The Rise of Digital Transformation

“The realignment of, or new investment in, technology, business models, and processes to drive new value for customers and employees and more effectively compete in an ever-changing digital economy.”

—Brian Solis, principal analyst at The Altimeter Group

With a combined 40 years of experience building, leading, and advising organizations from the napkin and seed stage to the Fortune 100, FTSE 100, and companies on every continent but Antarctica, both of us have realized one fact about life and one fact about human beings.

1. FACT 1: In life the only true constant is CHANGE.
2. FACT 2: No human being resists change, but every human being resists being changed!

Every fundamental and successful organizational change, large or small, happens through effective communication that penetrates the subconscious part of our mind. These facts hold true for organizations as well, where fundamental change occurs and begins to rapidly appear when a tipping point of some smaller percentage (10 to 15 percent) of the workforce accepts the new paradigm or operational order into their collective subconscious.

There are different personality types that you have to learn how to deal with effectively to facilitate positive change within your organization. For those who haven't studied persuasion or any of the masters of influence throughout history at length, we will do our best to provide you some necessary high-level clarity in this chapter to the levers that govern successful communication and shifts in consciousness. We do this so that you can lead, from wherever you are, and become a catalyst for creating a truly digital organization that is ready to sustainably compete and delight its customers in the years to come.

Anyone in marketing or sales knows, all too well, the old adage facts tell, but stories sell. Stories cause us to connect to our emotional (subconscious) mind. The mind that ensures that our circulatory, respiratory, and digestive systems work without us having to consciously be aware of them. The subconscious mind is our operating system and the body is our hardware. The conscious mind is where we can load software and new programs, but only the ideas that are compatible with our current OS (paradigms) will work immediately.

To put any of the framework and ideas in this book to work in your organization, you must first understand how to play the game of people and influence. The following paragraphs are our effort to level-set with you by installing the proper “plugins” to your organizational perspective before you can load some of the new software this book discusses and run it successfully. You must understand that there are only three ways (ports) to penetrate a new idea or concept into the subconscious mind, where it can be nurtured and begin to grow.

The three methods to “get in the head” of someone are below.

1. Shock
2. Awe/Fascination
3. Agreement

You will want to employ all of these directly as you attempt to implement the strategies in this book. You will also be prudent to time some of your deployment of crucial conversations around the indirect occurrences that shock or fascinate the mass workforce and key players within your organization. In other words, never waste a crisis or a high that you could use to implant some of your agenda firmly in the mind of your leadership and delivery teams.

Having worked with everything from early stage startups to middle-market turnarounds and large organizations like Sprint, Symantec, Qualcomm, and Huawei, we are always making mental notes of how these three tactics are deployed to create mass control scenarios, traction, or intrigue.

At Symantec, Travis experienced the impact (shock) of reorganization three times in his 2-plus years. While consulting for Qualcomm for 110 days in 2013, Chris witnessed its use twice. In contrast, for startups and early stage companies, fascination and agreement can get a lot of use as tools for mass control and direction. In any event, make a mental note that these three are the paths into the subconscious and reptilian part of the human mind. In the coming paragraphs, we will talk about the four types of people you will meet along the way to drill this point home further.

Think for a minute of how hard it is in a large company to get agreement on an idea. Think even more about how hard it is for managers across an organization to create a sense of fascination or awe. Certainly, you can think of some of the masters at this, such as Steve Jobs, but the one thing that works time and time again for getting uniformly in the subconscious mind of your entire organizational chart is a reorg. They create a visceral level of uncertainty and stress that can be utilized to weed out the detractors, put potential uprisings back in their place, and realign power centers under the most entrenched or influential leaders. At the end of the day, however, it is all about getting your undivided attention, so that some other news or communication can be delivered unabated into the heart of your mind.

