Ripples of change: Managing complexity
in the new digital era

Digital Workplace Impact – Episode 138: Ripples of change: Managing complexity in the new digital era

[00:00:00.480] – Paul Miller

Digital workplaces are, I think, pretty fragmented, very disrupted by everything that’s been going on in recent years, and starting to get a sense of where you’re at with that. What’s working, what’s not working, where you need to focus is a really important calibrator for future action. So you’re working, as we always say, on data metrics in a world of opinion.

[00:00:32.950] – Nancy

Imagine a stone dropped into still water, creating ripple effects that expand far and wide. This was the perfect metaphor for this edition of Digital Workplace Impact podcast featuring DWG’s founder and Chief Creative Officer, Paul Miller. With the backdrop of the latest gathering of the DWG Trailblazers, and and our member host, EY, who were the 2023 Digital Workplace Team of the Year award winners, our members explored such focus areas as the narrative of complexity, AI as a double-edged sword, the unsettling quest for stability, collective management through complexity, the pyramid perspective, and retaining and building top talent. As always, Paul helped us make sense of these challenges and offered specific advice for navigating these ripples of change. Join me now in conversation with Paul Miller. This is Nancy Goebel, your host and DWG’s Chief Executive. And as always, Digital Workplace Impact is brought to by Digital Workplace Group. Happy listening. So Paul, I have to say it’s an exciting day. It’s been a long time since you’ve been in the Digital Workplace Impact podcast studio, and it’s just wonderful to welcome you back for a chat.

[00:02:19.380] – Paul Miller

Yeah. Tell me, Nancy, what’s this whole digital workplace thing all about? Because it sounds intriguing, but we all work in offices, don’t we? What’s wrong with that?

[00:02:32.520] – Nancy

We were all called back to the office months and months ago, so it must be old news. But all kidding aside, it’s just great to have you back here for a chat, and I know that DWG hosted a very special online gathering called The Trailblazers last month. I just thought it would be interesting to explore this cohort with you a little bit in our time together. And I’m sure it’s going to spark a fascinating conversation. So let’s start by setting a little bit of context. What is DWG Trailblazers for those who don’t yet know about it?

[00:03:16.850] – Paul Miller

Well, I mean, we’ve got around about a thousand people from multiple different organizations all signed up as members on our intranet, the center point of our digital community. And within that, there are some particular leaders, managers, executives who are particularly attracted to future visioning to what’s coming next. I mean, over the years, if I think of somebody like Linda Tinnert at IKEA, whenever we were doing things back in the old days around intranets, she was always like, What’s coming around the curve. Those individuals are really, I suppose, to quote the word, they’re trailblazers. They’re people who are looking not just for what’s happening this year, next year. They’re also looking at where are we going collectively. Our Trailblazer community, which is a subset of some of our, if you like, most ambitious individuals within our membership, it’s It’s to help them communicate with each other, connect a few times a year, and share confidentially around specific issues, the evolving beyond hybrid work, reimagining a healthy approach to innovation, creating intelligent digital workplaces. That’s what Digital Workplace Group Trailblazers is about. As you say, Nancy, we had a terrific session of that community recently.

[00:05:03.540] – Nancy

Do tell, what was the central theme for the conversation, assuming there was one?

[00:05:10.290] – Paul Miller

Well, our host for the Trailblazers, because we like to have a signature dish in the mix was EY. EY’s Digital Workplace Team was voted DWG’s Digital Workplace of the Team Award for 2023. We got them on as the central story of what’s going on with Trailblazers and where it’s going. The central theme was really around high performing How do you create, as EY has, a high-performing digital workplace team? I think their story is a fascinating one, and we really tried to get behind that. We touched on issues around governance, user-centered design, the need to stay focused in a quite bewildering a range of things you could be doing, learning, trust, and that was the hub of the conversation, really.

[00:06:17.350] – Nancy

And the EY team has a long history of being one that is a more advanced team, and certainly part of the reason why they were singled out for the award last year. Another standout item is that they lead with knowledge management in driving digital transformation inside of this large, complex global professional services organization. Are there any other things that stood out for you about the EY story that you can share? Because, of course, I know that meetings like Trailblazers happen in a confidential setting, but we did share quite openly their story as part of the awards program.

