What’s the first phase of Digital Transformation? Here are a few common approaches and their proponents:

• Start with Culture Change… as supported by Dion Hinchcliffe, Niall McKeown, and many other Digital Transformation gurus https://dionhinchcliffe.com/ https://www.ionology.com/
• Start with Customer & Digital Strategy… as supported by Accenture, Cognizant and many other consulting firms https://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/a-framework-for-digital-business-transformation-codex-1048.pdf
• Start with Exploration & Innovation supported by Brian Solis, Edgewater, BCG and other firms / https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/race-against-digital-darwinism-six-stages-brian-solis

Starting with Culture Change makes sense because it’s the hardest to achieve and it fuels the evolution. Starting with the Customer also makes sense since because it’s the customer that’s causing the transformation. Starting with exploration and innovation is equally attractive when entering a new unknown territory.

Yet I dare say all these things are second to consider. Simplification must come before every significant stage of transformation. And it’s importance and effort size warrants it as a phase, not simply an activity in the above. Simplification is simply a process of creating the capacity to future evolution / change.

Evolution / change is highly disruptive to the entire organization. Instead of simply ADDING that disruption and making everyone work harder or forcing them to neglect their current duties / targets… First go through a structured and controlled process of DEPRECATING what’s unimportant. Create capacity for evolution / change. It’s the same principle used in Organizational management, Project Management, Budgeting, and many other practices. I don’t understand why it’s not common in Change Management and Digital Transformation.

Key advantages of starting with Simplification:

• Available capacity will decrease staff resistance and increase adoption. It will also increase trust and credibility because staff will not be forced to choose between their work (how they perceive their current value) and how they have to evolve (their future value)
• You will not put current duties / targets at risk. Else, current commitments will be the very first thing you will see in declining. It doesn’t matter if you believe your staff already has capacity. Transformation causes confusion. Confusion will result in inefficiencies.
• Transformation should take less time or experience fewer delays. If staff have to choose between doing the job they know vs change, they will often default to doing what they already know and neglect how they have to change.
• Perhaps most important, you will have more control of what gets neglected because you can structure and lead the process of Simplification

What does SIMPLIFICATION stage look like?

• Take Departments and Teams through a process of identifying what they work on every year.
• Prioritize the work by what creates most value to the organization.
• Mercilessly deprecate last 10% to 20% of work that creates the least value.
• Clearly communicate the purpose of the exercise was to create capacity in every team for future transformation / change (not to prepare for layoffs).

How can you decide what to Deprecate, especially if your organization / budget is completely stretched? I doubt Eisenhower’s Decision Matrix will help you. Quite likely most things are already urgent and important. Simply do comparative analysis of value between different items / duties / targets (used in LEAN)… and deprecate what has the least value.

How much should you reduce / simplify? That will be covered in my next article about the True Cost of Digital Transformation.