Think about why news organizations always lead with what bleeds. And notice how pundits, anchors, and talking heads often show up on screen in four boxes screaming at each other, only for the station to go to commercial every few minutes with some product designed to eliminate other stress in your life—whether by a pharmaceutical remedy, an enticing vacation, a gluttonous meal, or an adult beverage. Even when you put the news on mute, to lessen the shock and adrenal burnout, they have artfully placed camera angles showing the amazing legs of the female anchors—fascination—to keep your eyes engaged while they use graphics and the news alert ticker to feed you the same information in repetitive nature. Today, the BREAKING NEWS alert can include anything from a terror attack to a tweet war between Kim-ye and Taylor Swift. It's all designed to get and keep your fleeting attention just long enough to jam a message deep into your subconscious.

The way that successful startups use these three tactics to gain traction in the mind of their intended targets is even more fun. It is the old game of Villains, Victims, and Heroes, where they typically have some narrative around the inefficient or human injustice (shock) they are out to eradicate with their solution. They leverage every aspect of their youth, boldness, and apparent fearlessness to create a cascading sense of awe and fascination about the disruption they contend is imminent in a space that nobody thought could be toppled. They take early adopters and use growth hacking to proliferate the stories of their users who love being set free from the burden of the old way to amplify and create agreement that this is the future of (insert industry here).

When your customer experience or marketing team endeavors to surprise and delight your customer, this is a combination of positive shock and awe in full effect. The point is that you must also be willing to deploy these three tactics to get your organization to align around the idea that the present and future battlefield is around customer experience.

Our bold belief is that customer experience is truly the one metric that matters most. Organizations that align their total focus around optimizing their departments to provide the most seamless experience at each touch point in the journey will take home the lion's share of all rewards in the coming decade.

We highly recommend that you check out the efforts and CCXP™ certification at The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA.org),¹ if you are looking for a complete road map and operational aptitude to unify your managers around the discipline of CX. They are great friends of ours, and they provide an amazing level of best practices forums, white papers, and research to keep you sharp.

Those who fail to achieve and maintain great customer experiences across the customer journey will be relegated to a distant second place or put completely out of business.

Attention and Trust

Attention and trust are the two most important (and hardest) currencies to attain today and for the foreseeable future. They will also be the easiest to lose once attained. You already know that attention has long been the asset most coveted by marketers. In the digital world, however, attention is becoming nearly impossible to gain and retain over time. Too much noise out there and not enough signal. Consumers are being bombarded with advertising, content, social updates, texts, and app notifications 24/7/365.

A recent study, by Microsoft in Canada, found that since the year 2000, our attention span has dropped 30 percent from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2016.² By some accounts, we have the same attention span as a goldfish! Have you ever held a meaningful conversation with one of those? Better yet, have you ever gotten a goldfish to give you their credit card?

You didn't need Microsoft or us to tell you that attention spans have dropped. Hell, you have probably answered a text or watched part of a YouTube video while you were reading this chapter and popping an Adderall. Many of the people who picked this book up may have gotten so distracted that they never even made it to this page! So kudos to you. You're a champion and we love you for making it this far.

Attention isn't enough for winning more market share year over year. Trust is also required for that to occur. Trust to attention is the equivalent of carbon to steel. You need attention in enough compounding moment-by-moment proximity to gain a level of trust that builds with each microtransaction or touch point. You must consider it your organization's sole purpose to build real relationships (think deep friendships and marriage-level quality) with each customer, at scale. This means you will work at it day in and day out.

This also means that breaches of trust will occur from time to time and that how you repair that trust (while you still have the customer's attention) will be as important as how well you maintain it day in and day out. To truly be world class, to sustainably hold on to happy customers, and to not be vulnerable to massive disruption, you can no longer consider this optional. As a matter of fact, it is fundamental to survival. The good news is that you can use digital sense and powerful communication tactics to lead your team into a fully transformed digital organization and leap ahead of your competitors.

Influencers, Amplifiers, Motivatables, and Zombies

We mentioned in an earlier paragraph that every organization, and even society at large, is made up of approximately four general archetypes of people. It is important to have high-level understanding of this phenomenon as you go about being a change agent to not only be more effective but also to give you context that will help alleviate your frustration and self-doubt that you are somehow running into a unique situation that means you're doomed for failure. Everyone who has succeeded or will succeed in shifting their organization to a customer-centric organization will have gone through the same issues. People are people. There are no truly unique cases. It is not a matter of whether you are able to succeed; it will come down to what you are willing to endure to make it happen in your organization.

