Digitalization Isn’t Coming. It’s Been Here for a While!
And it isn’t going away either. Sitting it out or burying your head in the sand won’t help. Covering your eyes won’t make the “problem” of digitalization disappear. It’s here to stay. And that’s a good thing. This new era isn’t even that new, it started many years ago. When the coronavirus crisis began in 2020, a lot of business owners and self-employed people came to me asking what they could do right now to become more digital, ideally moving their entire business online overnight. But digitalization isn’t a project you finish by setting up an online store. It’s a process and an attitude that touches the whole company at every level. The crisis showed, almost overnight, how much had been neglected in this area over the previous years. Then again, that isn’t so bad, because it forces us to think about it now.
Digitalization in Your Company: Deal With It!
After seeing how companies work in Silicon Valley, Shanghai and Shenzhen, what struck me when I came back was how skeptical we are about new technology here in Germany and Europe. As a techie, I find that hard to understand. As a coach, I get it: we live in safety and prosperity, and we owe much of that to traditional industries (such as automotive and medical technology). Of course we cling to them and want to keep them alive. That’s okay, and so is the fear of losing jobs to digitalization. It just isn’t a solution. Because digitalization isn’t coming… it’s been here for a while. Deal with it! The question can’t be: will technology affect my business? It has to be: how can I actively shape this change? That question hangs over my work with business owners and the self-employed.
Why Silicon Valley Methods Don’t Transfer One to One
Silicon Valley has built a working ecosystem in which tech startups and big tech companies can scale and grow. You can walk through Shenzhen, the “Silicon Valley of hardware,” and marvel at streets full of almost nothing but electric cars and at urban planning fed with the city’s data in real time. But how do we bring that to Germany and Europe? Especially the parts that work well, and ideally without the downsides, such as employees being exploited by others or exploiting themselves, or total surveillance including social scoring.
Pulling individual pieces out of context and adopting them in isolation doesn’t work, and when it does, it’s luck: a bit of Scrum here, a foosball table there, and Casual Friday at the end of the week. What often gets forgotten is that a lot is different here: our framework conditions, rules, values, social system, culture and history. You can’t apply that one to one. Fair-weather agility then leads straight to frustration among employees (“So what have they come up with upstairs this time?”) and among managers (“Can’t they just work efficiently and agile for once?”).
Digitalization With Humanity
If we want to keep going down “our” path into the digital age and not steer toward dystopia, we need to put a value that has somewhat fallen out of fashion back at the center: humanity. In the end, it’s always about people: employees or managers, software architects, developers, trainees or seniors, suppliers, vendors or customers. People are the ones all this technology is supposed to serve, and they are the most important resource in this transformation. That’s why successful digitalization needs more than technical development. Above all, it needs the personal development of the people and teams involved. Enough with the shock and paralysis. Straighten your collar, take a breath and start shaping the future. Then agile values and an agile mindset stand a chance of becoming lived practice instead of empty slogans on the lobby wall.
Not Everything That Glitters Is Agile
In the same breath as “we’d like to be digital now, please” you often hear “…oh, and agile too, while we’re at it… properly, with Scrum or Kanban and dailies and all that. Because those methods will make us faster, more efficient and cheaper.” Hm. With an approach like that, my guess is that the “agility” project will fail as well. Agile methods are a good start, of course, but developing the values and the mindset matters much more. What kind of self-image should stand behind the methods? You need clarity: why exactly do we want to be agile now? Why don’t we just carry on as before?
A Model: Imprecise, but Useful
That question was already on my mind in my first agile projects in the early 2000s: why? Why throw out every process, shift responsibilities, dissolve hierarchies, bring in new tools here and fancy methods there? Just because it’s hip right now and everybody’s doing it? Sure, you can argue with faster, higher, further, more flexible… but over the years a completely different reason has emerged for me. Working agile, and even more thinking agile, helps us deal with knowing that we don’t know. In other words, with uncertainty. And where did that uncertainty come from? An imprecise but useful model helps here: at some point, around the time digitalization got going, complicated turned into complex. That was a turning point, and it’s already behind us. Complicated was yesterday. Now it’s complex.
The “Good” Old Days
Not everything was better back then, far from it, but some things were simpler. At least simpler to understand. Projects were manageable. Even large projects could rely on fairly stable conditions. An MS Project plan still had a useful half-life. Cause and effect were easy to follow. If you changed something in one place, you could estimate what effect it would have. That was the golden age of the optimizers. Make the process more and more efficient. Cut whatever can go. Fine-tune the adjusting screws and align them so the whole project runs like clockwork. That worked pretty well, at least until the cost of further optimization outweighed the benefit. But that was just one problem.
Complex Systems: Why Agility Helps With Uncertainty
Let’s blame it on the internet. Maybe not the first generation, maybe not the second, but at some point our projects started to take on a life of their own. Gradually, almost invisibly. Accompanied only by the uneasy feeling that things were getting hard to keep track of. A few systems linked here, a data exchange there, a couple of interfaces added. And today we’re looking at applications and system landscapes whose algorithms no single person can explain anymore (but they work). Complex systems in which the link between cause and effect is no longer clear. Whoever turns a cog cannot be sure where it will have an effect, or on what.
