Growing up in LA in the 1990s, I knew the only way to navigate LA’s unwieldy freeway system was to have the Thomas guide. It was a thick spiral-bound book that detailed street maps by using grids. To plan a trip from Westwood to Long Beach, you’d need to study this guide for at least 15-30 minutes to map out your route and then have it handy as you drove in case you got lost.
While today we would cackle at anyone trying to use the Thomas guide instead of a GPS phone, there are many other elements of modern life and business where leaders balk at the potential for technology to make a real difference. In fact, according to a study of about 2,000 companies that was published in Sloan Management Review in 2021, only 7% were led by digitally competent teams who had a firm understanding of how emerging tech will shape their company’s success.
I would argue that leaders that are unable to understand and apply digital solutions ultimately risk just as much irrelevance as the Thomas Guide.
When it comes to new technology, there is a continuum of leader profiles from Digital Technologists to Digital Naysayers. At the middle of that spectrum is a set of leaders that I like to call Digital Language Learners (DLLs).
DLLs are not technologists themselves, but rather are leaders who understand the power of modern technology and proactively seek out solutions that leverage it to create opportunities that would not have been available in an analog world.
The four obstacles that keep people stuck as Digital Naysayers are:
“Digital” is a vague and overused concept.
The application of modern technology and digital solutions is very industry specific, so there is no one size fits all playbook.1 That said, many naysayers fall victim to the “not invented here” mindset and dismiss digital opportunities altogether.
The technology that creates the most opportunity isn’t always the sexy stuff (e.g., VR, wearables, blockchain)
Digital innovation requires placing bets…some of which won’t work out. For risk averse leaders, this type of “failure” is too much to stomach.
So if you want to get out of the Digital Naysayer camp and move along the Digital Acumen spectrum, what does it take to move past the buzzwords and gain sufficient understanding of how to actually apply new technologies?
Here are three ideas that can serve as a starting point:
Stop faking it until you make it. It’s cute to use a bunch of buzz words and for the first 60-90 seconds, you’ll probably sound smart. It’s also relatively easy to regurgitate sound bytes (e.g., the digital revolution will transform our world in unfathomable ways so we must get ahead of it.) Instead, take the time to really understand what key terms mean. When I was an ESL teacher, I used to ask my students to explain abstract concepts in their own words rather than memorizing definitions or translations. This helped to differentiate between who was “memorizing” and who actually understood concepts. The same applies to Digital Language Learning. One place to start is by getting a foundational understanding of artificial intelligence2 (you’d be in rare air as only 16% of adults in the U.S. got a passing grade on a survey done by the Allen Institute).3
Unleash your curiosity and immerse yourself. Moving along the Digital Acumen Continuum requires a learning mindset. It’s not enough to just read about topics, you actually need to proactively engage in a hands-on way. As part of a research project I am working on, a team of us got exposure to topic models, a statistical natural language processing methodology for distilling abstract topics from unstructured data like interview transcripts. This helped me to understand the opportunities and limits of this particular tool. Think about similar ways to practically expose yourself to new digital technologies. Even better if you can create a team experience that gets you this exposure.
Hire and motivate technologists that know how to communicate to DLLs. As great as it is to have an enthusiastic set of leaders who are DLLs, there is no replacement for having technologists on the team who can help DLLs connect the dots between the technology solutions and the customer or stakeholder need. That said, innovative technologists with the profiles required to scale digital technologies often have a maverick streak in them. Leaders that want to push the envelope on digital solutions, therefore, need to be willing to accept there will be some friction here, because they may not fully fit the mold of your organizational culture. To that end, it is absolutely critical that you invest heavily in their onboarding and integration to help them avoid missteps and smooth over those missteps when they happen so that issues do not fester.
A couple questions I reflected on this week:
What are topics in “Digital” that I only have a cursory understanding of and how can I deepen my understanding?
What is one experiment I can run in the next year to actually try out a new digital technology that will make me and my teams more effective?
This piece by Bain is an excellent primer on the most relevant digital technologies by industry. I’m still looking for a similar piece that covers government and social sector. Here’s another great Bain piece on orchestrating digital transformation. I’ll plan to explore this one a bit more in a subsequent piece.
Consider these quotes by CEOs from across industries to see the realized impact of artificial intelligence.