Whether you review Gartner’s 2016 Financial Services Innovation Survey, read FastCompany’s articles on this topic, or recently run into the Capgemini’s report (global leader in consulting)… Culture Change keeps showing up as the largest obstacle to Digital Transformation.

Why is that? Here are the top three reasons:

1) Because we don’t spend nearly enough effort + focus on understanding, articulating, and communicating the real WHY.

We take the real WHY for granted. We default it to what’s expected, what’s common, and what’s polite. Our WHY is not compelling, not emotive, and not relevant to the very people we need to motivate to achieve a transformation. Same as Newton’s third law, the amount of change you expect to achieve must be matched by the amount of force / energy you apply. Are you trying to significantly change an entire organization? That’s a lot of energy you have to create and apply. A compelling, emotive, and relevant WHY is the easiest way to create that energy… far more effective than executive structure and authority.

2) Because we don’t have a good plan on HOW to do it

Reality is, despite what we wish was true, that Digital Transformation is very complex and undertaken with very limited information. Sometimes we don’t know what the customer really wants, or what new business rules should be, or how specific market will respond to our product, or how one system integrates with another. Yet we as those responsible for Digital Transformation, we charismatically sale as specific plan with a fixed timeline and budget. That’s just plain naive and ridiculous.

3) Because we only perceive, articulate, and blame the WHAT

We don’t invest in the WHY and we don’t have a good plan. So what do we focus on? We sale the one thing we think we know the best, the WHAT. We sell the new platform with wonderful features and capabilities. We sell deprecation of an old way of doing that everyone hates because its outdated and makes their work difficult. And when the transformation fails, it’s the WHAT that we point back to. The platform is terrible. The vendor is unreliable. The new approach is no better than the old one.

Sound familiar?

It should especially if you ever read or watched anything from Simon Sinek. If you didn’t, below is a summary infographic plus you must watch his 2009 Ted X talk about “How great leaders inspire action”

How can we do this better?

Saving money, more efficient, or rolling out a new technology platform is not a compelling reason to change. The WHY must be something compelling, emotive, and relevant to the very people you are asking to evolve. Change is only achieved through people and they must be truly inspired by the purpose behind the change, not simply told they have to do it. Here is how to get there:

• Invest time to discover the very heart of the WHY… not the one that sounds safe… not the one that you’re expected to say… rather the deep raw soul-wrenching gut-twisting heart-pounding WHY that directly connects to the the core issue / fear / opportunity. I’m talking about things like:”If we don’t change, in 5 years this company will be obliterated by our new competitors and none of us will have jobs! This is real! This is now!” or
• “Our customer hate our service. They go somewhere else because we care more about short term profit then their loyalty. Our actions show we care more about our short term profits then about long-term loyalty of our customers.” or
• “We stand on an edge of a mountain staring into an unprecedented opportunity at the horizon. We are uniquely positioned to do X. Instead of giving into our fear and defaulting to what’s comfortably known… we should gather our courage, embrace the unknown, and jump! Let’s make our mark in the history. Else another will take our place and we will be long forgotten.”
• Then invest time in properly articulating and over-communicating it to the very people you are asking to change. It should be the first thing they think / see about when they come to work and the last thing they think / see when they leave home reflecting on what they accomplished that day.
• Allow those very people to evolve the narrative, build on it, and make it their own.

Rather then looking to develop a perfect plan for something your organization has never done before, one that answers every concern and political angle…

• Accept there is no such plan because you don’t have all the information and the environment / market keeps changing
• Develop a plan that can continuously “inspects + adapts” then evolves itself to take advantage of what you don’t know (both good and bad). You don’t need a perfect plan when you’re exploring the unknown. You simply need a plan that can keep adapting to what you learn.
• Build a culture and leaders that embrace change and continuously evolve… rather then you leading and accomplishing a specific change.

Seeing the problem as an Opportunity

That last point also describes a much larger opportunity than a specific digital transformation stake you may be leading or participating in. Don’t simply try to organization realizing a specific need. Evolve and empower people in the organization to propel continuous evolution far pass your scope. Create a new generation of leaders greater than you, smarter than you, more daring than you, and ones with much greater vision than you. At the end, you can only evolve an organization by evolving the very people propelling it.

The WHAT is a very cheap and comfortable vision for Digital and any other Transformation. It is obsolete by the time it is achieved. Only a compelling, emotive, and highly relevant WHY can propel us forward far beyond the unknown horizon.