Back in 2008, I was part of a Big Four consulting team engaged to implement a core system replacement for a multinational consumer business brand based in Geneva, Switzerland. The large project team, consisting of over 25 people deployed from various parts of Europe, was split into several workstreams including functional and technical implementation teams, and project management office (PMO). I was a manager at the time, leading the business intelligence module implementation alongside a small team of data analytics specialists, including a German senior manager who constantly impressed me with his ability to balance technical prowess with empathy and people skills. I remember the project fondly, despite the long hours and months of spending weekdays away from home (I lived in Zurich at the time, about three hours away, and spent weekdays in a Geneva-based hotel with other team members).

Overall, the project ran rather smoothly, despite facing its fair share of typical implementation challenges. For example, as with any large system implementation, the existing process landscape of the company needed to be mapped clearly, which involved analyzing process and operations documentation, as well as uncovering hidden processes developed by people over time. This was a mammoth exercise and took several months to complete considering the size of the organization and scope of business functions. As our team moved on to the blueprinting phase, we focused on designing To-Be processes that combined the new system workflow with the existing business requirements. This involved numerous discussions during blueprinting workshop sessions with the teams and stakeholders from the company. In addition to project challenges, the consulting team, people from the Big Four consulting company offices across Europe including Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany, faced challenges and culture clashes. Despite sitting under the same global brand, the country teams had very different ways of working, cultures, and practices.

One thing that I remember vividly was the lack of a workstream or team leading culture change management for the project. Needless to say, the project was a large undertaking, both for the client company and the consultancy. Many of the issues faced during the project could have been addressed effectively if some focus had been put on managing the people side of technology implementation. To clarify, the project teams had enough forethought to propose a change management workstream, but it was a matter of budget scoping. The key stakeholders decided that it was a “nice to have” element and carved it out of the project scope to save costs.

This situation is not unique, as transformation leaders will attest—the “people” elements of technology project implementations are often viewed as non-essential and oftentimes become the subject of cost cutting and scoping. Managing change tends to be placed on the back burner for many organizations. At the end of the day, that perception hurts the transformation agenda and ultimately the bottom line of the business. Data repeatedly shows that implementing change management strategies can enable organizations to successfully complete more projects. Prosci, an independent research company in the field of change management, gathered data from over eight years and found that initiatives with excellent change management are six times more likely to meet objectives than those with poor change management. In the 2000s, a McKinsey study based on 40 large-scale industrial change projects found that the return on investment of large projects was 143% when an excellent change management program was used but only 35% when there was a poor change management program, or none at all (LaClair and Rao 2002). Another 2004 PricewaterhouseCoopers study of 200 companies also found a clear link between change management, high performance, and a high project management maturity level (Nieto-Rodriguez and Evrard 2004).

Despite an abundance of research, data, and insights that have been available over the years, companies still spend a considerable amount of time and money on project management methodologies and tools training for staff, but rarely invest in the same way for change management.

Undoubtedly, the effectiveness of the organization's change management strategies dictates to a large degree the success or failure of technology initiatives. A significant challenge that the core system project faced was the friction that had developed among key stakeholders, which led to resistance across the functional teams. Eventually, the project team realized that the underlying assumption that all stakeholders would be on board was a mistake. The need for change management techniques to manage the teams, the interactions between client and consulting teams, as well as guide the transition to the new system was crucial. The project leaders had not made a planned, cohesive effort to fully understand the changes they were asking everyone in the organization to make. Eventually, the system was successfully implemented, and I believe a key factor that contributed to the project execution was the efforts of individuals in the functional teams who were able to influence and generate enough trust to enable the transition.

I took away a lot of key learnings from that project experience. For example, as a transformation leader, one of the first tasks on an engagement is to assess the key stakeholders, business leaders, and department heads, mapping out where each one stood in terms of accepting the digital business transformation. Subsequently, I develop actions and tactics to bring these leaders on board, utilizing strategic communication and messaging designed to address each specific concern. I have found this strategic communication approach effective in building trust and giving stakeholders more confidence in supporting the transformation initiatives.

How Change Management Falls Short for Digital Business Transformations Today

Traditionally, change management applies methods to define and execute change within the organizational processes, both internal and external. This approach includes preparation and support before the change, establishing the necessary steps for the change, and monitoring pre- and post-change activities to ensure successful implementation.

Change management of organization culture refers to the process designed to shift an organization from one state to a potential future state in terms of culture—pattern of values, norms, beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that may not have been articulated but shape the way in which people behave and things get done in the organization.

Organization culture and change management processes are closely interrelated. The culture of each organization is unique, and any change process will affect the culture, i.e., working models, management practices, and organization structures. This means that, without proper management of culture change, any transformation or major change in the organization will face significant barriers and resistance. Significant organizational change can be challenging. It often requires many levels of cooperation and may involve different independent entities within an organization. As such, it is critical to develop a structured approach to change in order to ensure an effective transition while mitigating disruption.

