On 26 December 2004, at 07:58:53 local time a major earthquake with a magnitude of 9.1–9.3 Mw struck with an epicentre off the west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia. The undersea megathrust earthquake, known by the scientific community as the Sumatra–Andaman earthquake, was caused by a rupture along the fault between the Burma Plate and the Indian Plate.

A massive tsunami with waves up to 30 m (100 ft) high, known in some countries as the Boxing Day Tsunami after the Boxing Day holiday, devastated communities along the surrounding coasts of the Indian Ocean, killing an estimated 227,898 people in 14 countries in one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.

It was one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded in Asia, the most powerful earthquake in the 21st century, and at least the third most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the world since modern seismography began in 1900.

Naturally, the rehabilitation following this disaster has informed various case studies, one of which has addressed potentially transformative shifts in the ways local people interact with the state in Little Andaman. 

Of interest here, is that challenges have been presented to the notion of ‘deliberate transformation’ as opposed to ‘progressive transformation’.  Keeping it simple, it is argued that actively instigating ‘deliberate transformation’ according to pre-determined visions held by external actors (in this case NGO’s ‘non-government organisations’) is a direct contradiction to the principle that progressive transformation should be shaped deliberatively by the values and priorities of citizens themselves.  i.e. the NGO should itself undergo a transformation from ‘doing to’ to ‘doing with’ citizens.

Now, to understand how this impacts digital transformations, let’s look at some of the reasons why transformations are likely to fail.

One of these is around lack of awareness within the organisation. Humans by default fear what they don’t understand. The majority of an organisation’s employees will reject new software, tools, apps, and processes, even if they will improve their lives, unless they are slowly, consistently educated. 

Indeed, this may equally ferment into pure resistance for fear of being replaced.  You will have internal saboteurs who fear losing their jobs, so they’re doing everything in their power to undermine your progress behind your back. Who can blame them? Wouldn’t you if you thought your job was on the line?

What about who is leading the transformation.  If you look at the experience of the leaders, are they expert coders and engineers? If so, why?  The skills people need to lead transformation programmes are essentially soft skills, probably 80% in fact, whereas the technical skills that they have may only contribute 20% to what is needed.

One of the outcomes here then may be poor decision-making processes. If your leaders don’t engage with the people who are most involved and most affected, they won’t understand the potential roadblocks and what they need to do to anticipate and prevent these. A result will be slow decision making and more delays.

This of course feeds through into the ability or inability to translate the new way into real world language.  Whether it is to the executives providing the funding, or the staff on the front line, an inability to translate efforts into a compelling story that non-technologists can appreciate leads to self-isolation and barriers going up between the IT teams and their managers and everyone else who may be affected.

I’m sure we all know of plenty of other reasons for failure, be they new toy syndrome, poor prioritisation, loss of talent, lack of control etc. But you know what, none of these have anything whatsoever to do with the technology. The tech is generally fine; it’s the people who are getting in the way. 

An organisation will fail 70% of the time, not because of inadequate technology, lack of organisational capacity or lack of funds. It will fail because it is looking at digital transformation through rose-colored virtual reality (VR) glasses when it needs to be paying much more attention to the soft skills.

Humans are the problem. And the solution. 

So how does an organisation succeed in its transformation?  Going back to the Andaman example, it needs to include the right people, the impacted people, at the very heart of the process.  Transformation needs to be progressive and not simply, deliberate.  An organisation needs to hire appropriately skilled, qualified leaders to forge the path of a successful transformation. It needs to recruit on soft skills and not purely through the eyes of IT.  Stop promoting your technologists to their level of incompetence in the soft skills areas or at least train them when you do! 

And then make sure you ‘do with’ and not ‘do to’...

This is why an organisation only has a small chance of success.  It is the soft skills, 80% in fact!

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