture it presented was not pretty.

“According to our global data, only 16 per cent of corporate reorganisations provided the results they were supposed to, in the time they were supposed to,” Heidari-Robinson told Leadership Matters. “70 per cent delivered some value. In nine per cent of cases, the reorganisation actually damaged the company in the long run.

“Stop for a moment to consider this: Imagine that you learned that less than one-fifth of your product launches, projects, or initiatives had delivered their full objectives, that a significant number had hurt your business, and that the mass in the middle had limited or uncertain value. You would probably conclude that there is a significant scope for improvement – very significant scope.”

Rationale explained

In fact, Heidari-Robinson believes that many company-wide reorganisations are not needed; the problems that need to be addressed could be solved with changes at division or business-unit level. Interestingly, reorganisations implemented by a freshly-appointed leader who brings in organisational change as part of the ‘new order’ of their leadership are very likely to fail. To have a decent chance of success the reorganisation needs to have a clear rationale, measurable benefits, and purposeful strategy.

The most common motive for reorganising is to enable revenue growth (27 per cent), followed by cutting costs (12 per cent), moving to a best-practice model (12 per cent), and bringing change into an organisation that has become too static (10 per cent).

“Across almost all business sectors, the most serious issue is employees’ active resistance to the changes,” says Heidari-Robinson. “Until staff know what the reorg means for them they have no ears for the exciting future of the reorg. They still assume the reorg is about job losses. The leader’s enthusiasm for this change feels discordant and uncaring to them. Leaders should realise that most employees hate these kinds of changes. But they hate secrecy and uncertainty more.”

Most Australian reorgs fail to lift performance

In Australia, according to the annual Salary Guide produced by recruitment firm Hays, about half of companies are currently undergoing or considering some level of restructuring.

“There are countless economic, political and regulatory factors impacting industries, organisations and workforces, as well as the new technologies of the fourth industrial revolution,” says Nick Deligiannis, Managing Director of Hays in Australia & New Zealand. He points to a study by management consulting firm Bain & Company that suggests that fewer than one-third of restructures lead to improved performance.

“We expect the current level of restructuring activity to continue but we also expect that many reorganisations will fail,” he says. “There are many reasons, including an organisation’s leaders not being clear on what they are trying to achieve, failing to plan appropriately, not achieving the buy-in of their staff and not ensuring that change is reflected in the firm’s culture.”

Deligiannis believes that Australian companies perform fairly well when it comes to identifying the people and skillsets that will be needed in the rebuilt organisation, and recruitment of new talent usually starts at an early stage. In fact, a reorganisation can even be an advantage in the war for talent, as it means there are new opportunities and possibilities.

But company leaders are often less adept at working with their existing workforces to provide a rationale and roadmap for change.

“It is very important to align a workforce in response to organisational change, while also ensuring that staff understand why change is occurring, are engaged with the new way of operating, and receive upskilling if required,” Deligiannis notes. “Otherwise, they will fall back into the same old work patterns.”

Thought needs to be given to cultural change as well. This is particularly the case when a reorganisation comes about due to a merger or acquisition, so there is not one common culture but two that need to be integrated. Ignoring issues of culture in a reorganisation is a recipe for failure.

“In all this, the executive team has to lead from the front, embodying the changes they expect to see in others and creating an environment where all employees feel they can share ideas and talk openly about the changes occurring around them,” says Deligiannis.

“Whether the result of a merger and acquisition, the growth of a department or even the establishment of a new team, any new job profiles need to be designed to align with the organisation’s goals so that they help achieve success from the beginning of the process. Without accuracy on this point, the right candidates with the right skills and background will not be identified and an organisation will not be able to improve business results.”

Looking for solutions

There is good evidence that the high level of reorganisation currently taking place in Australia is underpinned by a capacity to identify problems early and address them before they grow into crises. According to KPMG’s 2017 Evolving Deals Landscape survey, nearly half of Australia’s large companies are looking to improve operations, especially in their use of working capital, including management of receivables, payables and inventory.

Matthew Woods, KPMG’s Head of Restructuring Services, is not surprised. “For many CFOs and treasurers in today’s environment, cash management is high on their radar,” he says. “It is what you would expect to find in an economy which has been strong but is coming under stress. Businesses need to reset their cost base and restructure to ensure they are resilient going forward. They need to extract every dollar from their operations in response to increasing economic and financial pressures.