Changes usually fail for human reasons, such as leaders of change did not account for the real and predictable reactions of people to disturbance of their routines. Effective communication is one of the most important success factors for successful change in an organization, in ensuring all stakeholders understand the reasons and direction of change, as well as progress through the various stages and results achieved. However, organizations tend to presume that change management relates mostly to executing a communication plan surrounding a change or transformation initiative. In practice, it is critical to assess the organization's culture and dynamics as well, through specific touchpoints and techniques such as interviews, focus group observation, or surveys, as well as developing a roadmap of initiatives that drive and manage the change process.

Digital business transformation is probably one of the biggest transformation or change initiatives an organization will face. This is because real sustainable transformation will require organization-wide change that impacts every aspect of the business. In order to influence digital business transformation success, a deeper level of change management that takes a holistic view of culture and transformation is required.

Kelly Campbell, a trauma-informed conscious leadership coach, refers to this as transformation that involves “being” and “doing,” a reference to mindfulness leadership practices based on the underlying concept of the Buddhist noble eightfold path to happiness. Change management is the process of doing—the framework or scaffolding for how we are going to make these changes over time. How will this be communicated? What are the logistics pieces? Who needs to be involved in the preparation, execution, and ongoing monitoring of the changes? What are the roles and responsibilities? Campbell refers to these as the operational elements of the change management process.

However, before advancing on a path of execution, organizations need to define the purpose, goal, or intention of the transformation or change that will take place—the “being” part. This involves identifying why the transformation needs to happen and, more specifically, the direction to head towards. What needs to change in order to bring sustainable returns and align with the vision and goals of the business? How do employees feel about the transformation? What do they value and how can this be incorporated into the transformation process?

The work that Campbell does leans closer to this part of transformation, an area she calls the “beingness.” Both elements—the being and the doing—are critical to digital business transformation in an organization and should be addressed sequentially. However, in many organizations, business leaders tend to jump directly into the doing or execution aspects. According to Campbell, based on her work with organizations across various industries, this approach fails to hit the mark and falls short of achieving what is needed for transformation. This is because internal stakeholders are not able to rally behind initiatives that do not align with their values and motivations. As a result, change management initiatives are often cut out for not delivering results.

Driving Business Transformation Through Purpose: Start with Why

During a digital mindset coaching session with the C-level management of a financial service company, I was leading a discussion on the customer value proposition. As a team, we were trying to pinpoint the reasons why a specific target customer group (in this instance professional women) would select the product range offered by the brand. As the team went back and forth trading ideas—including one suggestion that the products could be offered with free gifts such as handbags or pink pens!—I paused the discussion to ask a basic, yet essential question. In order to determine the value that the company brought to the market, I asked the team to describe their purpose. The responses varied from “to make money” to other more altruistic responses such as “to drive change in the way people exchange value.” At this point, it became clear that the leadership team was not aligned in their purpose.

The Golden Circle is a concept presented by Simon Sinek in Start with Why (2009). What I find fascinating about the Golden Circle is that it provides a simple and clear explanation for the complexities of human behavior. It tells us why we do what we do. And in terms of transformation, this is essential.

“If we don't understand people, we don't understand business.”

Simon Sinek, 2012

The Golden Circle provides compelling evidence of how much more we can achieve if we remind ourselves to start everything we do by first asking why. The Golden Circle is an alternative perspective to existing assumptions about why some leaders and organizations have achieved such a disproportionate degree of influence. In the book, heralded as the “best-selling leadership book” of its time, Sinek describes two fundamental ways leaders are able to influence change—to manipulate or to inspire.

Manipulations (e.g., tactics that include dropping prices of goods, launching a promotion, or an event using a scare tactic to quickly force customers into action) can be very effective, but the gains are usually short-term. Over time, manipulations tend to get expensive—businesses must keep coming up with bigger and better manipulations, sometimes at the expense of profits and always eventually sacrificing loyal relationships with customers. In the context of digital business transformation, the manipulation tactic manifests itself as the “shiny new thing” that leadership teams want to have.

For example, a global insurance company CEO I was working closely with to develop a digital strategy came in one Monday morning with an intriguing announcement—the company was to implement an AI-based dashboard for management decisions. The announcement surprised the entire management team, including me. I had developed a deep understanding of the data and information landscape of the company. An AI-based dashboard would require a data strategy and several months of data clean-up to ensure accuracy, source credibility, and alignment of structured and unstructured data formats. So where had this idea come from? It turned out that the CEO had played golf over the weekend with peers from other companies, one of whom was currently implementing an AI-based decision system. Once I understood his motivation, we were able to openly discuss if this was the right initiative to focus on, and if so, how to go about successfully implementing it.

