Digital Transformation and Fear

If only digital transformation had been named more completely. If only it had been branded the digital transformation of people. In talking about digital transformation, attention is paid to the technology and tools that are developing around us, yet it is people who are expected to use them correctly.

Technological innovation has an annoying habit of moving faster than most people can handle. It is driven largely by our relentless and innate desire to conquer challenges and improve our situation. But that motivation gets funneled through a very small number of people – the visionaries, the modern-day Thomas Edisons who possess the brilliance and the magnetism to pull together a group of other brilliant people to build that better mousetrap and change the world.

But these innovators represent a tiny minority of the human population. They are the bright sparks, the leading-edge thinkers, and the technical visionaries, feverishly riding their own wave of progress and streaming the results back to other companies and organizations across the world. But for every Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, for every Grace Hopper (developer of one of the world’s first computers and the code to run it) and Hedy Lamarr (famous as a film actress, but also a gifted mathematician and engineer who laid the groundwork for GPS, Bluetooth, and WiFi), there are millions more average people who must face the results of these innovators’ efforts.

Overall, most innovations end up being helpful to the rest of us, and maybe we should be more grateful. But the speed at which they come about, and the fact that such changes were seldom actually asked for, means that their reception and integration into society is sometimes a little rough.

Digital transformation is a real thing, but it is still a blend of fact and marketing lore. It offers some amazing new ways of doing things and, like so many of the transformations that have come before it, many of these innovations will simply soon become part of our normality, making way for other, even more transformative innovations to come.

It all becomes normal eventually, but before it does, we humans have to learn whether we can run the gauntlet of emotion-based doubts and fears, along with the desire to reject the changes outright, because that’s how we’re built.

Fear Is Not Always Terror

The condition we call fear does not have to always mean being in a state of abject terror. Most of the fears described in these forthcoming chapters do not lead to wide-eyed screaming, but some could indeed cause nightmares and heart palpitations. Fear can also present as reluctance, procrastination, sadness, anger, or outright refusal, but it always emanates from the same dark, deep place, far below the surface, and it always has enormous influence over our individual selves and over the potential for the success or failure of a company’s digital transformation undertakings.

What Is Digital Transformation Anyway?

Kinda neat, eh? In other words, digital transformation is about doing things better and seeking better outcomes using digital tools and a mindset to match. But what actually comes to mind when someone mentions the term digital transformation? Perhaps cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, collaborative technology, communication technology, e-commerce, social media, and maybe even blockchain. These are all fascinating and real technologies that are already changing the world.

Sandy became a regular Starbucks customer because of digital technology that transformed her coffee-buying experience, and made her feel better about it, especially during the Covid pandemic. The technique was digital, but it was she who was transformed.

The technologies of digital transformation have already changed the way we do things. That’s the amazing thing about digital transformation. It’s not something out there in the future. We’re already soaking in it. It’s just that the tech stuff that we’ve become used to doesn’t seem to be that transformative anymore, because it has become parts of our new normal. These items are now travelling at the same speed as us.

Taking a selfie and posting it to Instagram is so simple it could easily slip under the radar of digital transformation. But think about it more deeply. A high quality camera mounted inside a portable cellular phone takes a photo or video that is then effortlessly edited, perfected, and then transported to a personal billboard like Instagram by way of reliable and fast WiFi or cellular connectivity, where it can be immediately seen and reacted to by people anywhere on the planet. That’s a long way from snapping a roll of 35mm film in the family camera and then waiting a week for the photo center at Walgreens to process it.

A Roomba is a world famous robot vacuum cleaner and a source of entertainment for many a house cat. But it’s only a robot until you get used to it, and then it becomes an appliance. Its robotic novelty dissolves itself into everyday home life. The same goes for intelligent assistants like Alexa, or the device that automatically helps you parallel park your car. One moment they’re new and weird, the next, they’re just a thing.

The process of becoming just a thing is easy for some technologies and more difficult for others. The Instagram selfie, the Roomba, Alexa, and the parallel parking feature are all consumer products. People purchase them enthusiastically because each promises some form of immediate improvement in their lives. Digital transformation on the consumer front can indeed be rife with positivity. A smartphone with a camera is a tool with a thousand benefits, and is one that few people can go without ever again. A Roomba promises a life free from vacuuming, and Alexa seems to offer convenience by simply talking to it. The fear barrier with these innovations is low because the threat barrier is low.