“There is a flow-on effect. If you are not actively improving working capital performance right now, then standing still is very much moving backwards. Whether you notice or not, there is a high chance that your suppliers and customers are optimising their working capital at your expense.”

Public sector lessons

“When it comes to reorganisations, the public sector and the private sector handle the processes very differently,” says Jacqueline Hiddlestone FIML, who has been involved in a range of restructures. She currently heads Jackal Oz, a consulting firm that offers advice on strategic development and operational delivery.

“[Public sector reorgs are different] mainly due to the level of union involvement, policies in place and greater willingness to discuss what is happening. Private sector companies usually pay minimal redundancy payments whereas public sector agencies usually have procedures such as moving people into a pool of available staff for a period of time, additional assistance in seeking alternate employment, and larger redundancy payments.”

There is often a difference in the support mechanisms too, such as dedicated HR or other staff. This leads to a more structured approach. If the reorganisation involves redundancies then transition options are available, and where redundancies are not involved there are re-training options.

Hiddlestone believes that reorganisations are more common in the public sector than the private sector, often due to changes in the statement of corporate intent provided to the government. In fact, this sense of continual reorganisation can become very disruptive. Change fatigue may drive talented staff to move on. Other employees can switch to ‘cruise’ because they believe that the work environment will change again shortly. This allows some to stay under the radar in terms of delivering agreed outcomes.

“I have found that a combination of communications channels works best,” she says. “Face-to-face sessions allow everyone to hear the same message about the direction, the target and the journey. This might be followed by a Q&A and written communication. An anonymous email avenue also allows concerns and questions to be raised without staff feeling they will be penalised for raising them. An open-door policy that allows staff to have private discussions provides an additional assurance that they are being heard and the organisation values them.

“Where redundancies may arise, the manager should do whatever is possible to explore options with individuals. Where do they see themselves in a year, or in five years? This can also help decide on who is impacted where there are equal capabilities against
fewer positions.”

Planning needed

The issue of planning – or, rather, failing to plan appropriately – looms large in any discussion as to why so many reorganisations do not achieve their goals. In many cases, the problem starts at the top. Some boards do not fully grasp the difficulties of a reorganisation, seeing it as either a matter of redrawing lines and boxes or seeing it only in financial terms. Many reorganisation projects are under-funded, considering
the problems they are
trying to solve.

Any presentation by senior management to the board must be able to explain and demonstrate the issues. For this reason, there should be a series of board meetings dedicated to the reorganisation, as well as regular updates while the process is in train. Sign-off of the plan must be clear and explicit, and there needs to be adequate resourcing for the project.

From this point the company leaders need to have a well-developed strategy for communicating the plan, including a means for making it available to all staff, whether or not they are directly affected. Any communications vacuum will be filled by gossip and speculation, which might then take a long time to correct.

Managerial accountability can only take place with transparency. Any attempt to keep the project secret is essentially counter-productive; more likely to alienate employees than win them over.

In the operational plan it is easy for the planners to place too much focus on the company’s weaknesses. But existing strengths must also be acknowledged and, if possible, developed. This goes back to the reason for a reorganisation: it must not be about change for the sake of change, but change for a specific, clearly articulated purpose.

“It is very important that staff hear their leaders, from the CEO to team leaders, talking regularly about the reorg, through internet sessions and ‘town halls’,” Heidari-Robinson says. “You should continually communicate the one big thought of the reorg – for example, moving from print to digital, or making local managers accountable for P&L outcomes – and the three to five biggest organisational changes that will make this happen.”

Managing employees who have received redundancy notices is an extremely difficult challenge, even with a good communications strategy, maximum sympathy from managers, and a generous payout. Their motivation can drop to zero and they might even look for ways to inflict symbolic – or real – damage on the company. External recruitment consultants and transition support providers can be very valuable at this point, helping the people affected look to future opportunities and possibilities.

Heidari-Robinson believes that the best way to handle this stage is to move as quickly as possible, offering thanks to departing employees and moving to re-focus continuing employees on their new roles.

“A slower process just drags out the water torture,” he says. “Good planning and speed are of the essence when it comes to reorgs.”

While having a clear plan is crucial it is also important to check progress along the way, through mechanisms such as employee surveys or metrics analysis. There might be a need to make changes in implementation if significant problems emerge.

Even when the reorganisation is complete there is still a great deal more work to be done.

“Plan for your reorg project team to return to conduct a review, one or two reporting cycles after implementation,” suggests Heidari-Robinson. “Do not declare victory for your reorg until it delivers the business results you wanted, which is sure to be some time after the actual implementation.”

