How do digital leaders deal with this new normal?

Talk­ing to many lead­ers over the recent months of lock­down, I realise that this extra­or­di­nary sit­u­a­tion has tak­en many on a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion crash course. How­ev­er, it can’t just mean we have all mas­tered Zoom or Microsoft Teams, or have carved out a space in our homes we now call the office, or that in the absence of any­where to go out in the evening our work-life “bal­ance” has become con­stant work.

No, these things will change, but dig­i­tal lead­ers under­stand that change, uncer­tain­ty and piv­ot­ing busi­ness­es are the new nor­mal for every­one, and three-year plans and look­ing back at past results to pre­dict future out­comes are no longer going to work.

To use the anal­o­gy of a car jour­ney, it’s about less time look­ing in the rear-view mir­ror to under­stand where we have been and more time clean­ing the wind­screen and look­ing for­ward to the next bend, know­ing the road behind is no pre­dic­tor of the future and the future is uncer­tain.

Now this new uncer­tain­ty we all face is not a com­fort­able con­di­tion to be run­ning a busi­ness in, but it is not a new, dig­i­tal-era phe­nom­e­non. Three cen­turies ago, French Enlight­en­ment philoso­pher Voltaire said: “Doubt is not a pleas­ant con­di­tion, but cer­tain­ty is absurd.”

So how do dig­i­tal lead­ers deal with this new nor­mal? I think there are three things to think about.

First­ly, we must rein­vig­o­rate the peo­ple side of busi­ness. In a dig­i­tal age, peo­ple are your great­est asset and the largest over­head in many busi­ness­es. Inter­nal­ly, rethink your hir­ing strat­e­gy to give your­self the abil­i­ty to spin up your team and turn it back down fast, and to vary its skills set. Think more about col­lab­o­ra­tion with oth­ers to deliv­er inno­va­tion; some­thing we have seen hap­pen­ing exten­sive­ly in the fight against the coro­n­avirus.

Sec­ond­ly, bring data into the heart of your deci­sion-mak­ing. Try and use data from your busi­ness and from the inter­net to give you insight. There are count­less tools out there that will help you visu­alise these num­bers into dash­boards and once mas­tered, with a lit­tle tri­al and error, they will help you reduce the anec­dotes and increase the data which cur­rent­ly informs your deci­sion-mak­ing.

Final­ly, find your empa­thy. As we have peered into each other’s homes through our lap­top screens over the past three months, we have realised that the homo­gene­ity of the office envi­ron­ment masks our col­leagues’ very var­ied per­son­al lives and cir­cum­stances out­side work. Let’s use that insight to help under­stand our teams’ diver­si­ty and unique expe­ri­ences.

For exam­ple, I would hope most lead­ers by now no longer hold the view that home work­ing is tan­ta­mount to a day off. I can report many lead­ers who track this data, report see­ing absence from work is down and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in their work­force is up in this new nor­mal.

I think this all means less con­trol and com­mand from the cen­tre and a big­ger focus on com­mu­ni­ca­tion. We will see the decen­tral­i­sa­tion of deci­sion-mak­ing and the pro­mo­tion of localised ini­tia­tive of the “ask for­give­ness, not per­mis­sion” vari­ety. As lead­ers we must embrace this new cul­ture and reward it with trust.

So good luck. None of this is easy, but if you can focus all your obser­va­tion for­ward, rely much less on the past for guid­ance, and cre­ate a cul­ture of exper­i­men­ta­tion and progress through iter­a­tion, you may be bet­ter placed to embrace the uncer­tain­ty, because as Voltaire said some 300 years ago, to be cer­tain is absurd.