[00:07:05.920] – Paul Miller

Yeah, well, I mean, they got the main award because they really had, I guess, delivered at scale a really ambitious vision of digital employee experience. And that’s been a mission and a purpose for Greg Nemeth and the team at EY, well, over a long period of time. And it’s really… I mean, one of the things that I like about is that their digital workplace program is about supporting knowledge sharing to help EY win in the market. If you like, they’re tying their own knowledge harnessing, knowledge optimization into the central purpose of EY, which is to be successful in the industry that they’re in. I mean, one of the comments that Elizabeth Marsh, who was one of the judges and ran the Digital Workplace Awards, said was that their knowledge platform is of a very high caliber with a human-centered approach at the core of its work, clear, ambitious vision for digital employee experiences, delivering an exceptionally high standard. They’ve got a few key components that I think stand out. They’ve got their flagship product, which is called Discover. They’ve got a knowledge architecture. They’re very much driven through data and insights. But they’ve also got the capacity, which I really like with them, which is to stay adaptive.

[00:08:43.960] – Paul Miller

Different business climate change is happening in the EY ecosystem. They launched something called Discover Reimagined, which was an iteration, looking at personalized findability, more comprehensive people profiles, and upgrading of the technology. And I think there’s always that combination, I think, at EY, which is why I think they were a really worthy winner and a fascinating story. And I know there’s a blog post about this on our website, which is there’s always lots of clear strategic thinking. I mean, it is a large team. They’ve got 66 team members across six countries. And I know they operate at a scale that a lot of teams can only dream of, but they really make that work. They have a plan and design phase, build and integrate, and teams working on innovation as well. So I think it’s really a very comprehensive thing. One thing I would pull out is that they don’t, I suppose, get trapped in one area. It’s really quite holistic. Yes, they have customized digital experiences suited to the actual work that people EY do, but they also have a fantastic ideation program, and they hold these things called ideathons that are regular part And it’s part of the team’s process, getting creative input using a platform called CogniStreamer to help develop different ideas.

[00:10:26.900] – Paul Miller

And I suppose my final point is that they’re always looking for high-impact stories. They know that a key part of digital workplace leadership at a team level, and we saw that in previous years at Fidelity Investments, was creating the overarching narrative. Why are we doing this? I think their narrative is very much linked into the EY purpose and strategy.

[00:10:58.080] – Nancy

I think what’s important about the approach they’ve taken to storytelling is backed by data and evidence. And they’re not just sharing opinion about where they think they’re touching the success of the business. They take a very pragmatic but also fact-based approach to telling that impact story. So you talked about EY as the main dish. And so I also know that DWG has a secret sauce that goes along with the main dish, and that’s something we call live benchmarking. And I’m sure there are some really interesting things that not only the members to the tune of 22 organizations, I think it was in attendance, learning from each other, but I think that live benchmarking can also be proxy for what’s happening across the digital workplace industry at large. And one of your roles as part of that session was to do some sense making as part of the live benchmarking. And are there some themes that you can share with us as takeaways from that part of the agenda?

[00:12:24.720] – Paul Miller

Yeah. Well, I think the overall thing that came across to me, and it It is really extraordinary when you listen to 20 or so different organizations speaking openly without fear about the issues that they’re facing. You really get a sense of what’s happening in this digital workplace industry at that time. And what came across to me was just the level of complexity. I think when I was doing my summary in the sense making was that when I started in the mid ’90s and this whole thing called HTML arrived, and I had a sense that there could be these internal systems that then grew into the intranet, they were really pretty straightforward. You wanted to access a bit of information, you wanted to access people and their connections. But the level of complexity, the nuances, the challenges, the ripple effects is really at a level that we’ve not seen before. I think the pandemic and the post-pandemic period is just adding additional complexity into it, as is obviously AI. But the analogy that I thought of was that it’s a bit like if you drop a pebble into a stream, into a lake, you get these ripples.wI think the ripples are going wider and wider. So that was my overall point. What I would say that people talked about specifically was the importance of… I mean, everybody’s trying to deal with the fact that budgets have been cut in quite a lot of organizations. Colleagues have been let go. So you’re trying to work within quite testing constraints and the power of relationship across different business units. That came up as a theme. It’s something that doesn’t cost you anything, but having strong connections from, let’s say, IT into communications, into HR, into facilities, into digital workplace, into intranets, into executive leadership, and making sure that those connections are as strong as possible. The other one that came up was the idea of having champion networks. I think it was something that came up on a podcast recording you did recently with somebody from LinkedIn. It came up from BCD Travel Employee Experience Network. In a way, what you’re doing is you’re tapping into… It’s almost like, what have we already got? What’s there that we don’t make much enough use of? It does remind me that the first book I wrote in 1997 was called Mobilizing the power of what you know.