Above all, accept that any large-scale reorganisation is going to be difficult. It affects the lives of employees – people who deserve to be treated with respect and consideration. Done poorly, a reorganisation can create a reservoir of dissatisfaction within the workplace. Done well, with effective communication and solid leadership, it can create new opportunities, transform operational efficiencies, and improve the organisation’s ability to deal with market changes and competitive pressures.

“Our advice is that you should only do a reorganisation if you have the rationale clear and you completely understand the likely cost of the change,” Heidari-Robinson emphasises. “If this has not happened, stop and think again.”

Career Doctor: How can I work with my team to find a unique solution to our problem?

By Peter Cullen MIML

 

We often talk about problems in a meeting. We often talk about the same problem in our next meeting as well. And on it goes. If this scenario sounds familar, read on…

Firstly, you are not alone. This is a common experience in corporate Australia. How do I know? Because the topic is often brought up in my facilitation work. People will bow their head and sigh in recognition of their own work environment. The truth is they’d prefer not to find themselves in this situation anymore. Unfortunately, it is often so ingrained within the culture of the business or department that they can see no way clear.

To halt this issue in its tracks, we need to stop talking about the problem and instead start looking for solutions. That starts with putting your hand up and admitting we know what the problem is, then focusing on how ‘we’ fix it. Many heads are better than one because you benefit from a broader spectrum of thinking and contribution. So, determine whether we need the whole team, members from other teams or a select group who are specialists in their field. Then get together and work together to find and implement a solution.

Working to the following process will keep everyone focused on finding and implementing the best solution:

  1. Define the problem: The most critical point in being solution focused is to ensure the problem is 100 per cent defined correctly. Adequate resources must be allocated to ensure time, money and effort will not be sacrificed by heading in the wrong direction with an inappropriate solution. Once it is defined, consider all the stakeholders involved. What might their contribution have been to the existence of the problem and how might their input be used in finding a resolution?
  2. Be curious: Now that we have defined the problem we need, as a group, to set about asking as many questions as possible. The questions we need to ask need to be expansive, open and probing. They need to focus on the what, why, when, where, who and how. A helpful addition to this process is mind mapping. Creating a mind map can reveal end-to-end systems and processes, internal and external influences, policies and procedures, and much more.
  3. Discovering solutions: One of the great ways to discover solutions is the tried and tested structure of brainstorming. Two great methods are the use of Post-it notes and open forum idea generation. When using Post-it notes it is necessary to provide each team member with five or six Post-its and ask each person to write only one idea on each note then post it on the whiteboard. These can then be grouped for commonality and may be placed on relevant points in the mind map or elsewhere. Brainstorming is simply having a topic and accepting every person’s idea without question and writing them up on a whiteboard.
    Then rank the top five ideas.
  4. Solution selection: It is possible more than one solution will appear viable and a choice will need to be made. Even then it is important to rank all the potential solutions in a table to determine which is the most suitable. I would suggest making four columns, titled respectively Solution, Must-Have Factors, Score and Desirable Factors.
  5. Solution Implementation: Once you have the most desirable solution then comes the implementation ensuring it is measurable so you can the determine modifications and the level of success.

Working together unifies team members on a common cause and contributes to a more sustainable outcome.

Peter Cullen is an education and training facilitator who teaches AIM Education and training courses.

Each three-day program engages participants in developing and implementing their capabilities as managers and leaders.

How Booktopia adapted to industry disruption

As a manager for two decades in the book industry, John Purcell has led people through extraordinary change.

As an author, John Purcell is capable of amazing feats of imagination. But away from writing fiction, he’s been heading up Booktopia’s marketing and buying teams, and is now Director of Books, helping the online retailer become one of the fastest growing companies in Australia. In the past nine years, annual revenue has swelled from $4m to $114m (with a compound annual growth rate of 35% per annum). This year, Booktopia won the People’s Choice award at the national finals of the Telstra Business Awards, as well as the NSW Business of the Year award.

Starting small

“When I joined Booktopia, most of the staff were doing customer service and order fulfilment,” he recalls. At that time, Booktopia was a small operation. “A bell would ring every day and all of us – including the CEO – would go down to the garage and help load a single Australia Post van with books. They gave us three minutes in their schedule, so all of us would rush out there.”

