Digital transformation mostly isn’t

Everyone in business and government has probably heard the term “digital transformation” by now. Yay…

It’s a terrible, misleading, term.

Transformation is hard. And it mostly isn’t digital.

NOTE — The first half of this presentation is wall-to-wall pop culture references, GIFs, video, and audio, so the effect is entirely lost here.

My pitch for this talk promised Soylent Green, so here it is. Charlton Heston a little past the peak of his career; after Planet of the Apes, after Ben Hur, after The Ten Commandments.

Just as Soylent Green is people, so the conversation we’re about to have is about people.

I want to begin with a short story…

Way back when, I was a technical manager of a fairly large web team. To my eternal shame, I thought I knew it all.

I use that experience of managing that team and saying those stupid, stupid things, as a check on myself. Especially so when I feel like I’m under pressure to neglect the people in the story.

That kind of self-check is a very useful tool.

Let’s get down to business: unless you’ve lived under a rock for the past five years or so, you’ve heard this term: “digital transformation”.

I’m not really a fan. Not because saying digital transformation will bring about change is wrong, but because it misses something I think is critical.

Let’s look at a model Paul Shetler from Stone and Chalk, and previously at the Digital Transformation Agency has been talking about: The Square of Despair.

Paul’s premise is that these factors — procurement, IT, funding, governance — when handled badly, are the things that cause digital transformation projects to fail. I absolutely agree.

However, in the words of 1970s Australian-American disco diva, Marcia Hines…

“Something’s missing in my life. Maybe it’s you. Baby, it’s you that I need.”

Where are the people in the digital transformation picture?

I have an idea. It’s probably terrible, but here goes…

THE PENTAGON OF PAIN!

Sorry…

Here’s the Pentagon of Pain. There’s a new side to the story: design.

When you do a digital transformation project. Hell, any project, and leave out design and with it, consideration of humans, you set yourself up to fail.

You also create room for some things to happen that might cause significant problems.

Who’s been on a project where feelpinions and anecdata get traction? Albert there wouldn’t have been impressed. I reckon he’d have been a cracking designer.

Design helps ensure that preconceived ideas and uninformed views get pushed out, and that insights are actually backed by research.

And this?

I can’t tell you how many projects and environments I’ve worked in where there’s an almost religious fervour behind “tech comes first”.

And magical thinking?

Save us from those who think “digital transformation” is a panacea for solving all our ills.

If you let these things run a project, you end up with something like the spaghetti in the picture.

In case you’re not familiar, that’s the visual for the Labor Party’s 2001 Knowledge Nation education policy. You probably had to be Barry Jones, the responsible Minister and a giant of Australian progressive intellectualism, to understand the thing.

Let’s just say it bombed. Hard.

When you let transformation projects run without design, something unpleasant almost always happens.

In the immortal words of Obi-Wan Kenobi…

“I feel a great disturbance in The Force. As if millions of voices cried out and were suddenly silenced.”

Let’s apply some designerly approaches to fixing this (this is the bit where I steal from others’ work).

Leisa Reichelt produced this diagram a while back, when she was leading service design at the Digital Transformation Agency.

Honestly, you should all be finding this on the web, printing this out, and sticking it up at work as a reminder.

Let’s give Broad City the last word on this…

Yas Queen!

No matter if we’re in government or any other sector, we need to be making sure that engagement with real people happens as close to Day 0 as possible.

Let’s look at a very recent project of mine. We’ve only just completed the work, and this is a 10-minute talk, so you get the “barely scratching the surface” version.

I’ve been working on a joint agency project between the Departments of Defence and Veterans’ Affairs since March. We’ve taken 4–1/2 months to do a long, involved Discovery phase.

I realise that in a lot of projects, that kind of time would be an absolute luxury, but this project definitely required it. And even at more compressed time scales, this kind of work is doable.

Here’s the trigger for the project. It’s an election commitment from the government to examine reasons that a number of people transitioning from military service to civilian life struggle with that transition.

Let’s just say it’s complex… About 1-in-10 of those transitioning report that their transition was, for some reason, less than satisfactory.

Bad transitions happen for a multitude of reasons. We already knew some of that from past inquiries and demographic data.

This quote is typical of what you hear from former serving ADF members. It’s very representative of the soldier’s mental model of the military being who they are, instead of it being what they do.

Let’s look at some numbers.

6000 people separate from the ADF each year.

Of those that separate completely, that is they don’t transition to some form of reserve service, almost 1-in-4 fall into high-risk cohorts. And of those, slightly more than half are at highest risk, separating on medical grounds. They’ve been deemed no longer fit to serve. That’s a big hit to the perception of self for a soldier, sailor, airman or airwoman.

Those who separate are often young. They potentially have long lives and careers ahead of them.

Young men are a dominant group in separations, although the numbers are close to the actual gender split in the ADF.

As many of us will be aware, the mental health of young men is a big issue, and as a population, they’re at high risk of self-harm or suicide. For those separating medically from the ADF, it’s an even bigger issue.

We needed to understand more, so in April and May, we went on tour.

We spoke with a lot of people. And put in a lot of miles.

Here’s how those engagements broke down.

Intercept interviews, workshops, deep-dive interviews with individuals.

We ended up with some pretty rich information.

We also did some quantitative research, assisted by Orima.

We kept hearing things that made us wonder if transition was well-designed.

Medical separations are a partially high-risk category post-separation. They represent a disproportionally large percentage of those with complicated or unsatisfactory transitions.

We heard this kind of thing over and over.

Perhaps not surprisingly we determined that transition, in its current form isn’t really fit for purpose.

That wasn’t a terribly popular finding in some circles.

It’s the first of 12 findings we made. Those findings will shortly be reported to the responsible agencies and the Minister. We’re hoping for the go-ahead to start an Alpha to redesign transition.

For this project, we’ve definitely heard from the people with the problems, and the transformation we’re hoping to be able to influence in later stages of this project has the potential to objectively improve people’s lives.

If we’d considered this project to be about “digital transformation”, we’d have got it all wrong.

Much like the new thinking from the Geefle and the Gonk in the old Sesame Street sketch, we as designers need to change our thinking about “digital transformation”.

So, I’d like to propose a change: let’s just call it “transformation”.

In the words of Journey: don’t stop believin’. If we all advocate for design in transformation, we can make it about people. Because digital transformation mostly isn’t.

I presented this talk at UX Australia’s 2017 conference on 11 August 2017. I’d neglected to publish it, so am doing so now. I encourage your response, question, challenge or support through comments. I can’t get better at my craft in isolation.