The second approach, inspiration, focuses on creating loyalty and is triggered by a shared purpose or vision—the WHY factors described in the Golden Circle. Within an organization, this shared purpose will inspire employees to rally behind a transformation roadmap and, when reflected effectively in your organization's communication and portfolio of offerings, will drive customer loyalty.

Although it could take many forms, one of the most effective ways of inspiring is leading by example to drive change within an organization. For example, leadership teams who want employees to adopt a new system or alternate way of working should live what they preach and naturally inspire change. At the core of creating inspiration is understanding people. According to Sinek, when companies or organizations do not have a clear sense of why their customers are their customers, they tend to rely on a disproportionate number of manipulations to get what they need.

Both strategies have a place in the business toolbox and, when used authentically, could be effective in continuously engaging employees, fostering customer loyalty, and driving increased profits. However, at the core is a deep and steadfast understanding of the purpose of your organization in the market.

Purpose-Driven Organizations Built for Success

A purpose-driven organization is one that stands for and takes action based on something greater than its products and service offerings. The purpose provides a guidepost for decision-making to demonstrate commitment to responsible business leadership, including defining the broader strategic direction; opportunities the organization decides to pursue, or not to; and conduct of the daily business operations. A well-defined purpose sets the organization apart in the competitive landscape and proactively attracts people and customers who share the same values and beliefs, and ties them to the organization in the long term. Irrespective of the company size, stage of business maturity, or industry focus, purpose-driven organizations have one thing in common—a clear understanding of what they stand for, and the willingness to make decisions that align with that purpose.

There is often a misconception that focusing on a purpose may compromise the commercial aspects of the business. Although leadership teams increasingly understand that purpose is central to business success, the focus remains on defining and communicating purpose for commercial success (PwC 2016). Purpose is also often not referenced as a guidepost for decision-making—an authentic indication of a purpose-driven organization. Contrary to this, research has demonstrated that purpose-driven organizations are far more profitable, simply because the business direction and decisions taken produce outcomes that are aligned more closely to the needs of the consumers and the market.

The current global business landscape is crowded and noisy. Over the last decade, consumers have shifted to digital, spending more time on mobile devices and online channels. It is now easier than ever for brands to access and engage with consumers. Direct-to-consumer brands are appearing everywhere due to lower entry barriers, making it easier for consumers to find and try alternative or new products and service options. The coronavirus pandemic has further accelerated this shift in consumer behavior and consumption patterns, forcing even mature, more established brands to compete for attention and loyalty. Organizations that demonstrate a clear alignment with purpose across customer-facing activities, including brand strategy, marketing and communication, and product offerings, stand out from the crowd and achieve continued loyalty. Consumers today are spoilt for choice and often seek to align who they are and who they want to be with a brand's purpose on a deeper level. Based on a global consumer pulse survey (O'Brien et al. 2019), respondents indicated that their decisions point focus on how brands treat their workforce, demonstrate care for the environment, as well as supporting communities in which they operate. Purpose-driven organizations are able to build deeper connections with consumers and amplify the brand's relevance in their lives.

Employees are also seeking deeper meaning and value in the work that they do. When an organization and its leaders focus on connecting people to their purpose and build this perspective into daily business activities, a transformation will take place. A workforce that is aligned to a shared purpose and highly motivated will be able to bring more creativity to their work, as well as demonstrate more loyalty in the long term. With a clear, shared purpose, the individual drive and collective good will align, creating positive peer pressure, reenergized workforce, and a sense of closeness and belonging in the organizations.

In his best-selling book Drive (2011), Daniel Pink highlights that people do their best work when their intrinsic motivation is awakened. In past decades, organizations depended on the traditional “carrot and stick” motivation tactics, fueled by the assumption that employees are mainly interested in fulfilling the contractual requirements of their positions at minimum personal cost and effort. This belief aligns with previous generations of workforce, who were motivated by a drive to survive or external rewards and punishments for the work done. We explored these generational motivations and reasoning in detail in Chapter 2. However, current and future generations of workforce are becoming increasingly sophisticated, enabled by the instantaneous access to information, technology, and people from across the globe. Technology-based solutions are also enabling the automation and digitization of repetitive and mundane tasks, creating a greater need for more creative and heuristic work. External motivations and rewards may motivate people in doing routine work, but effectively dampen creativity, enthusiasm, and engagement. Alignment with purpose triggers intrinsic motivation, as it is less to do with external rewards and more connected to inherent satisfaction of the task itself, resulting in better performance in the long run.