Since those early days Booktopia’s personnel has multiplied from 25 to almost 200; and Purcell now runs a team of six people including a content team, merchandisers and buyers. But that culture of “rolling up your sleeves” has remained constant, he says.

Their culture has been guided by a very clear and simple business strategy, says Purcell. “Our CEO Tony Nash is single-minded about growth. He’s always been prepared to reinvest in the business so that when we needed a warehouse, or shelving, or automation, the resources were available.”

Beneath that overriding growth objective, managers are given the scope to develop their areas of the business. “There’s no micromanagement,” says Purcell. “We have a lot of ownership of our particular areas and that makes us feel that we are part of the business. I think that’s one reason our staff retention has been so high.”

Growing pains

Booktopia’s growth has been remarkable by any standards. It is the only company to be listed in the annual BRW Fast 100 eight of the last nine years. In September it was named in the Australian Financial Review Top 500 Private Companies. But growing at such a pace does present challenges for managers, Purcell admits:

“There’s never a stable environment when you’re growing so fast. We had a very fluid decision-making process and the danger was that teams could get overloaded and some projects perhaps wouldn’t achieve return on investment.”

To overcome this, Booktopia’s leadership team had to introduce more formal processes, explains Purcell. “For our growth to be sustainable, we had to develop our own corporate structure from within. What helped us was attracting people who had been in corporate environments. Every new person we hired brought knowledge and we would alter things accordingly.”

Alarm bells

Booktopia’s growth is all the more impressive when you consider the rollercoaster that Australia’s wider publishing industry has been riding. A decade ago mobile technology began seizing consumers’ attention and refused to let go. In 2011, high street bookstores Borders and Angus & Robertson closed their doors forever. All up, close to 200 bookshops closed around this time and the Australian book market fell by 20%.

Catherine Milne, Head of Fiction at publisher HarperCollins, recalls this time with a shudder: “They were dark days. Bookshops were closing, TV was suddenly accessible on mobile screens, social media was swallowing up people’s time and the Australian dollar was so high that – briefly – it became cheaper to buy books from overseas.”

Milne, who is publishing Purcell’s new novel, The Girl on the Page, says Booktopia helped the industry fight back. “It changed the retail landscape. After the closure of so many rural and regional bookstores, Booktopia was able to service all those Australians who can’t easily travel to a bookshop – not to mention many more who simply like the speed and convenience of online shopping.”

Question everything

As leader in an industry undergoing so much change, Purcell encourages his colleagues to stay up to date. “There are new products born every month from publishing presses. If you want to keep up, reading the right newsletters and social media is vital.

Reflecting on her own experience of leading through change, Milne recalls: “During rapid change you’ve really got to question everything; question your processes, question your methods. You have to ask yourself if what you did previously is still working today – and then be prepared to change when it’s not.”

“Our CEO James Kellow is incredibly good at setting very concrete goals for us that we can reach and then celebrating when we reach them. I think that’s the best way – to really focus on the things that you can influence, the things you can change, the things you can create.”

Kellow is one of the two leaders in publishing who Purcell admires most: “James and also Louise Sherwin-Stark [CEO at Hachette Australia] have made very strong and clever push to make sure they are publishing Australian stories,” he says. “In the past 10 years, it’s become clear that Australians are reading Australians, which is extraordinary because for most of our history we looked towards overseas literature.”

Separating fact from fiction

Purcell points out that neither of these leaders inspired ‘Julia’, one of the more memorable characters in his new novel, who is a terrible leader.

“Julia is the publishing director of my fictional publishing house and she’s a terrible leader because she’s all management and no product knowledge. She thinks only of the bottom line so her ability to inspire people in the business is nil, because she has absolutely no relationship with the books. All she sees is the numbers in the end.”

So how did Purcell’s real-life publisher feel when she read this? “There were times when I winced,” laughs Milne. “I thought ‘Is that the perception people have of publishing?’ Like any industry, there are certainly managers who prioritise profit above all else, but they are few and far between in publishing. In truth, you can only be a good publisher if you put the interests of the book and the reader first and if you invest the time that a book needs to get it right.

“I’m hoping that the mere fact I’m publishing The Girl on the Page is a counterpoint to the Julias of this world!”

By Andy McLean, Editorial Director of Leadership Matters.

*The full version of this article was published in the December 2018 edition of Leadership Matters.

The state of digital transformation in Australia

By Mark Cameron FIML

Increased interest in “digital business transformation” within the global business community has been meteoric over the last couple of years. A quick search in Google Trends confirms that. Why is this so, and what does it mean for businesses in Australia?

