By Katri Harra, Co-Founder, Grip Strategy
When a company sets out for major renewal, the conversation usually turns to strategy work, and that’s often my own natural starting point too. Of course we need to analyze, understand and plan for the future, make clear choices and work towards our shared vision.
But what if the renewal of a company actually starts even earlier, before the company or the leaders have done anything at a strategic level at all?
Over the past few decades, technology has become an increasingly important driver of change.
- It changes organizations constantly and continuously, and all of us who are part of them too.
- It opens new doors to new products and closes old ones.
- It changes value chains and erases non-value-adding parts of them.
- It pushes investment into new areas.
New thinking and new capabilities emerge inside organizations, and the best companies know how to put them to use quickly. Signals for change come from both inside and outside the organization.
When leadership understands and is genuinely interested in these possibilities, and wants to build strategy around them, they’re already well ahead. Strategy work then builds on top of the organization and its capabilities, and is already a few steps ahead of the competition. At the same time, this keeps the strategy ambitious enough, and it renews the organization without delay, rather than leaving potential unused.
Four waves of technology
I’ve worked with change and what is today called digital transformation firsthand almost from its earliest days, and then again several times over as each new wave of technology has rolled through the business world. The changes have since transformed almost all industries, from media to travel.
My first personal experience of major disruption and change was the first wave of digitalization in the late 1990s. At first, many saw the internet simply as a shift in communication and marketing: a new channel to talk through and engage with customers. It didn’t take long to realize that all communication and transactions at the very core of a company were changing too. What used to be invisible became visible, and value chains were reshaped, not just reformed.
In the beginning, resistance to change was strongest exactly where it landed first: in marketing. The new digital channel required entirely new skills and ways of researching and building. Concept design, UX design and usability research were first born. Products and customers moved into the core of the company in a completely new way. Organizations changed, some faster, some slower. In the company I worked for during that wonderful decade of the 2000s, design, technology and business came together. Earning logic was much debated. In hindsight, we call these years the first wave of digital.
The next wave was social media. With MySpace and Facebook, we all became content creators and got another life, or several, on the internet. Companies had to work out how, and who, would use these channels. Everything became more transparent. As communication technology developed, images and even videos took over the internet. Organizations debated how to capture this potential and whose job it was. Many handed the responsibility to communications; others put the whole staff to work communicating and keeping the pulse on social media. Company culture became a decisive factor. Everyone learned that culture eats strategy for breakfast.
The third wave came from deep within the technology stack: the company’s own data. We learned to collect and enrich data with an efficiency that hadn’t existed before. Data scientist became the sexiest job title around, and companies searched for them across the whole of Europe. In reality, there were only a few dozen true masters of the craft on our continent. Organizations learned data-driven leadership and rebuilt processes and units around data. Analytical rigor took center stage in management.
At the same time, people started talking about agility, about how quickly the conclusions drawn from analysis could be turned into practice. Experimentation cultures and agile organizations began to rise. Companies set up DevOps teams that developed digital services, especially customer-facing ones but internal processes too, quickly and continuously.
Once the software teams had gone agile, it was the rest of the organization’s turn. Leadership, marketing and especially commercial functions did the same, and not always easily. Lessons were borrowed all the way from Silicon Valley; the new startups knew how to build flat hierarchies, fast teams and cultures to match. The goal was to make decisions close to the customer or the service, not far away in the leadership team. The rhythm shifted from an annual calendar to weekly cycles, and first-mover companies gradually adopted this new way of thinking, one step at a time. Planning days brought together the whole leadership team and every developer. GDPR also brought a completely new level of attention to data confidentiality. The law demanded a lot, and in doing so, it prepared companies for the age of AI. Because if your data isn’t in order, it’s hard to make much use of it, as many soon discovered.
The fourth wave began almost immediately after. AI was being piloted, and it was used to speed up and automate individual tasks and processes, often delivering impressive results quickly. I was working at a large listed company at the time, and I learned that there’s little point doing strategy work before you have some sense of what the technology can actually do, not in general, but specifically in your own organization.
So we rolled up our sleeves and started experimenting, together with users. Some of the solutions that emerged even made it into production. The technology organization grew with new skills: AI. It was hard to decide how best to organize this new dimension, as part of technology or business.
Does it really matter in which order the strategy chain plays out, as long as the company itself is able to recognize its own strengths and weaknesses, invest in and speed up what’s new, and act as a team working toward a shared goal?
#renewal #strategy #technology #organization