Unsurprisingly, purpose-driven organizations with satisfied, loyal customers and highly motivated employees will inevitably deliver better business outcomes. The Global Leadership Forecast 2018, a survey of 1500 global C-level executives, found companies that defined and acted with a sense of purpose outperformed in the financial markets by up to 42% (DDI 2018). A clear purpose contributes to building organizational resilience and improves long-term financial performance and shareholder value, acts as a unifier that raises employee engagement, and increases customer loyalty and commitment (see Figure 4.1).

These real benefits are only realized when organizations are business leaders and management teams demonstrate behavior that exemplifies the shared purpose in their daily business and decision-making. In addition, organizations that effectively and consistently articulate their core business purpose will not only attract talent with a shared mindset, but also partners, suppliers, and collaborators to create a greater impact in the business ecosystem. When an organization embraces purpose, it becomes better positioned to confront and address uncertainty, disruption, and transformation. A higher purpose and shared values bring key stakeholders together and form a unified approach to making key decisions and setting the direction for digital business transformation, and the expected outcomes from these efforts.

Business leaders need to do more than talk about the purpose in order to fully leverage a purpose-driven organization. They need to demonstrate passion and commitment to the purpose, implementing and embedding the necessary elements in daily business, and make it easier for people to deliver on their promises to customers. Three principles are at the core of building a purpose-driven organization:

• Define the purpose with clarity    Articulate a clear purpose and shared values by addressing existential questions around why the company exists and what key internal and external stakeholders truly care about. These questions will put a spotlight on the business and its daily activities, as well as guide decisions on how to move forward strategically. It is important to validate the defined purpose with broader groups of stakeholders, and, once finalized, embed it across various business communications and interaction touchpoints.
• Integrate purpose and values into the core business strategy    Reinforce the purpose across daily business operations and treat it as a commitment to shareholders by publicly communicating and reporting on its progress. Highlight to employees how their daily work contributes to the shared purpose and value to end customers. In a recent conversation with a R&D business leader in the textile manufacturing industry, I realized that he was deeply embedded in research and had lost sight of the impact of the team's work to the end customer and market. By creating a touchpoint to the sales team, we were able to not only highlight how their work impacted people all over the world, but also inspired new innovative ideas to be explored.
• Create measurable goals to embed purpose in business    In order to make the purpose more concrete, develop and set clear measurable goals to put their purpose statement into action. Identify the business impact metrics that flow from the enactment of the purpose, and align both business and individual performance metrics to these to give it gravity.

An organization will not be able to achieve long-term profits without embracing purpose and considering the needs of a broad range of stakeholders in the business ecosystem. In the course of our lives in these modern times, people will spend an average of 90,000 hours at work. Our self-identity is closely linked to the work that we do on a daily basis, and our sense of purpose is intertwined with it. Commitment to an organization is experienced as a psychological attachment, making it all the more critical for leadership teams to define and develop a purpose, or north star, that will not only boost employee motivation and overall job satisfaction, but also speak to the shared values of the customers.

In 2015, Dan Price, founder and CEO of Gravity Payments, made global headlines when he announced a commitment to pay every employee a minimum wage of $70,000. The credit-card processing company received mixed responses, with many critics calling Price's commitment a “socialist” act that would leave the business in financial turmoil. When the coronavirus pandemic hit in March 2020, many of their small-business clients were forced to close or cut back services. As Gravity Payments’ revenue fell by 55%, Price estimated that they would be out of business in a few months. Most organizations chose to lay off staff to keep their businesses running during the height of the pandemic. Price chose a different route, by meeting with his employees to explain the company's situation, and nearly every one of the 185 employees agreed to a voluntary pay cut of between 5% and 100%. Collectively, they also agreed not to jack up payments for their 200,000 customers, which would have yielded an extra $2 million a month, choosing instead to endure the pain internally. This was a demonstrable example of how a shared purpose and human-centered approach in the organization helps to weather disruptions and uncertainty. Gravity Payments was able to not only keep its track record of never having laid off any employees, but also pulled together as a solid team to attract new business by 31% during the pandemic. The company has now restored employees’ full salaries, and also paid them what they lost in July from the pay cuts.

In Price's own words, he describes how “the purpose of an organization is to make the humans’ lives better. It's not the purpose of humans to make the organization better. That is 100% backwards with how most of us look at companies and organizations. It's always company first, and I'm going to sacrifice myself, sacrifice my colleagues, sacrifice my integrity, sacrifice my loyalties, in the name of supporting the almighty organization, and that's really wrong. People should come first.”

Setting Your “North Star” to Drive Organizational Purpose

In recent years, a new breed of organizations has emerged that are responding to the transformations of the digital economy and future of business. Exponential organizations—as referred to by Salim Ismail (2014) in his best-selling book of the same name—grow at an above-average rate. These companies are not only able to grow up to ten times (10x) faster than comparable companies in the industry, but can make do with considerably fewer resources thanks to new forms of organization and the application of emerging technologies.