Following the GFC in 2008 the term “digital transformation” was hardly discussed or understood. Ten years down the track it seems organisations, large or small, public or private, are focusing on their approach to digital transformation as part of their core strategy.

The conversations with our clients have shifted from “what is digital transformation and should we do it?” to “how do we transform?” and critically “how do we do it and not stuff it up?”.

What is digital business transformation?

“When a snake sheds its skin it changes; when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it transforms.” – SAP Business Transformation Journal

The key question to get right is this: Are you looking to increase performance or are you truly transforming?

Remember this analogy as we see a number of organisations getting caught in the trap of speeding up delivery and results as opposed to inventing for the future. Speed is important but without a meaningful destination, it can accelerate irrelevance.

Let’s tackle a common point of confusion. What does “digital” even mean anymore? It means many things to different people. It can mean the digitisation of marketing activity, or the implementation of new technologies. Both are technically correct, but significant opportunities exist outside these definitions.

In 1995, Clay Christensen and Joe Bower published their famous HBR article Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave. “Disruption” has become shorthand for almost anything to do with change. This is wrong.

Disruption is about dramatic shifts in delivery models, experiences and expectations. Technology plays a critical role, but it is only an enabler. It allows for the rapid emergence of new models that upend industries and set new customer standards. The recent news of the collapse of Sears in the USA shows the true impact of disruption.

Rabbit in the headlights?

A study by The Global Centre for Digital Business Transformation found that 69 per cent of respondents see the need to adapt their business models to respond to the changing environment. Despite this awareness, only 55 per cent said that digital disruption was a board-level concern, and only 25 per cent had active plans to tackle the disruption head-on.

While digital transformation interest and activity has increased, there is still a gap in business leaders’ understanding of how rapidly the environment is changing. They see future change as linear and manageable.

It reminds me of a quote from Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman in 1998 in which he stated, “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” Looking back now it is easy to scoff, but it shows that even the smartest people misunderstand the pace and scale of technological change and how it will impact the world.

Until executives create a true vision for transformation, the organisations they helm are vulnerable to disruption. A business with a better model, that offers better experiences, and new standards of service, will eat their lunch. When it happens, it can happen fast. Leaders run the risk of being caught out like a rabbit in the headlights, aware of the threat but unable to move, waiting for the impact.

Phases of digital transformation in Australia

Leaving disruption to one side, definitions of “digital” and “digital business transformation” help to progress our thinking. For the purpose of this article, let’s define “digital” as the convergence of multiple technology innovations enabled by connectivity. And we’ll define digital business transformation as organisational change using digital technologies and business models to improve performance.

These definitions will help to show that there have been three main phases in digital business transformation following the GFC.

Phase One: A reaction to the global economic crisis. A cost-out exercise where technology was employed to lower operational costs through introducing automation and reducing reliance on human capital.

Phase Two: The media landscape became increasingly digital and fragmented, and tried and trusted methods of acquiring customers and building brands became less effective. In an effort to connect with an increasingly “online” customer, marketing budgets increasingly orientated to technology, focused on data collection, marketing automation and technical capabilities.

Phase Three: Today, cross-sector consumer expectations are high and rising. Many products and services don’t enjoy the stability they once did. Through technology, businesses are searching for new sources of revenue.

Let’s apply this to Telstra.

Phase One: Immediately following the start of the GFC Telstra invested heavily in automation and cost cutting technologies.

Phase Two: When David Thodey took the CEO role in 2009 he focused the whole organisation on the customer, even using Net Promoter Score, as a key KPI.

Phase Three: More recently the current CEO, Andy Penn, is transforming Telstra from “a telco to a tech-co”, essentially moving revenue from their traditional space of connectivity of fixed line, mobile and data to new technology based products and services. This is obviously a monumental task for a company the size of Telstra, but a shift that needs to happen.

Telstra is far from the only company that has gone through, or is going through, these phases. This activity, in varying stages of maturity, is being carried out across the market.

Avoid sleepwalking into irrelevance

Taking action in the face of potential disruptive threats is demanding. While there is no silver bullet, and no substitute for great strategy and leadership, human-centred design methods complemented by the right technology choices are effective tools to fend off disruptive forces.

Here is a basic approach to drive digital business transformation:

Map your current state: Many businesses are unaware what their overarching customer experience is, or how the systems and capabilities work to support that experience. This is unsurprising. Businesses scale organically and focus on requirements incrementally. But this lack of clarity makes it very difficult to design a future state.

