The vocabulary of business.
A couple of weeks ago, I met a stylist, let’s call her W. W is a cool person. She’s a yogi and she practice everyday rain or shine, she has an excellent eye for style and colour, she also has an inquisitive mind about life in general.
W loves to travel. She thinks it’s an eye-opener, literally. She showed me a picture she took at a desert during one of her travels. It was a beautiful picture taken at dusk. The sun was setting, and the sky is a rainbow of colours. What’s amazing with the picture is that the colours graduated from sky blue from the ground up to a glorious orange, which is unusual - it is typically the other way around. W went on to consider and research on why this was the case. Apparently at dusk, the water vapour that hovers just above ground evaporates, lending the sky the brilliant blue from ground up. It was mind blowing.
W went on to explain - the seasonality, land, environment, even culture of each place is different and so the colours you can find at every point will be different. If you don’t venture out of your regular haunts, your vocabulary of colours will be very much limited. With a limited vocabulary of colours, your styling options are very much constrained and without breakthrough.
What an amazing revelation.
I immediately drew a parallel to transformation. The process of transformation itself is a scary notion. You are basically leading your organisation away from its comfort zone, into the unknown to achieve what you envision to be success. Along the way, you will encounter a variety of challenges. Some foreseen, some not. To successfully navigate this, the person driving the transformation needs to come with a breadth of experiences - a big vocabulary of organisational situations, internal and external. Transformation is an organisational-wide process that requires business savvy, creative thinking, digital know-how, and the dare of an entrepreneur all rolled into one - in other words, someone with a breadth of business vocabulary. The same way W knows that a limited colour vocabulary will result in a very much constrained styling presentation, so will a limited business vocabulary skew/ constrain/ limit the degree of transformation your organisation will undertake. If so, why embark on stunted transformation at all?
So, what sort of person should lead a transformation effort? Ideally, it should be someone who has had proven credentials - but this area is so new, it is unrealistic to expect a teeming pool of talents who can lay claim on this. I will venture to suggest that the person leading your transformation effort be someone who comes with a strong and wide business vocabulary - someone who has seen enough business models to understand how to scale/ move/ be agile, someone who has crossed silos in an organisation so as to have a broad understanding of processes/ interdependencies, someone who has witnessed successes and failures so as to be able to point out what goals an organisation should aspire to, what pitfalls to avoid. In my mind, this person is a generalist, not an able project manager, nor a capable technologist as I see now being as criteria pegged to digital transformational roles. I am not dissing both capabilities, don't get me wrong, but we are now talking about the person who would be the driver of transformation, not of its team composition.
What do we all think?