David Spark, Executive Producer of the CISO Series podcasts, points out that Facebook was the application with the lowest threat barrier of all. In its early days, everyone, it seemed, flocked to it without any fear, just sheer curiosity and passion for human connection. He mentions that every time Facebook made a change to its interface or features, there was initial pushback, but that its users eventually adapted to the changes to the point that they forgot that a change had even been made.³

But when it comes to changing the way work is done in the office, the story can be quite different. Employees might express curiosity around the opportunities that digital transformation might bring, such as being able to work from home some or all of the time, and using new tools and apps to help make their jobs more efficient. Yet they also may fear how these same tools will affect their livelihood, how these tools might reveal their inadequacies, how younger, more tech-savvy rivals might poach their job, or possibly how the technology might eliminate their job entirely, and with it, their home and their very identity. In these circumstances, digital transformation can be seen as something that stands between a person and their future and that, quite naturally, will be seen as a threat.

People in management positions may also anguish over whether these new transformative technologies will actually help their department thrive in the next few years, and they might shrink back a little from them in fear. For a start, there’s the fear of losing control over employees, and a recognition that they have never been able to entirely trust them. There is also the fear of losing a comfortable status quo in terms of an office where it is easy to walk the halls and be visible as a manager. These concerns can pair easily with the fear of what problems these technologies might bring, and how this might affect their own career prospects as a manager.

Senior leaders might be shown, by consultants and experts, a bright future for their company – one that includes engaged employees and smart tools that will help move their company into a digitally connected and quickly evolving global ecosystem. But they, too, may fear the implications of technologies they do not fully understand, including choosing which path to follow, which tools to embrace, and how to manage the ever-expanding threat of cybercrime. A company’s board of directors expects solid leadership from their senior executives, meaning there will be despair and fear in the corner office when the decision between holding the course and pivoting in the name of digital transformation rises from the floor like a serpent.

Perhaps that’s why the people who coined the term digital transformation chose the word transformation and not change. It sounds less severe, and more magical – not so much a change as a smooth makeover. Maybe they knew just how difficult the change was going to be.

Digital Transformation and Video Chat Fatigue

Digital transformation was already well underway before the pandemic descended upon the world. Companies were already looking to move to the cloud, for example, to benefit from its many promises of scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency. They were starting to discover the proactive efficacy of the as-a-service model, in which suppliers that used to simply sell products found there was more to be made by providing subscription-based services to support those very products. Some would even give the products away in order to capitalize on the ongoing service contracts, in much the same way printer companies underprice printers and make the money back on toner.

Strides were also being made in distance collaboration, and ecommerce. Early digital transformation was starting to usher in virtual and augmented reality to meetings, training sessions, and direct applications in hospitals and factories. Driving apps like Waze were already using crowd-sourcing to collect real-time input from other drivers to intelligently calculate the best route for any driver to use at that very moment, while avoiding roadkill and speed traps.

So, digital transformation was certainly well on its way when, in early 2020, the whole world experienced the jarring horror called Covid-19, and we were all sent home to learn how to work remotely. At least the lucky ones were. Those who lost their livelihoods or whose jobs demanded that they go back onsite to perform them had much bigger problems. Meanwhile, millions of knowledge workers who never had any intention of working from home suddenly found out they had to master it quickly.

Much like the phishing test example mentioned in Chapter 1, lockdown was another interesting test case for digital transformation. Almost overnight, companies and organizations of all sizes had to pivot, adopting and expanding their use of video chat technology and turning it into a lifeline for the business. As a result, the providers of video chat apps rode an enormous wave. Zoom, for example, saw sales soar 326 percent to $2.6 billion in 2020. Profits jumped from $21.7 million in 2019 to $671.5 million a year later.⁴ Other manufacturers of collaboration technology saw similar jumps in demand and revenue. Daily participants in Zoom calls surged from 10 million a day at the end of 2019 to 300 million in April 2020.

Because video chat technology was available, we used it. But just because we used it more doesn’t mean we used it correctly, and that’s what makes it a good test case. For example, many meeting attendees preferred to turn their cameras off. Some said this was to conserve bandwidth, since not everyone has access to prime Internet connectivity. But for many more, the reason was because they just didn’t want to appear on screen. They didn’t like it. Some even feared it, and many probably didn’t fully know why.

With so many people choosing to mute their camera, the adoption of the video-less video chat essentially turned Zoom, the poster child of lockdown-based digital transformation, back into a simple conference call. In fact, for many of these meetings, a traditional telephone-based conference call might have been easier and better. The audio quality would certainly have been better, and the supporting images and documents could have been sent around in advance by email for everyone to look at on their own computer screens. As the saying goes, “maybe the entire thing could have been an email.”

To be fair, this reluctance to use video chat technology was not universal. There were many instances where more experienced presenters took full advantage of what this new medium offered: collaborative whiteboards, animations and multimedia, breakout rooms, polls, and chat. This is a technology that is in truth far superior to the telephone conference call and, therefore, truly is a poster child for positive digital transformation. But its learning curve was too steep for a change that happened so fast.