Mapping business capabilities and IT systems combined with mapping customer journeys provides clarity. The business then knows how the organisation works, where efficiencies may exist, and where customer experiences can improve to create a competitive advantage.

Design your future state: The best-performing companies don’t start designing a future-state focused on technology. They start with experience. Using service design techniques, led by experienced practitioners, start with the customer and design the target state that transforms your business.

This includes focusing on what it takes to deliver. Begin with your most important asset – your people. Understanding how employees will support your target future state, and supporting them in their experience makes the difference between good and great.

Map process improvements and revise your technology architecture to provide a supporting technology roadmap. This approach ensures your people, processes and technology are designed comprehensively and cohesively.

Communicate a clear roadmap: Leadership should take artefacts developed in the design process and use them to communicate clearly with the organisation. This will help create the context for change, which most of the organisation is aware of and agree with.

Next, be transparent about the projects, expectations and spend. This will allow people to understand how their job impacts the process and provide them with an opportunity to contribute positively.

And of course, communicate the successes. However, be careful of getting addicted to “quick wins” at the expense of the long-term strategy. Constant short-term activity is where organisations can execute a lot of change, but no real transformation.

Communication through major change programmes is critical. When you think you have communicated too much, you are probably pretty close to the right cadence.

Develop new ways of working

Developing and articulating a vision and strategy is one thing, delivering on them is another. All too often businesses allow the delivery of new products or services to become engineering led, which loses focus on the customer problem the initiative was set out to solve.

Human-centered design techniques can, and should, be employed all the way to delivery. Constantly testing and refining features and functions with the intended customer base ensures that internal assumptions about the customer are always being tested. Every idea is a hypothesis that should be validated or discarded.

This approach allows your organisation to begin to build a strategic design practice that puts the customer at the heart of any initiative. It reduces risk and cost of delivery.

Grab the opportunity

Organisations have learned, sometimes in very painful ways, that for digital transformations to be effective the human aspect needs to be at the very center. Yes, automation and machine learning will change the future of the job market, but it is humans, be they customers, staff or a wider set of stakeholders, that will always determine the ultimate success of these innovations and investments.

So, employ the skills and techniques necessary to design the future you want for your organisation. Design your organisation for what it will need to be tomorrow. Design for humans.

Innovator: Karen Hayes transforming a trusted brand

By Lachlan Colquhoun

Karen Hayes FIML had decades of experience as a senior manager in business technology consulting when she realised that she wasn’t “bouncing out of bed every morning” to get to work.

After time working in Europe and Canada, she found herself back in Melbourne and sitting on a number of boards of not-for-profit organisations when the realisation struck: she was enjoying the not-for-profit world more than the commercial world where she had made her career.

She she set her sights on the much-coveted role of CEO at Guide Dogs Victoria. Having secured the position, she knew that the organisation needed to change.

The National Disability Insurance Scheme was about to begin and with it a new model of “self-directed” care, where people with disabilities would be the ones making choices on which services they use.

At the time, the philanthropic model was changing and this had major implications for an organisation that receives only 8 per cent of its funding from government.

“The days of corporates writing big cheques, handing them over and then just ticking their corporate social responsibility box are well and truly over,” says Hayes.

The vision was to move to a more sustainable model where Guide Dogs Victoria could maintain all the values that made it so beloved, but at the same time move towards being able to fund itself.

“It was about respecting the fact that the organisation had 60 years of great history, but also putting measures in place to make sure it survived and prospered 60 years and more into the future,” Hayes says.

Many of the staff, for example, had been at Guide Dogs Victoria for 40 years and the average tenure was 13 years. Hayes had come from an industry where the average stay was 11 months.

“I needed to respect the history, but not allow the history to hold us back,” she says.

Part of the reinvention was around communicating the fact that Guide Dogs does more than train and deliver the iconic guide dogs themselves.

Guide dogs are only around 30 per cent of what the organisation does, with the majority of the balance being in providing other services to the sight impaired. There are 250,000 people with low vision issues in Victoria, but most do not have guide dogs.

“We introduced a strategic plan, and that is about us being first choice as an employer, as a services provider, for people looking for an organisation to support with philanthropy and also for volunteers,” says Hayes.

“We are redeveloping our campus in Kew with the objective of diversifying our revenue stream with a vet clinic, a doggie day care centre, a dog friendly café, all of which will be revenue generating.