Ismail, the former Head of Innovation at Yahoo and founder of Silicon Valley innovation hub Singularity University, explains that rather than increasing human capital or physical assets, the most successful twenty-first-century companies leverage information and technology to achieve rapid expansion in pursuit of a “massive transformational purpose” (MTP). In doing so, they are able to scale their business strategies, culture, organizational frameworks, and purpose at the same rate as the technology—one that follows an exponential curve.

Ismail now runs OpenExO, a global community of more than 17,000 certified coaches, investors, consultants, and innovation experts. I joined the OpenExO community as a certified consultant several years ago as I recognized the exponential organization framework as one of the most powerful tools to allow companies and businesses to thrive in the future digital economy. With this framework, companies will be able to implement new organizational techniques that leverage accelerating technologies solutions to create disproportionately large impact or output—at least 10 times larger—than their peers. This means organizations will be able to grow faster, bigger, and cheaper than the competition, and scale as quickly as digitally enabled companies and rapidly developing technologies do.

A core element and starting point of the ExO Framework is the MTP, meant to be the north star for the organization that provides direction when key choices are required. It helps to build a purpose-driven organization with a higher aspiration to achieve radical transformation and a distinct focus on abundance. Exponential technologies enable abundance, and exponential organizations are built to connect with this abundance. The focus in every industry today is shifting from a scarcity environment, where there are intrinsic limitations relating to physical assets, geographic boundaries, and narrow mindsets, to one of abundance and exponential capabilities.

Massive transformative purposes are not vision or mission statements. A vision statement describes what an organization wants to become, while a mission statement describes how they will achieve the vision. Conversely, an MTP does not address how the purpose will be achieved, but what the overarching purpose is. This allows your organization to modify the approach or even pivot, over time, staying dynamic and agile with the rapidly changing digital times. For example, global media organization TED Talks has developed an MTP that provides a reference for keeping the organization's activities focused, while achieving exponential growth and scale across the world—“Ideas Worth Spreading.” In the same way, Swedish furniture conglomerate IKEA has developed an MTP that goes beyond furnishings and addresses a broader purpose and value for the market—“To create a better everyday life for the many people.”

There are several methods to help organizations craft an MTP (Ismail, Palao, and Lapierre 2019). The approach that I have applied repeatedly for client engagements is the WHY/HOW/WHAT approach, designed to frame your thinking according to these three categories and help separate the MTP from execution. In my experience, this approach works well for incumbent organizations that are typically constrained by the need to take into consideration existing offerings and operations (conversely, start-ups and newly founded companies may have the opportunity of starting with a blank slate and define their MTPs from scratch).

The WHY/HOW/WHAT approach brings together key individuals from across the organization, including hierarchies and functions, to brainstorm three main questions:

• Why does your organization exist?
• How will your organization address the need or opportunity?
• What will your organization deliver?

At the core of this session is defining the purpose through an iterative process of sharing ideas and selecting one to develop further (up to five or six iterations until a version of the MTP that resonates with the group is identified).

Peter Diamandis, cofounder and executive chairman of Singularity University, often says “Find something you would die for, and live for it.” Employees and stakeholders within the ecosystem of purpose-driven companies that are organized around a unifying massive transformative purpose will work harder and are more dedicated, and most importantly, feel more fulfilled about the work that they do.

Driving Digital Empathy Through Purpose

In an increasingly crowded digital landscape, companies find it difficult to stand out and gain the much-needed engagement and attention from their customers. However, purpose-driven organizations are able to do just that—stand out in a unique and differentiated way, as opposed to becoming a part of this sea of sameness.

Approximately 5 billion internet users exist across the globe and the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 has further accelerated their activity online. An annual infographic by Domo (Domo, Inc. 2021) captures the essence of how much activity is going on in any given minute on the Internet. At the heart of the world's digital activity are the everyday services and applications that have become staples in our lives. For example, in a minute on the Internet, 6 million people shop online, 5.7 million Google searches are conducted, and YouTube users stream 694,000 videos.

To get a glimpse at just how much data was created every single minute across high-traffic platforms and apps in 2021, check out the infographic shown in Figure 4.2.

Considering that the amount of data and information available in the digital universe is effectively doubling every two years, it is fair to say that companies today not only need to have a strong presence online, but also face daunting competition to stand out and get noticed by customers. Consumers have now become accustomed to engaging with digitally enabled businesses seamlessly across channels and touchpoints, as well as accessing hyper-personalized product and service offerings that meet their specific needs. As the coronavirus pandemic accelerated digital interactions and online acquisitions, companies across industries implemented digital strategies to keep up with the demands.