Look at the two pyramids in Figure 2.1. On the left you will see the typical layers of an organizational chart along with their primary decision-making lens/view. On the right, you will see the generic archetypes of the people that fill those spots. The Influencers (I), Amplifiers (A), Motivatables (M), and Zombies (Z)—everyone's favorite antihero. This graphic doesn't imply that all the Zombies are in the rank and file or that you don't have Influencers buried deep in the organization. Each archetype can penetrate all echelons of an organization, but this is where you will find each in their most native setting.

Starting on the left side, let's baseline our understanding that any time a decision is being made at a different layer of the organization, that the lens by which that decision is assessed is as follows:

• Inside the C-suite, decisions are based upon the overall enterprise-wide impact.
• At the SVP or VP level, the decision criteria are usually centered around the business unit or division-level impact.
• Senior directors and directors focus on their department-level impacts and budgets.
• Senior managers and managers are concerned primarily with how it will affect the program objectives they are being held to achieve.
• Lastly, the rank and file merely want to know what is going to make their task or project go more smoothly.

None of this is new to you but, it serves as important mutual context as we discuss who you will meet, and need to leverage (or avoid) along the way, as you endeavor to implement some (or all) of the recommendations in this book. Humanity always falls into statistical buckets, and this chart represents more than 40 years' combined experience in the trenches, leading organizations, consulting to organizations, and building businesses and teams from the ground up to exit. These are not exact percentages, but the percentages are good enough for government work, as the saying goes, and will serve you as a good barometer as you go about leading change.

Roughly 3 percent of the population are what we consider to be Influencers. They are also commonly identified as motivators. These are the masters of human persuasion. They lead effortlessly and we all want to follow. They are master motivators, orators, communicators, visionaries, and catalysts. (These aren't the same type of Influencers, however, that we'll discuss in Chapter 10). For every 100 businesspeople, three or fewer will fall into this category, and you will notice them immediately. If you read the energy of the room, it will always gravitate toward them. In the rare event that an Influencer cannot shift the energy of a room or a conversation to their agenda or liking, they may leave that room, company, or conversation, never to return.

Next up are what we call the Amplifiers. They represent roughly 10 percent of humanity, are extremely self-motivated, and have the innate drive and raw talent to become Influencers, but they must be placed in fertile soil to develop the nuances of that well-rounded mastery. They are intrinsically ambitious but many times can be constrained by blind spots in their own personality. They can show signs of frustration at times as they bang their heads against the same wall until someone masterful shows them another way around it. They are never short of effort but sometimes can be short of insight or tact.

Amplifiers are the foot soldiers of the Influencer. They lead by example, and they are critical players in turning a vision into tangible reality and proof points. They love the challenge of doing things that others say can't be done. They find personal fulfillment in being different than the masses, but they are not satisfied with their place in the world and hunger for higher tiers of influence, money, success, and notoriety. These are the people who will die for ribbons of acknowledgement and validation. They seek mentorship. They love to be a part of a winning team. Some are selfishly motivated, egotistical, and only stable in the organization because the leaders have found a way to tie their incentives to the goals of the organization. Others in this category are extremely altruistic and willing to build others up as part of their leadership expression. In any event, the Amplifiers are the critical fuel to the fire that is ignited by the Influencer and are, often times, the tangible day-to-day heroes inside of your organization.

As we move into the largest segment of humanity, we come across the Motivatables. These are the motivatable people inside of your organization and make up roughly 60 percent of everyone you know or will meet. Motivatables have the less than effective and often tiring habit of being people pleasers. They don't do it with malicious intent. They do it to blend in. Motivatables are masters at thriving and surviving in any environment. Like chameleons, they are wired to adapt. It comes from any number of prior experiences and early childhood software downloads that told them to be safe, nice, and polite even at their own expense. They dislike conflict and crave the comfort zone.