For those who did use the cameras in video chat, many meeting attendees spent most of the meeting looking downward at their own laptop screens, which was where the other participants’ faces appeared, rather than into the cameras that were supposed to act as the tool of direct eye contact. It’s important to not dismiss this simple act too quickly. When video chat participants look down at the people they see on their laptop screens rather than looking into their camera to simulate direct eye contact, it becomes a perfect metaphor for the challenges of digital transformation.

We are a species that instinctively looks to the past – to the known – for comfort, rather than looking to the future, loaded up, as it is, with myriad unknowns. We tend to go with what we know rather than what can be. The people we see on the laptop screen represent a known. They represent faces that we would see in a conversation, and we are naturally drawn to looking at them. The habit of making pretend eye contact by looking into an unblinking camera, especially when it is in a different location than the faces of the people themselves, is a new and unfamiliar technique. It’s an act of performance that must be consciously practiced despite instinct telling us to go with what feels right.

Video chat calls were simultaneously overused and underused during this period. They were overused in terms of the fact there were way too many of them. It seemed that every meeting held during the work-from-home pandemic period had to be conducted by video, even when they really didn’t need to be.

And they were underused in two other significant ways.

The first underuse method delves further into the symptom of meeting attendees turning their video cameras off, and is symptomatic of what happens when change happens too fast. Humans can only deal with new things in the context of what they know, and at a pace that they are willing to handle. Not only were they now forced to contemplate the idea of seeing themselves on screen while others were also seeing them, they also realized that they were bringing their work life into their homes in a whole new and uncomfortable way.

Letting work colleagues appear in your living room where they can look around at your décor and see into your private home is not something that most employees had ever signed up for. It crossed that sacred line between work life and home life. In earlier years, an occasional phone call from the office on a day you were home sick was OK. They couldn’t see you, so the appropriate work-home barrier was maintained. But strangers in the house is something to be feared.

And then there’s the notion of video call fatigue.

In a peer-reviewed academic paper published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behavior in February 2021, Professor Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), identified four causes of video call fatigue.⁵ In brief, they are:

(1) Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact – it is highly intense. The act of staring at people’s faces on the screen, or of staring into the camera eye involves much more and longer-held “eye contact” than we are used to in face-to-face conversations.

(2) Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing. Bailenson compares this to someone constantly holding up a mirror so that you have to keep seeing yourself. This, he says, is unnatural and distracting.

(3) Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility. People feel they must stay rooted to the spot and are not able to move around as we would in a live conversation.

(4) The cognitive load is much higher in video chats. The lack of gestures and nonverbal cues make it harder to send and receive signals. We must work harder to understand the meaning of what is being said.

There is also the notion of focus and engagement. Conversations over the phone allow for a particular type of engagement that is encouraged precisely because you do not have to be looking at someone. You can look at documents or at your computer screen, out into the middle distance, or even out the window, but there is something in the passive visual distractions of a phone call that allows greater focus and engagement.

Back in the days when all phones were landlines, a great many conversations involved seemingly absent-minded actions like twirling the phone cord, doodling, or playing with a pile of magnetized paper clips. These, too, are actions whose significance should not be overlooked. Actions like these allow humans, who are by nature, active and kinesthetic, to redirect energy that is otherwise being held hostage by the phone conversation, and even more so by a video meeting. This is currently a gaping hole in digital transformation for employees and school-age children alike. Fidgeting is part of learning. Movement is part of life.

This is not to say that video chat technology is useless – quite the opposite – it will be the future of interpersonal communication. But it’s not quite there yet, at least in the hearts, minds, and bodies of its users.

Digital Transformation and Zoom Gloom

The second significant underuse pattern of video chat meetings is that they were mostly used for formalized activities, which means meetings. Meetings are an inevitable part of most peoples’ jobs, but they are not the sum total of the job. In fact, much of the workday is spent “not in meetings.” It is spent doing self-directed work, managing emails, and physically moving around. This vital non-meeting component of office life, the act of just being in the office amid the presence of other humans, is a reflection of life itself. It is about existing with general purpose, whereas meetings are specially designed for interacting with a specific purpose.

Working in a common space gives comfort. It’s very human to want to be part of a tribe, and workplace colleagues are just that. Even when office life is distracting or annoying, and even when you don’t like all of your colleagues, it is still a tribe – a place to coexist with others. This is an indispensable element of work life, but during the forced work-from-home period, the whole casual “non-meeting” part was forgotten about.