Covid-19 has also accelerated the transformation of business practices and processes. For example, the rise of remote work offered a glimpse into hybrid working—home office, digital meetings, and online collaboration tools—further blurring the lines between digital and physical boundaries. This is the new normal, and companies that want to thrive going forward are going to have to continue to reimagine the use of technology to bring those new cadences to life faster and more easily.

In order to succeed in these digital interactions, companies need to ensure that they build empathy into transformation solutions and customer journeys that are implemented online. A shared purpose helps motivate and drive people towards a common direction that they believe in, while empathy moves them towards each other in a helping and healing capacity. Digital empathy builds on this concept further by connecting people in realizing the full potential of technology and understanding how human users interact with platforms, systems, and processes. This new approach to building relevance in the digital age applies to both employees using technology in their daily work lives, as well as customers who experience an organization's product and service offerings, and interact across channels and touchpoints in the market.

Mastercard provides a good example of how empathy and purpose steered the brand's online strategy and helped it stand out during the coronavirus pandemic (Rozen 2021). The global financial services giant was just as shocked by the worldwide pandemic as any other company, however Mastercard was relatively better prepared to quickly shift to a fully digital working model. This enabled the company to shift their focus on ways to demonstrate empathy and prioritize supporting their customers and communities. According to Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard's Chief Marketing Officer, it was important for the company to demonstrate digital empathy and lead through the lens of “to serve and not sell,” both for consumers and for society at large.

As a global brand, Mastercard had already defined clear commitment to social causes that align with its purpose. During the pandemic, the brand made efforts to keep these existing commitments. For example, Mastercard continued its partnership with Stand Up To Cancer, an organization that was instrumental in getting seven drugs discovered and approved for cancer patients. As part of its commitment to support diversity and inclusion, Mastercard launched the “True Name Card” credit card in 2019, specifically developed to support the transgender community. The card incorporates both the name that the person identifies with, as well as their “legal” name in small type on the back to fulfil regulatory requirements. Additionally, Mastercard is vocal in supporting the Black Lives Matter movement following the tragic death of George Floyd, and had pledged $500 million to help close the racial wealth and opportunity gap for Black communities and businesses.

During the coronavirus pandemic, Mastercard continued to support and engage, as well as demonstrate empathy, for these social causes through digital channels and interactions. The company believes that organizations have the resources, network, and power to shape perception, beliefs, and mindset, and need to make an effort to create greater impact in society.

In the current business landscape, organizations are expected to demonstrate a certain degree of empathy across channels and touchpoints to the market. Building digital relevance through empathy involves implementing communication approaches that leverage technology solutions to gain a deeper understanding for people's values and priorities, and responding in alignment to this. The practice of building trust through authenticity and transparency will help drive digital empathy for any organization. This is described in a structured approach as follows:

• Active listening    Active listening involves a deep commitment to seeing the world through the eyes of customers and key stakeholders. Online channels and technology solutions that exist today make it easier than ever to gather data and generate insights to better understand consumers. A great starting point is to set up digital listening capabilities to find out who is influencing the discussions or topics of interest in your industry, and what is being shared. Analyze the content to explore what people think, feel, say, and do, to proactively build empathy with stakeholders.
• Integrate insights    The insights gathered from the active listening phase should feed into the organization's communication and engagement activities. Focus on developing a narrative that describes the purpose and value your organization offers and how it aligns with the values of customers and key stakeholders.
• Shared experiences    Consumers today are not satisfied with one-way interactions, where companies bombard them with content, announcements, and promotion. People want meaningful communication where they are seen, heard, and valued, especially with the brands they interact with. Create shared experiences by exploring interactive channels that give customers and key stakeholders the opportunity to respond, interact, and engage with your channels and touchpoints. For example, the increasing user adoption of augmented reality (AR) devices provides an opportunity for companies to create experiences that engage people's emotions. The ultimate aim is to establish trust and a shared space where companies and people are able to interact, engage, and build resilient relationships.
• Evaluate, measure, and refine    Establish a continuous evaluation and measurement to determine the impact of the communication and engagement activities, ensuring demonstrable progress in building digital empathy. For example, user adoption is a key metric that indicates that the engagement strategies are being used across the channels and touchpoints.

Consumers want human engagement, that is, to interact with brands in the same way they interact and engage with family and friends. They want to be seen, heard, and valued as humans through personalized interactions, and not to be reduced to a cluster of data points. And, most importantly, consumers now expect brands to showcase their humanity through empathy, regardless of the channels or touchpoints used.