And that doesn’t only apply to projects. Companies and our society have moved in the same direction. And that’s not all. The conditions around us aren’t stable anymore either: fast cycles, fast markets, new contexts, everything in motion, a physical virus that (snap!) turns the whole world upside down. Safe Harbor here, GDPR there, employees and their needs, and shareholders have needs too. All of it at breakneck speed. So here we are, with three options:
- Keep optimizing and hold on to what you know: that ends in frustration or burnout, and the goal is out of reach anyway.
- Sit it out. Possible in theory, if you have staying power and bet that everything will go back to the way it was. But it won’t.
- Accept uncertainty and shape it yourself. Sounds exhausting, tedious and unsatisfying. It is. But it’s the only chance.
Okay, accept uncertainty. What’s so hard about that? In my experience, the biggest hurdle is the fear of not being in control. Not having anything to fill MS Project and the traffic lights in some PowerPoint report with. Not being able to cover every eventuality in a straight line. Not being able to protect yourself for the long term. Not having a scapegoat when something goes wrong. And this is where agile methods come in, because they exist to establish the values, beliefs and visions, in short the mindset, that we need to find solutions: more trust, more courage, more personal responsibility.
Your Agile Start Into Digitalization
Fine, but how do you actually do that? How do you and your company become more agile? For years I’ve been searching for the miracle pill “Digitalikum forte plus C.” Hand every employee a pill in the morning before the first meeting, and after a week the pain is gone and everything is agile. That would be nice. Unfortunately, pills often treat only the symptoms. For an agile transformation, companies can’t avoid changing their “lifestyle habits.” Because if I’ve learned one thing in more than 20 years of working with technology and people, it’s this: it takes time, patience and energy. And none of us has those lying around in abundance. That’s why it matters all the more to start in the right places. Otherwise the path ends in an expensive dead end.
Four aspects I consider especially important:
- Your own way: agile methods are nice and useful, but they’re also just other people’s best practices. What matters is that you find your own agile way, one that fits your company, your people and your conditions.
- The first step: get moving, try things out and find out what works and what doesn’t. Drawing on Scrum, Kanban or Lean at the start makes sense, but pulling one of those frameworks over an entire company in one go is risky. Start with parts of it instead, for example a daily meeting or a retrospective.
- From project to mindset: changing the culture or the mindset doesn’t happen overnight, and it always depends on the people. To establish personal responsibility, a focus on solutions and thinking outside the box, employees need competent guidance for their professional and, above all, their personal development from a coach. Managers can take on that role too if they have the right expertise.
- Use what’s already there: in my experience, companies have untapped potential for this path: your employees, with all their ideas, strengths, knowledge and talents. Dig up that treasure and put it to work in your process.
And Now?
Shape your own path into this digital age. Follow it consistently and take your employees, colleagues, customers and suppliers along for the journey. Transform your company so that it stays successful in the digital future, or becomes more successful. Give me a call: for support, for ideas or just to exchange thoughts. An agile path also has a lot to do with togetherness and communication. I look forward to hearing from you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is an online store enough to digitize a business?
No. Digitalization isn’t a project that can be completed simply by launching an online store; rather, it’s a process and a mindset that affects the entire company at every level. At the start of the COVID-19 crisis, many business owners and self-employed individuals asked how they could move their operations entirely online as quickly as possible. Above all, the crisis highlighted what had been neglected for years.
Can Silicon Valley’s working methods be applied to European companies?
Not one-to-one. The framework conditions, rules, values, social system, culture, and history are different here. Pulling individual aspects out of context and adopting them in isolation (a bit of Scrum, a foosball table, plus Casual Friday) works, if at all, only by chance. Such “fair-weather agility” creates frustration on both sides: among employees who feel sidelined, and among managers who expect rapid efficiency.
Why do agile initiatives that rely primarily on methods fail?
Because they lack values and the right mindset. Anyone who wants to work agilely simply to become faster, more efficient, and more cost-effective has a good chance of failing. Scrum, Kanban, and daily stand-ups are a useful starting point, but they need to be grounded in a shared understanding. First comes the clarification: Why do we want to be agile in the first place, and why don’t we just keep doing things the way we always have?
What distinguishes complex projects from complicated ones?
The relationship between cause and effect. In the past, even large projects could rely on relatively stable conditions; a project plan had a useful lifespan, and the impact of changes could be estimated. That was the era of the optimizers. In complex systems, this connection is no longer clear-cut: whoever turns a cog cannot be sure exactly what effect it will have.
Why is it so hard to accept uncertainty in day-to-day project work?
The biggest hurdle is the fear of losing control. There’s a lack of material to fill project plans and status reports. Contingencies can no longer be addressed in a linear fashion, long-term safeguards are no longer in place, and there’s no scapegoat when something goes wrong. This is exactly where agile methods come in: more trust, more courage, more personal responsibility.
Where do you start when a company wants to become more agile?
Start with individual aspects rather than a complete framework. A daily stand-up or a retrospective is a realistic first step; imposing Scrum, Kanban, or Lean on an entire company is risky. The important thing is to take action and try out what works. Agile methods are best practices developed by others, so the approach must be tailored to your own employees and organizational context.
What role do employees play in digital transformation?
They are the most important resource, because technology is meant to serve people. Successful digital transformation therefore requires not only technical development but, above all, personal development of the individuals and teams involved. Personal responsibility, a solution-oriented mindset, and out-of-the-box thinking emerge through competent guidance, whether from a coach or an appropriately experienced manager. The ideas, strengths, and talents of the workforce often remain untapped.