Consequently, because video chat technology was used just for meetings, which are formalized events, it tended to magnify the sense of isolation felt by almost everyone, but especially by those who are unused to working from home. Once a video chat meeting comes to an end, and everyone waves goodbye and awkwardly searches their screen for the “leave meeting” button, and once the app closes, each home-bound employee becomes alone once again.

This sensation of amplified solitude was even given a name in honor of the industry leader of the time. It was called Zoom Gloom.

In our rush to reproduce the dynamics of the in-person meeting on video, no attention was given to reproducing the non-meeting time, that candid space where a person could see other people walking past, have casual conversations in the kitchenette, or simply wave and say “hi” to colleagues. Maybe no one realized how important this was because we had spent so much time hating it. Most employees did not realize just how much they would miss that atmosphere, and frankly did not have the time to even prepare for it. They were at the office one day, and locked down the next.

There are in fact many apps and virtual online environments that reproduce the casual yet immersive nature of people existing in a shared workplace. They were already in existence before the pandemic, and were on the leading edge, bringing virtual or augmented reality into the “real” reality of day-to-day work. But they were not embraced in any widespread fashion before the lockdowns, and especially not during, even though they would have been perfect. For most people, the idea of working in a virtual space, appearing as a cartoonish avatar in a cartoon representation of an office was seen as too silly or just too alien to be taken seriously. It was too much like video gaming and not enough like work. It was once again, too much of a change, too quick – one digital transformation step too far.

My favorite virtual spaces combine the preferred reality of people’s real faces and voices, delivered by their own computer’s camera and microphone, within a virtualized floor space, either an office layout, including designated areas like breakout rooms, cubicles, and a kitchenette, or something more vague, but where all the avatars of all the colleagues “at work” today can be seen milling around in some way, even when they are not interacting with each other. They are together in a finite space.⁶

The idea here is that while you work from your home office space, you can place your avatar at a cubicle, or in any of the rooms they offer. The key value is that others in your team can also place themselves in the space. If you see someone you want to talk to, you simply guide your avatar across to the zone they occupy, at which point the mic becomes live and the conversation can start.

Of course, these apps also offer other collaboration tools like whiteboards, messaging, and document sharing, but overall, they add a sense of presence that is real enough to feel comfortable without being surreal enough to feel like you are in a video game.

These technologies are not Zoom meetings – they simply are places to “be’ and to be visible to your team between meetings, while your team remains visible to you.

Some of the resistance that I have heard regarding these platforms comes from the notion that it is difficult to have a conversation with an avatar. It feels strange to people who have grown up interacting with other humans face-to-face. Yet everyone seems perfectly comfortable talking to a disembodied voice on the phone, and relating to others by way of bubbles of text on a chat app.

The difference is that we are attuned to focusing in on voices during a phone conversation and by and large have learned to interpret emotion through voice tonality in the absence of visual cues. It’s not perfect, but our brains are really good at detecting emotion and meaning from the slightest change in tone or even a delayed response in the communication flow. Texting on a chat app is convenient, but comes with a raft of challenges that are covered in more depth in Chapter 10.

But faces? Faces hold a special place in the mind. Think about how you can scan a wall of hundreds or thousands of faces in a crowded arena, and immediately pick out a friend, or simply someone who seems to be looking directly at you. Even with peripheral vision, most of us can detect when someone seems to be looking at us.

Our minds, and the physical receptors in the brain dedicated to facial comprehension are highly attuned to the messages broadcast by the human face – the slightest arch of an eyebrow, a subtle tensing of the lower eyelid, a momentary flaring of the nostrils. These fall under the umbrella term non-verbal communication, but they are innately strong and can be made even stronger through practice. This is one reason why VR avatars – computer generated representations of a person are just not there yet.

Compare the characters from the movie Polar Express to those that now exist in every recent Disney Pixar movie. The Polar Express kids were highly realistic for the time, but something about their eyes made them seem lifeless. Modern animated movies, however, have made huge leaps in animating eyes and facial tics in ways that seem much more human, even when the characters themselves are not.

Ultimately, it’s all about what each person accepts as a valid representation of the person or people they are talking to. When it comes to the face and to the eyes, there are only two acceptable situations – fully realistic, (Pixar-style or real on-camera video) or none at all (telephone style).

Overall, I believe that a great many people will grow comfortable in the virtual office, logging on and sitting their avatar down at their desk and looking around to see who else is in today. If a spontaneous meeting needs to be held, it will be just as easy to tap on the virtual shoulders of colleagues and march on down to the virtual meeting space.