Influencing Digital Business Transformation with Culture Change

An organization that has a clearly defined purpose and developed capabilities to demonstrate deep empathy for internal and external stakeholders will be able to better navigate uncertainty, disruption, and transformation. As leadership teams gain a deep understanding for how purpose and empathy overlap with change, they will be able to build long-term, trusting relationships with their stakeholders, be it employees, customers, or collaborators and partners in the wider business ecosystem. A humans-first approach to communications, engagement, and interaction will mean taking additional effort to explain the overarching purpose through the lens of stakeholder needs and values. In a letter addressed to employees of Microsoft during the pandemic, Satya Nadella wrote: “It is in times of great disruption and uncertainty that our ability to stay grounded in our sense of purpose and remain true to our identity is of the utmost importance” (Nadella 2020).

Digital business transformation is a process that needs to be proactively managed. It involves organization-wide change, triggering a range of emotions including excitement, anticipation, fear, loss of control, anxiety, and anger, among others. Organizations that do not proactively manage transformation will face resistance that results in productivity loss—lack of support, low morale, initiatives running over budget, unplanned increase in scope, compromises in quality, or rejection of initiatives entirely. Figure 4.3 illustrates the Change Curve, the four phases that people usually experience in any change or transformation process.

The Change Curve is a powerful model that helps predict how people will react to change, providing organizations with guidance on how to support and drive the transition from one phase to the next. The model was initially developed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in the 1960s to explain personal transitions in grief and bereavement. However, the model is often used in modern business to manage major organization transformation that could be genuinely traumatic for the people undergoing it. Digital business transformation, although occurring over time, may be described as major change as it involves adopting new ways of working, engaging, and governing within the organization. The Change Curve model describes the four stages most people go through as they adjust to change:

• Stage 1: Denial    When digital business transformation initiatives are first introduced, the initial response in the organization may be shock or denial, as people react to the challenge to the status quo. Key stakeholders may choose to avoid the topic and even continue doing things like before. At this stage, stakeholders may consider the new initiatives or solutions as unnecessary hype and believe that people will roll back to the old standards eventually.

  In the denial stage, clear, transparent communication is essential to counter the shock or denial that people may face. Apart from enough time to adjust to the transformation, people need frequent, consistent, and continuous information to understand the change, how it will affect them, and what is expected of them throughout the journey. Create a transformation communication plan that incorporates multiple channels and touchpoints, as well as formats of communication that will reach the target audiences. Utilize stories and narratives that will provide required information in an engaging way that is easy to absorb.

• Stage 2: Resistance    Once the reality of the transformation hits, people will start to show their reactions to it. This initial reaction may range from negative to positive, depending on the level of transformation and type of change. Employees may show fear, feel anger, or event resist the transformation completely. Managers may fear the loss of control, new levels of transparency, or skills requirements. If not addressed in a timely manner, it will impede the transformation efforts and keep the organization in the resistance stage of the Change Curve.

  In the resistance stage, it is important to set up appropriate methods to listen and observe the impact of the change. Consider the impact of the transformation efforts and the reasons for resisting the change. For example, someone who has built up expertise in a certain “old” way of working may fear losing their position or not being able to learn the skills required for the new post-transformation environment. By gathering insight through listening and observation, the true motivations behind resistance could be identified and addressed effectively.

• Stage 3: Exploration    This stage brings some relief as people start letting go of the old environment and begin to accept the transformation initiatives. Curiosity and exploration kick in, allowing them to try out the new solutions or embrace new ways of working. As people start to adapt, the reality of what works well and what does not will start to emerge. Leadership and transformation teams will have to address these to keep the momentum of change.

  The exploration stage requires focus on upskilling people in preparation for the transformed business environment. This stage incorporates skills and capability assessments to develop training and education plans, as well as sufficient opportunity for people to try, test, and provide feedback on solutions that may be implemented. This is vital to encourage learning and acceptance, which will result in buy-in and support for the transformation efforts.

• Stage 4: Commitment    In the commitment stage, employees and stakeholders will have accepted and embraced the transformation initiatives, allowing the organization to finally realize benefits and desired outcomes. The Change Curve offers organizations the opportunity to identify ways to move people through the stages more quickly, as well as make the curve shallower and narrower.

  A key way to do this would be to share and celebrate successes. As the organization starts to reap benefits and teams become increasingly productive and efficient, it is important to share these successes and provide the opportunity to celebrate them. Recognize key people at every level of the organization who have helped drive the transformation, and showcase outcomes that have been achieved. Digital business transformation is an ongoing journey, and celebrating successes will make it easier to gain support when more transformation or change efforts are required.

In reality, it is critical to understand that transformation does not take place only through implementation of new systems, processes, or structures, but occurs when people in the organization adapt and change along with it. By observing people's reactions in relation to the Change Curve, leadership teams will be able to help accelerate the movement along the curve towards more positive emotions. Organizations will truly be able to realize the benefits of change when its people are able to make their own personal transitions. In my personal experience of implementing digital business transformation in organizations, it can be an intensely traumatic experience for many people. The easier that leadership teams can make this journey for their people, the more quickly success can be realized.

