Unit 7, Listening 2, Change Is in the Making
Change Is in the
Making
Kevan Gilbert:
Welcome to Change is in the Making,
Domain7’s podcast where we explore all things digital through the lens of
purposeful change. I’m Kevan Gilbert.
Veronica Collins:
And I’m Veronica Collins, and together, we’ll be discussing themes of
connection making and culture shaping. We’ll be delving into[1]
how to create meaningful change from
a business standpoint and a human
perspective.
Gilbert: Today, we’re looking at the exploding
reality of quote, unquote “digital transformation.” . . .
Collins: But I saw somebody call it a digital
revolution the other day instead of digital transformation, and that really
seems to ring true, that we’re living through, in the same way that the
Industrial Revolution[2]
completely reorganized people’s lives. We’re living through a digital
transformation in that way—
Gilbert: Wow.
Collins: And I think it’s happened . . . It
feels like it’s happened so gradually that we don’t even see it, and yet I love
how you like to say, you know, “Ten years ago . . . “ I can’t do the Kevan, you
do the Kevan. Ten years ago, what didn’t exist, Kevan? Or what was brand new?
Gilbert: This was . . . this was easier to say
when it was say 2015 or 2016, but I’ll try it anyway.
Collins: Yeah, getting old.
Gilbert: I know, we’re aging out of our ability
to access the “when I was your age”
statements, but about ten years ago, we didn’t have smartphones kicking around,
YouTube hadn’t been invented yet, Facebook might’ve been emerging as a network,
there might’ve been Twitter, but it was just SMS-based[3].
Laptops were still super expensive. You were connecting with people in real
time[4],
yes, but it was through MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. You were probably
using your free Hotmail account unless you were an early adopter of Gmail. And
the state of technology just a decade ago was so bound to the desktop, and
mostly not real time. It was definitely not mobile, it had very little in the
way of video and audio, it had very little in the way of even cameras to
enable, you know, easy access to video conversation. . . . And, most of our
organizations that we interact with, from our governments, to our hospitals, to
our educational institutions, to our small and medium business across Canada,
are operating with technical environments that are at least ten years old. And
it simply means that by nature of how times have changed, we are not using 90%
of the capabilities that technology has given us for running most of the
organizations on this planet.
Collins: Which is astonishing because I feel
like, back to me, I feel like in my day-to-day life, I just expect everybody to
be ubiquitously[5] digital. You know, I’m an
Amazon Prime member, I watch Netflix, I stream my music, I do online banking, I
use Google for the hours of every neighborhood institution I visit, I reload my
transit card online. And so I just assume that this is the new reality, and
that we’re all here. . . . Um, and I get frustrated
at—even though this is relatively
new, right?—that I could order something on Amazon, it could be here this
evening. I get frustrated that Amazon has not figured out for me how to get
that to my door, and get my door unlocked with, you know, new technology. So,
like there’s, the expectations that
I have that have gone up so high, and yet I was an early Facebook adopter in
university, and I’m not that old. Like, I remember Facebook being new, and now
Facebook, YouTube, these mega[6] platforms have more than a billion
users. . . .
It’s sort of the age-old, uh, a
human challenge of change, right? Like, when you unpack[7]
the word transformation, it’s a very
positive spin on the very simple reality of a change story. I just think about
human psychology around change, and while you’re managing risk and
responsibility, it brings so much emotion to bear, actually.
Gilbert: Yeah . . .
Collins: Trying to make smart decisions in a
changing environment. I mean, history books are full of this, right? Like, you
look back at different eras in human history where there were massive changes,
and you can just almost hear the existential angst[8]
coming off the page as people tried to grapple with[9]
it, tried to, were left behind or, or tried to catch up. And this idea of like,
does it have to—I think disruption
gets a bad rap too, or maybe it puts a bad flavor into this story where it’s
like this idea of something that’s, like, aggressive, and disturbing and not
very human—if anything, it’s gonna, it sounds like it’s gonna cause human pain,
right? Now quite often it also causes human flourishing, but there is that discomfort, that emotional
discomfort around the reality of disruption, and what that means for people who
are leading other people really—like businesses are people leading people.
Gilbert: Wow . . .
Collins: But how do you get there, right? Like,
even as we’re discussing it, it can feel a little bit like a, “Oh my goodness,
this is, this is a lot to tackle[10],”
and yet, we were talking earlier today about how transformation can start with
some very simple optimizations. . .