“We are going to build a low vision clinic and an educational auditorium, and introduce a level of predictability and sustainability in our financial model that has not existed previously.”

This is all in addition to the ‘Dialogue in the Dark’ experience in Melbourne Docklands, where people are led through an environment in total darkness and have to rely on other senses to interact.

Around 15,000 members of the public have been through the experience, which also employs a team of 20 blind people
as guides.

All these changes go right down through the organisation. All employees have balanced scorecards and KPIs that flow from the strategic plan and which are measured every year.

“When I came here I could see that this was an organisation full of individuals with very strong values,” says Hayes. “Now I feel we are also a values-based organisation with a plan everyone understands, so we are all moving in the right direction together.”

Could Appreciative Inquiry Be Your Next Solution?

Who would’ve thought that you could solve inefficiencies and problems by not looking at the inefficiencies or problems? It is an unusual concept, but Appreciative Inquiry (AI) takes problem solving in an innovative direction. According to this problem solving technique, paying attention to the problems will only amplify them; whereas, focusing on the positives will elicit the best solution. In addition to this, AI has been proven to produce other significant benefits for organisations, such as: enhancing collaboration, encouraging creativity, empowering individuals and avoiding stereotypical solutions. So, how can your organisation solve problems using AI?

There are four steps to undertaking a successful AI process, these are: Discover, Dream, Design and Deliver. When organisations want to undergo an AI process, they are encouraged to invite a group of stakeholders along to a planning workshop that works through these four phases.

Discover

The Discover phase of an AI process seeks to understand the current situation. This is one of the hardest phases for people to get their heads around as our minds naturally shift towards the current situational issues. However, instead of looking at the current issues, the Discover phase requires us to appreciate the best of what is and what has been. To discover this, participants are asked a series of questions that get them thinking about some of the key strengths of a current situation. Examples of questions that are commonly used during this phase are:

  • What do you like most about…?
  • What makes this memorable…?
  • Why do you like…?
  • What would make you choose this over something else…?

By responding to these questions, common themes and words start to appear. These are the themes that the rest of the AI process seeks to capitalise on…

Dream

The second phase of an AI process is the Dream phase. The Dream phase encourages imagination and creativity from participants by allowing them to brainstorm an ideal situation. When crafting an ideal situation in their minds, participants are encouraged to think about what it involves, what it looks like and what strengths it capitalises on. To make the most out of this phase, it is usually conducted individually at first before ideas are shared and strengthened in a group.

Design

The third phase of the AI process is when participants start to translate radical ideas into reasonable solutions. As a group, participants take bits and pieces from the dream phase to design an ideal solution. Practicality questions are answered during this phase when proposing what resources, skills, training, money, knowledge and commitment is required to translate the dream into reality.

Deliver

The final phase is the Deliver phase. This phase is where participants commit to the solution and set out a plan to achieve it. Typically, this stage involves the formulation of a proposal plan or implementation timeline.

And that’s it! A small workshop with four steps that could lead to innovative solutions for your organisation. Could AI be the solution to your next organisational problem?

How to present and build culture and your competitive advantage

Everywhere you look these days there’s some kind of change on the horizon. Companies are restructuring, offshoring and battling to stay ever present in consumers’ minds to stay ahead.

The result? Battle scars that get left on teams and team members, that if not fixed, continue to eat away at your company’s culture, productivity and profits.

More and more clients and departments are waking up to the fact that a company’s performance is driven by an engaged team and culture. As Gallup states on their website: “A strong culture makes employees want to perform better and makes customers want to spread the word about you.”

But building a strong culture isn’t easy. It doesn’t mean having ping-pong tables and bean bags. It does mean making sure that everyone in the company is aligned and eager to work towards the same values and vision.

The best way to do this is to focus on how you communicate internally, whether you are a manager, leader, a CEO, or an executive.

Everyone in your company needs to feel part of the equation. They need to be clear on how their role fits into the puzzle and fulfils a greater purpose. This needs to be more than words on the wall, on posters or coffee cups.

Often, it’s up to management to communicate and motivate teams towards a new vision or higher purpose through a presentation at a town-hall style meeting. This is usually supported through crowded and boring slides full of flashy org charts, mission statements and goals that do anything but leave your team feeling energised.

If you look at the majority of presentations, the content is presenter centric. The speaker talks about how good they are, shows off all the data they have, and how much growth the organisation is undergoing.