[00:15:37.080] – Paul Miller

I think that’s a perennial question for anybody working, particularly in the digital communication, connecting knowledge area, experience area inside organizations. How can we mobilize what we know? Other things that came up were the importance of trust. So it Again, you can deal with budget constraints, you can deal with fewer people. But the thing that will affect your success will be the level of trust, relationship, connection network that you have across organizations. So I think those were some of the things that struck me from listening to people’s stories. Probably the other thing is that When you do listen to each story, you hear a lot of authenticity and people just, in a way, not getting too overwhelmed by strategic changes and just trying to focus on what you can make a difference, where you can make a difference.

[00:16:52.850] – Nancy

And every good benchmark, because I think about our wider evaluation process, not only shares findings, but also recommendations. And so thinking about this theme of managing collectively through complexity must surely spark some best advice from you, Paul, about what teams should be thinking about or doing in light of the current environment.

[00:17:26.870] – Paul Miller

Well, I think having a clear vision and strategy and story is the first thing. It’s like, where are we going? So we’ve always said, Nancy, haven’t we, in DWG, that what we do as a consulting company is look at the intersection between humans, technology, and work. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re in an organization with three people or an organization organization with half a million people. You’ve got human beings, you’ve got things that human beings invent in work, which is mostly technology, and you’ve got work itself. And you’re looking at the challenges and opportunities in that trio of elements, if you like. So I think wherever you are inside your organization, starting to think, what’s our vision, what’s our strategy, and What’s the story we’re trying to tell? I mean, EY have got a very clear story. I think the other thing is that we are still in this post-pandemic period. I mean, sometimes you can I get there was a pandemic, but there was. And every individual and every organization has been changed by that. I think one of the issues that we have is that we don’t really know quite how we’ve been changed.

[00:19:02.890] – Paul Miller

It’s almost like that sense where something happens in your life and you know it’s changed you, but you’re not yet sure how. And you know that time will reveal itself. But I think that 2025 is a year to really start to be a lot more deliberate about what the shape and plan for the year is. I say that because I think 2024 feels to me like the first genuinely post-pandemic year where we weren’t still clawing our way out of that period. And I think that… So I think 2025 is a year to really start to map out and plan. And it’s never too early to start thinking about that. Let’s say you’re in a manufacturing organization. Is it going to be a year where we’re going to better simplify the experience of people in frontline roles? Are we going to make sure that whatever way we’re working in a hybrid way is actually a lot more coherent and a lot more effective than what we’ve been doing at the moment? So I think if we’re thinking about benchmarking, and I think the digital workplace management benchmark is a fantastic tool, and I’ve seen it happen inside organizations.

[00:20:37.530] – Paul Miller

It’s a great way of getting that third-party view on how we’re doing and what better thing to do now in order to start planning out next year. And my little pitch for this is that digital workplaces are, I think, pretty fragmented, very disrupted by everything that’s been going on in recent years and starting to get a sense of where you’re at with that, what’s working, what’s not working, where you need to focus is a really important calibrator for future action. So you’re working, as we always say, on data metrics in a world of opinion.

[00:21:23.160] – Nancy

Well said, Paul, as always. When I think about the work that we do from a benchmarking standpoint, alongside our research, there are always very tight linkages. And so last year, we centered a lot of focus around the return of the business case post-pandemic. And two essential ingredients in that arena are not only having the right data and metrics, but also wrapping the right story around what the numbers are telling us to to help shape the focus around what’s needed next, as well as to take stock of where we are and how the digital workplace is performing in whole or in part. And so this year, we saw the story of EY come to life as part of the conversation with the Trailblazers. And so for other organizations who want to advance their practice, their approach as a team, as you say, the the digital workplace management benchmark can be a key way of assessing in a robust fashion where the attention is needed next. I’d say alongside that, the 2024 research program has a trifecta, as I’m now calling it, of research reports that will be looking at what’s needed next for digital workplace teams to help put some of the important practices in play and help actually future proof what’s needed of digital workplace teams.

[00:23:11.190] – Nancy

And the three areas that we’ll be looking at are digital workplace product management, digital workplace team, and futuring for digital workplace teams. And so I can see how the findings of the benchmark, along alongside the recommendations will be well supported with the resources that we are building as part of that research program this year. Let’s talk a little bit about what’s to come with DWG Trailblazers. When’s the next gathering? What can we expect from it?