. I mean, I think of a really simple story of a very small business, which is
my dad’s business. He’s a painter, he has a small paint, house painting
business, and he used to always do Yellow Pages[11].
You know, growing up, I remember helping my dad design the small ad for the
Yellow Pages with the paint roller and that stopped working for him a few years
ago, more than a few years ago now, and thankfully he had people come alongside
him who were like, “Try to get on Google. Try to share some painting tips with
quick videos.”
Gilbert: Nice.
Collins: “Get your location up there. Get your
search results up there.” And my dad, who was not a digital native[12]
by any stretch of the imagination, just has a very, like, willing-to-learn sort
of personality, adopted these things that people were telling him to try out,
much younger people were telling him to try out. And, you know, he’s close to
the top of the search results for his region, and that’s really helped him in
terms of just bringing, you know, bringing the business in and keeping his
business running and then, this affects people’s lives, right?
Gilbert: Yeah.
Collins: Instead of, instead of it being sort
of a story of his business going as he got older, it actually flourished and
grew just from him embracing a few simple things. So I know that’s an extremely
simple story, but I was thinking of the story that you have about the US
digital service. . . .
Gilbert: Yeah, that’s really interesting about
your dad. I mean, what I see in that is somebody who was embracing a learning
attitude. And, you know, when you ask, you know, “How does one even get started?”
you know, you can at least start by wanting to. Wanting to not just achieve the
digital transformation, but wanting to bring about some of those values you’re
describing, the collective intelligence of the network. It seems that so often,
I don’t really hear that from leadership praising that as a priority. I just
think, imagine what could change if you were simply sending the signal of an
intention to be that kind of organization, to be a learner like your dad’s
describing, like you were describing your dad.
With the US digital service,
this, the story of the US digital service is pretty commonly known by now, but
I had an interesting window of insight into how it was being formed. A couple
years ago, I was speaking at a conference with Jared Spool, who is a world-renowned
UX expert and whose partner, Dana Chisnell, was helping actually do the hiring
and recruiting for that department.
So when I was talking with Jared
about what he was seeing as some of the early wins in the US digital service,
what I was really surprised to hear is that he brought it back to forms,
digitizing paper forms into things people could interact with online. I asked
him, like, what was interesting or exciting about that for him; that seems like
an oversimplification, if anything. And he had specified that what they were
doing was identifying high-profile, high-use departments that had key paper
processes they needed to streamline, and one of his stories of success was with
the US Department of Veteran
Affairs, where they had taken a paper-based process that previously had
something like 30 days’ average completion time to get the paper, file the
paperwork, receive back the things that you needed regarding funding or
assistance, and they, they compressed that into a process of something like
four minutes long, completable entirely online. And he told the story about a
particular veteran he was able to interview whose life was literally saved
because of the access and speed they were able to access the funding and
services they needed through this application.
Collins: . . . when push comes to shove[13],
when you really need essential services, there’s so much room for human
creativity and ingenuity to, to come
to bear at those points in terms of applying technology and really make life
better.
Gilbert: Yes.
Collins: Not just here, but in places in the
world where life is a lot more stressful than it is for us here. And, that’s,
that’s exciting to me, thinking about that, thinking about building empathetic[14],
creative communities that come up with creative solutions, and help us live in
better ways, and, and have greater quality of care for each other.
Gilbert: Absolutely, I love how you’ve framed
that. You know, when I think of what you’re describing, it’s, it’s giving a
little bit of like, honor and credit to the worthy work of digital transformation.
[1] delve into: phrasal verb to try to find out more information
[2] Industrial Revolution: noun the period in the 18th to 19th
century when machines began to be
used to do work
[3] SMS-based: adjective based on “short message service”
[4] real time: noun a short time between a computer system receiving information
and dealing with it
[5] ubiquitously: adverb seeming to be everywhere
[6] mega: adverb extremely
[7] unpack: verb to separate into parts
[8] existential angst: noun negative feelings that arise from human freedom and
responsibility
[9] grapple with: verb to struggle with
[10] tackle: verb to start to deal with
[11] Yellow Pages: noun the yellow book that lists telephone numbers of businesses
[12] digital native: noun someone who has grown up with digital technology
[13] when push comes to shove: idiom when there is a lot of pressure
[14] empathetic: adjective able to understand another’s feelings and experiences
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