This kind of approach instantly alienates our audience. They are left thinking, but what about me? Why is that important? How will my world be affected as a result? In a nutshell, why should they care?

Thanks to the digital world we live in, our audiences’ needs and demands are constantly changing, which is what makes communicating so hard! In general, people want a more personalised approach, a more intelligent approach, and that is why it’s crucial to put your audience and their needs first.

Your presentation is your opportunity as a speaker to connect with your audience and create a united front. This only happens when you write, design and deliver a message in your presentation that puts your audience first and includes these 3 vital things:

  1. Being honest

    We need to remember we are connecting with our teams and employees, human to human. Unfortunately, we often think that as leaders we need to be different and that can translate to being cold and insincere.Instead, just be honest. Start with the reality of the situation – what is the situation right now, how are people feeling and what challenges is everyone facing? Don’t hide any bad news. Lying or covering up the truth only makes things worse. But make sure you move to the solutions and positives, show the future opportunity that everyone can be a part of.
  1. Sharing common ground
    You need to create common ground with your audience, to really address their key concerns and show them that you understand where they are coming from. The best way to do this is by sharing stories that show emotion, that show you understand where they are at and what they are faced with, perhaps because you’ve been in a similar situation before.
  1. Putting your audience’s needs first

    Do your homework and actually research the people in the room – why are they there? What challenges are they facing? How can you help them?

Resist the temptation to just read from slides and talk profit. Help your audience to feel that you are equally invested in the same outcome, whether that is company success, profitability, or future job security. Show a weaker side and your audience will really feel like you are all part of the same journey.

 

Learning to communicate well internally is your key to communicating well externally. After all, your greatest advocates are those people working with you, alongside you, every day, always.

 

Emma Bannister is passionate about presenting big, bold and beautiful ideas.

She is the founder and CEO of Presentation Studio, APAC’s largest presentation communication & training agency, Microsoft MVP, and author of the book ‘Visual Thinking: How to transform the way you think, communicate and influence with presentations.’ Emma will be speaking at IML’s Sydney TEL Talk: Enhancing Innovation and Creativity – How to make an impact.  

https://linkedin.com/in/emmabpresents

https://www.presentationstudio.com/

Sharing their vision is the way that leaders create the future

Written by Charles Horvath MIML, Professional Mentor and Decision-Making Facilitator

 

As a business mentor, I am passionate about succeeding.

We know and understand the principles for sound management and for succeeding. The rebranding of the Australian Institute of Management to Institute of Managers and Leaders (IML) is an excellent example of a successful undertaking. The right thinking took place at the right time and with the right execution, IML and its members are on the path to a successful future.

 

The August 2017 issue of Institute’s magazine, Leadership Matters, gave a very good description of Chief Executive, David Pich, went about the process of rebranding IML.

 

However, the fundamental reason for the success of the rebranding was only touched on coincidentally. The fundamental reason for the success of the rebranding was that someone had a vision of what IML would look like in the future. They shared that vision and a sufficient number of people bought into that vision for it to prevail.

 

A cursory review of management and leadership writings indicates that many characteristics are ascribed to successful managers and leaders, such as good planning, ability to communicate, selecting the right people to fill roles, to name a few. The one characteristic that is mentioned only in passing is that of a vision.

 

The foremost characteristic of a leader is to have a vision that captures the imagination. Nelson Mandela had a compelling vision. He shared it. People bought into it. South Africa is now free of apartheid.

 

Whilst a person becomes a leader for a number of reasons, the most important reason is having a vision and sharing it. David Pich is an excellent example of an effective leader. He had a vision for the Institute that was clear, compelling, comprehensive, soundly reasoned, supported by research and well presented to the target audience whose support was a key factor in the rebranding. People bought into it and the transformation to the IML took place.

 

The Institute is now a body of professional managers and leaders. This is great for its Members because they now have a new and an exciting credential with which to present themselves. However, at a bigger picture level, I would like to consider how our society as Australians will be affected by our newly qualified professionals.

 

The reason for focusing on vision as an important attribute of leaders is because leaders create the future. They do this by having a vision and sharing it with others. Leaders know how to bring the future into existence. So the question is, as a leader, “What is your vision for yourself, for others, and who are you sharing your vision with?”

 

Given that functioning with vision is an endemic and intrinsic part of our nature, we function with is subconsciously. My purpose in having broached the topic is to make conscious use if it.

 

Charles Horvath, B.Bus. (ACC.); FCPA; MIML.

Professional Mentor and Decision-Making Facilitator