[00:23:53.100] – Paul Miller

It’s been fantastic to see because it’s something we launched last year. Sometimes you don’t know whether new initiatives that we come up with are going to appeal to people. But right from the word go, this was something that really seemed to seize on the Trailblazer audience. Each one’s really popular. And I think the next one is really exciting, which is July the 16th. Our host is Avanade, which is a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, a company that specialize in Microsoft technology and implementation implementation and change. We’re going to be supported by Florin Rotar, who I know well, and he is their first Chief AI Officer at Avanade. They’re really looking at how Avanade is transforming work with the use of generative AI. I mean, one of the things that’s really interesting about Avanade is that they beta the beta. Because they’re so close to Microsoft and Accenture, they’re always, if you like, tasting the dishes before they’re fit for a wider consumption to keep the recipe metaphor going. That’s going to be really interesting to see. I know Florin is always very open and share some really terrific insights and demos. We’re going to be having 25 of our member organizations for this session.

[00:25:25.270] – Paul Miller

There’s also a call for guest applications. If you are in an organization that isn’t yet a member of DWG, then you can use a registration link. I guess you’ll put it in the show notes for the episode and apply to come and join as a guest. We ask people to sign up to terms of confidentiality to protect themselves and protect all the member organizations come. But it’s a great way of dipping your toe, test driving the DWG car a little bit before becoming members.

[00:26:02.010] – Nancy

Helpful call to action as always, Paul. Of course, members will be able to mark their diaries with the help of the DWG member extranet for July 16th as well. And then for those who want to learn a bit more about our digital workplace management benchmark, we’ll be able to share that via the show notes as well as the guest registration link for the Trailblazers. Paul, we’re just about at the end of our time. What have we missed? Any final reflections?

[00:26:38.190] – Paul Miller

I suppose what we’ve missed, in my mind, we’re not missed, but come to me just because they’re in my mind a lot. One is, I think it’s strange coming from somebody who founded a company called the Digital Workplace Group, but I feel digital working has been seen as a post-pandemic answer to work and that we have lost some of the human in-person connection that I think is essential in work. I spent 20 years suggesting to people that the technology of work would allow them to work wherever they want, whenever they wanted. I don’t think people were culturally ready for it, but then the pandemic arrived and everybody went, we are technically for it and now we’re going to have to work that way. I think what’s happened is that it’s been seen too much to be the answer to work. It isn’t. It was an essential way of working during the pandemic, but that’s not because it’s the best way of working. Obviously, we’re into a permanently flexible, more adaptive way of working and where we work, but it’s It’s really important to me colleagues. I heard a story that broke my heart from a friend of mine whose son was working for a software company in the UK, and it’s got a really good job, but every day he’s at home.

[00:28:18.910] – Paul Miller

They don’t have any offices at all, and he’s got very, very limited capacity to meet his colleagues. And I think it’s a dreary way of working if you’re 22 and you’re working in the software industry. We need to do better than this. And I think organizations need to have more confidence in getting people back into in-person connection, what people like Grammarly would call intentional connection, something that we also see in intuit, who we had that fantastic meeting with last year. So it’s really, don’t think that digital working is the elixir of working. It’s clearly fundamental to work, but we need human in-person connection. That’s point one. You did ask, didn’t you? I’ve got any final thoughts, so sorry about that one. And the other one is that people are doing really good work in the digital workplace industry, and they’re really forging ahead as much as possible. But I think we really lack a compelling vision of where work is going to be by the end of this decade into the next decade. I look back in time and think about when I was starting to talk about this thing called the digital workplace, the places where we could work.

[00:29:48.280] – Paul Miller

There wasn’t the physical workplace. And I feel like there’s a real need for a North Star. What a fundamentally better future of work would look like and some of the ingredients in that. We can think of it as being more integrated, more human-centred and digital-centered, but I would like to see some more granularity on a compelling vision for a future digital workplace and workplace that’s beyond the next few years. Those would be my two thoughts to throw into the mix, Nancy.

[00:30:31.790] – Nancy

Well, I have to say, I think you’re likely foreshadowing a little bit of what we’ll be thinking about for our final gathering of the Trailblazers later this year in tandem with the futuring report that will be coming out. So hopefully that’ll give us another reason to come back into the studio and chat some more about the future of work, especially where this balancing act of digital working and in-personal connection need to come together. So that sounds like a great place for us to pause, and for me to thank you for coming back into the studio to share some headspace together for a little bit.

[00:31:23.080] – Paul Miller

Great. Thank you, Nancy. Much enjoyed it.

[00:31:28.500] – Nancy

Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by the Digital Workplace Group. DWG is a strategic partner covering all aspects of the evolving digital workplace industry, not only through membership, but also benchmarking and boutique consulting services. For more information, visit digitalworkplacegroup.com.