Designing Digital: Beyond the Crisis
Over the past twelve weeks, business leaders pivoted their businesses, enabled remote work, and hosted virtual happy hours. Web conferencing became the norm overnight. As states re-open, business leaders face ongoing uncertainty about the back-half of the year. This is not the time to slow down or pause your digital acceleration efforts. This is the time to rethink and redesign.
Business leaders who make time to rethink their business models and focus on evolving their digital products are more likely to emerge as market leaders. PWC's 2020 Digital IQ study revealed that only 5% of companies are doing all it takes to get payback from digital. A McKinsey study reported that over 70% of Digital Transformations fail. What can you do beyond the crisis to successfully evolve your business digitally and be rewarded for it?
- Rethink your model, using Design Thinking. Notice that we are not saying, "rethink your technology." Rather, we encourage you to go back and question your entire business model. Can you answer the question, "How might our business model be different and digital in the future?" Companies who utilize Design Thinking to rethink the complexities of their business problems end up with clearer visions. Clearer visions increase your chance of being in the 25-30% of transformations that succeed. If you do not have experience with Design Thinking, find someone to help you who does. At Reach Partners, for example, we utilize client roadmapping and storytelling as a powerful way to inform, inspire, and align your team to both the vision and the necessary steps to achieve successful results
- Prioritize what matters. There are many projects that you could do, but that does not mean that you should do them all. Focus on the discrete efforts that are going to move the needle and prioritize the order of your focus. Saying yes to accelerating your digital business means saying no to a lot of other perfectly good opportunities. Companies that run after everything at the same time, fail. To be successful at digital, you need to prioritize.
- Accelerate automation. What areas of your customer, employee, or supplier relationships are manual? Why are they manual? How might you improve speed to market, customer satisfaction, time, money, sales? Rethink your business processes, and digitalize the effort and automate away the manual tasks.
- Digitize safety. How might you leverage software apps and tools to digitize and communicate your safety and compliance efforts to your stakeholders, your employees, and customers?
- Iterate, test and learn. Your business should be agile, and COVID-19 forced many companies to switch to agile mode almost overnight. You may be better at agile than you ever thought possible by now. Run, but do so in sprints. Have very clear goals for each sprint. Test out your digital ideas for quantifiable feedback. Analyze the results you get and be willing to pivot based on what you learn--for each one. Celebrate your wins, and be willing to pivot as you push on, each step of the way.
Those who commit to designing their digital strategies beyond the crisis will be more likely to rebound after the pandemic. Creating your digital roadmap is no easy task, yet it is as crucial in this environment as mapping the customer journey. You would not dream of ignoring the customer experience in your planning, so why would you consider postponing or minimizing the digital design which will empower every aspect of your business moving forward?
Re-think, prioritize, accelerate, digitize, iterate, test and learn. And then iterate, test and learn again and again. This business climate is not for the weak of spirit. Everyone must put their egos aside and get to work. It’s now or never for your teams to get onboard--it’s digital time.
Click HERE for more details on how to design your digitize strategy--now and beyond the crisis .
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