Motivatables can tend to be your passive-aggressive types. These are your political players, the most savvy of which have worked their way up to the higher levels of the organization. There, they can rule a silo and find personal significance through championing the inspired cause of an Influencer/Amplifier while falling back on a victim-type dominance when things imply change that forces them out of their comfort zone too quickly. Motivatables become who they hang around. Like chameleons, they adapt to their environment and rarely/almost never create it.

By the way, there is no judgement passed by us for people reading this who aim to please. Motivatables have not yet fully mastered how to stay on the productive side of that line. Their intention to create harmony is right, but their method leaves them vulnerable. Our hope in giving this example is that you will become more self-aware of where you fit on this leadership continuum and endeavor to lift yourself and others up to Amplifier and above.

Organizations that do well with culture have a solid and active maintenance by the Influencer and Amplifiers that causes the Motivatables to appear to have the same characteristics as the Amplifier. Over time, Motivatables who hang around Amplifiers long enough can morph into them, but the likelihood is smaller that they will ever become Influencers simply because they tend to be wired to be risk averse. Because of this risk aversion, the Motivatable can be an extremely vulnerable segment of your organization, if you allow too many of the fourth segment to exist in your organization.

The Zombies represent 27 percent of humanity, and inside your organization these are the truly unmotivatable people. They have the same smartphones and access to information, noise, and pop culture as everyone else, and therefore their power to proliferate poison is even greater than it was just 15 short years ago. Truly unmotivatable, they combine Debbie Downer with Negative Nancy. Wah wah wahhhh. If you handed a Zombie a gold brick for a Christmas bonus, the Zombie would drop it on their foot and sue you for gross negligence and max out their workers compensation claim.

The Zombie gets off on one thing. Turning other people into Zombies.

You cannot let Zombies get their teeth into a Motivatable or anyone else. Your Influencers can smell Zombies from miles away and will never be seen around them but will strike them quickly in the head the minute one comes anywhere near someone healthy.

The Amplifiers have no problem fighting the Zombies either but will, at times, spend too much time saving Motivatables from their grasp because Motivatables are too worried about being liked by everyone to run away from the Zombie.

Zombies are experts in every sordid detail of what is wrong, scary, or unsafe about society and your company's product, culture, and leadership.

How to spot the Zombies in five bullets:

• They know every piece of gossip and share it all frequently behind closed doors.
• They build or promote websites or write negative posts on Glassdoor.com when they leave an organization.
• They know every loophole in the HR policy.
• They are absolutely destructive and toxic and suck the energy out of every meeting they are in.
• They are insatiably hungry.

In every great story, there are villains, victims, and heroes. In your organization, the Zombies are the villains. The battle is constant and culture is built with each decision or indecision on a daily basis. If you want good to overcome evil in your company, you MUST avoid the traps and neutralize the Zombies as you proceed with your efforts to transform your organization and do your part to proliferate a digital sense across it. The Zombies don't want to be exposed. The Zombies win on persistence and prey on apathy and negativity. To Zombies chaos and the status quo are oxygen. The Zombies are like crabs in a bucket. They will do almost anything to keep any other crabs from getting out of the bucket and into the light. They don't want the organization to be free from its past. They are your mortal enemy.

We aren't worried about offending any Zombies, however, because we are WAY too far into this book for any Zombies to still be reading. And the chances are that no Zombie would pick up or buy this book in the first place. Although, when the word gets out that we called 27 percent of the adult workforce Zombies in this book, we are fully expecting that a Zombie will start an anti–Digital Sense page railing against us to the rest of the walking dead. We fully intend to leverage that, by the way, into book sales for them to burn at their Zombie-hater parties. Hey if it makes dollars, it makes sense, right? Allegedly, we know the person who owns DigitalSenseSucks.com.

Now that you know the game and the players, let's arm you with the framework, tools, and strategies to win as we proceed to the next chapter and introduce the Experience Marketing Framework.