Influencing People for Transformation

Successful and sustainable implementation of digital business transformation strategy is as much an art as it is a science. Those who lead transformation efforts in an organization must find a balance between a structured approach to define, develop, and implement change initiatives that will move the business towards future readiness, and the fine art of influencing people in the organization to adopt and live these changes in the long term.

This brings to mind a story of the Trojan War in Greek mythology, illustrating how creative methods are an essential component of the strategic toolkit. The Trojans and Greeks faced off in a war for over ten years, without a clear winner in sight (McInnis 2020). The Trojans were known to favor Ares, the god of war, tactics, and brute force, while the Greeks favored Athena, a goddess recognized for her strategic and creative affinity. The Trojans held up behind a strong wall, successfully fending off attacks, pushing the Greeks to try an unconventional, creative approach to shift the balance of the outcome. The story goes that the Greeks built a giant horse filled with soldiers and convinced the Trojans to bring the massive statue through the gates of Troy. This gave the Greeks the opportunity to gain access through the impenetrable walls, and as a result, beat the Trojans to win the war. There has been much debate about the historical evidence for the Trojan War. However, the story offers a reminder that a successful strategy implementation requires a combination of structured and creative components.

In my personal experience, developing creative strategies to influence and drive transformation in an organization is essential. Unlike the Greeks who tricked the Trojans with misinformation, leadership teams need to take an authentic and empathetic route to engage, communicate, and lead people through the transformation process successfully. This approach may include several effective human strategies to gain buy-in and accelerate the journey. Harrison Monarth, executive coach, leadership consultant, and the New York Times best-selling author, describes how principles of human behavior that generate buy-in will generate more respect and honest effort for long-term sustained organizational success. I first came across Monarth's executive development service several years ago, as I was growing my consulting firm and in need of a business coach. In engaging with him, I gained insights not only into understanding what motivates people, and how to inspire and motivate people towards change, but also an understanding of my own leadership style and how best to utilize it for the digital business transformation work that I do.

In his book, Executive Presence (Monarth 2010), Monarth describes the distinctions between compliance and buy-in. In essence, compliance is rooted in traditional, hierarchical systems with defined roles and organizational structures. Compliance is linked to authority and fear, where people may be forced to carry out instructions even if these contradict their personal beliefs. Over the years, I have observed numerous teams work in compliance that is perceived to be buy-in. The outcome is low commitment and short-term success.

In the context of digital business transformation, where initiatives or changes may be complex and with significant impact, buy-in is necessary to achieve long-term sustained success. According to Monarth, buy-in is an alignment of thoughts and beliefs that drive people to work together towards a common goal to achieve a win-win outcome for all parties. There are a few creative strategies that can effectively gain buy-in and influence people to shift their attitudes and behaviors. At the root of these strategies is trust – the foundation element that builds teamwork, as well as effective and ethical buy-in. The role of the leadership team shifts from directive to one that promotes a safe and trusting environment, where employees are empowered through informed and team-driven decisions, open communication and collaboration, as well as showing vulnerability and empathy.

Apart from the essential element of a shared purpose that we have already covered, I have found a few strategies immensely effective in gaining buy-in through the execution of digital business transformation, irrespective of the maturity, readiness, or existing culture in organizations:

• Focusing on adding value    Always add value first. This lesson has stuck with me through the years as a consultant and transformation leader. It is human nature to look for personal benefit in any situation, be it an intellectual or an emotional outcome. Tap into this by focusing on how the transformation relates to the people and what they may gain from it. For example, a new technology solution implementation may result in the ability to quickly complete tedious tasks, or even eliminate this completely through automation, hence taking away a specific pain point for employees. Being able to find the value for employees or stakeholders rests on listening attentively to their motivations, challenges, fears, and optimism.
• Strategic storytelling    Stories have the ability to pull people in, gain their attention, and engage with them on a deep personal level. Use strategic storytelling to share visions of the future, purpose, and meaning of the digital business transformation work that is being executed. Storytelling is also a powerful tool and, when used effectively, can influence thoughts, demonstrate credibility, and create an emotional link to the content and presenter. Leadership teams that use strategic storytelling to drive change are able to gain buy-in and influence employees’ reactions to change.
• Simple message, continuous communication    It is known that communication is a critical element of any change journey. However, crafting a simple message and sharing it in a phased manner that builds knowledge and understanding over time will distinguish successful transformations from all others. Develop simple key messaging to describe the vision, purpose, and direction of the digital business transformation strategy, ensuring anyone across the entire organization will be able to understand and absorb it. The communication should be authentic and human, designed to connect on both intellectual and emotional levels, and take advantage of the range of channels available in the organization.

Chapter 5 describes the digital business transformation journey, starting with a digital maturity assessment and key insights on tackling complex change.