Video chat – better phrased as video collaboration – has a great future. It still remains a lasting ambassador of digital transformation, since it is slowly nudging people toward an entirely new realm of work, where physical commuting is no longer a barrier, and where physical proximity is delivered through informal digital presence. But this medium needs time to grow into its current puppy ears and paws.

To transform means to change, but it also means to evolve. User sophistication comes through practice and shared experiences. One day we will look back on the stilted, awkward video chats of the early 2020s the same way we currently look at movies from the 1920s, or fashions from the 1980s, or music videos from the early 1990s, and see something in its nascent form, brimming with potential, but not having found itself yet.

The Personalization of Fear

As people turn to face a future filled with digital transformation, that same future must also turn to face us, and it might be surprised as to what we have become. We are not so much “we” anymore. Increasingly, employees and consumers are perceiving themselves more as individuals. We are no longer part of a customer base or an employee base. Our self-awareness has become highly individualized, and this has much to do with the impact of personalized social media.

Based on the type of algorithm-based services we receive from Amazon, and social media like Facebook, Tik Tok, and Instagram, as well as every website that deposits cookies as we browse, we have come to expect personalized service everywhere and we expect it immediately. We are all sole members of our own audience-of-one.

This is now transforming all aspects of work life, everything, including the way companies must attract, hire, and retain employees, how they manage and lead, and how productivity and culture are encouraged and maintained. It is also transforming public-facing policies in the marketplace. The Internet is now the primary interaction conduit between each individual consumer and the companies they buy from.

So when did this all start? I’m going to suggest it started in 1975, the same year that Jaws was released. That was the year the VCR – the videocassette recorder – started to sell in the electronics stores and department stores of the world. It started to personalize the activity of television watching. Prior to this, families sat around their single television set and watched what the networks and later, cable TV channels, decided they should watch. Some households might have had two or more TVs in operation, but they were still only showing what the TV networks chose to show.

VCRs started us down the path of individualization, into a land where we were able to record and watch shows when we wanted, and later, go out and rent whatever movies we wanted, from the local video store. We had broken free of the bonds of network television, and had entered an age where entertainment had become a matter of personal choice.

Netflix rode this wave extremely successfully, delivering videodiscs by mail before hitting high gear as a personalized online streaming service, and later as a producer of bingeworthy entertainment. YouTube did the same with other, mostly homemade types of videos, and later, Instagram and TikTok allowed any person to become stars in their own media world. Amazon of course became the giant of personalized shopping, and Google became our personal index of everything.

The smartphone, the world’s most versatile appliance, was built expressly for an audience-of-one culture. For billions of people, it is now the main source of contextual awareness, the place for personalized entertainment, the home of custom-designed socialization, and the launching point for self-idolatry. There are currently more active smartphone accounts than there are people on planet Earth.

This individualization of the experience of being alive has also emboldened people with a newfound ability to express their anger and magnify their biases. Fear grows in the darkness of our own solitude, and connecting with others who share the same biases creates strength and a reassurance that our fears are well-founded, mutual, and justifiable.

As the science-driven innovations of our digital age push us forward, the emotional fears of change and of the unknown try to pull us back. For example, science develops and distributes a coronavirus vaccine in record time, yet huge numbers of people all over the world resist it, citing fears and conspiracy theories that they themselves cannot prove.

The same resistance did not happen to this degree for polio shots, water fluoridization, tattoos, or car seat belts. Twice a year, almost all the people of the world change their clocks by an hour without rioting in the streets. They have been voluntarily giving up more personal data than they know to Facebook as the price of connecting with others, and many thousands of consumers also happily supply DNA samples to genealogy and ancestry tracing companies. And credit cards and password breaches? They simply shrug.

Humans are strange that way. The behaviors of individualized resistance, passionate followership, and self-absorbed belief are not new to human history. Zealots have been following charismatic visionaries for all of our history, and as already mentioned, superstitious and religious faith have always been there to deliver much needed reassurance. But what happens when this same self-focused mentality chooses to reject the benefits of digital transformation?

If people decide they do not trust biometric security devices such as retinal scanners out of fear that they are somehow implanting tracking technology or reading DNA, then this will thwart a vital component of the practice of multifactor authentication, which is a key layer of protection in the war against breaches and ransomware. What if people refuse to continue updating their Windows software, or refuse to stop using legacy apps that are still functional but are no longer being patched? What would that do to a company’s vulnerability and attack surface? What if just one employee decided to record a video chat conversation without informing the other participants, and parts of that recording found itself stored in a cloud located in a GDPR-bound nation? What if they started using a USB stick that they received in the mail?⁷

The goal of digital transformation is marketed as a transformation of a company’s technological workings, but it seems the true transformation must occur within each and every individual with whom the technology comes into contact.