First Comes Art, then Comes Science
An Inside Look at Why Empathy Is Key to Digital Innovation
“Your multi-colored sticky notes and buzzwords aren’t welcome here.”
The burly, bearded man sitting at his heavy wooden desk didn't say that, but his crossed forearms and furrowed brow projected that he was thinking it. What I eventually learned was that this man, a key client stakeholder for a project we were kicking off, was an industrial business processes expert — he spent the past five years revamping the technical systems that his company uses to manage day-to-day operations—and our involvement risked upending all that work.
Like 72% of CFOs, his top priority was optimization — he’d transformed the entire national division into an efficiency machine. And now, we were here: smarty-pants consultants, with zero expertise in his industry and its operations, coming to help make it even more efficient… because someone in the “innovation” department had invited us in.
It made sense that he was quietly, politely, furious.
The systems he created were a series of home-grown tools cobbled together incrementally over time — but as the lead of business operations he was understandably hesitant to rethink them from scratch. Employees were burned out and skeptical. Technology folks were doing their best. And the innovation people were starry-eyed and starved for change.
Spoiler alert. We won him over. Here’s how we did it:
We interviewed all the C-suite executive decision-makers one-on-one and asked them hard questions: “Does this project make sense for the organization to be pursuing, from your perspective? If not, why not? What are you most worried about?”
The in-depth interview questions were all about empathy: They helped us understand the humans behind all things digital.
Such questions enabled us to build a picture of the political and systemic reasons why an organization might be stuck or slowed by internal politics. It means that once we get to the end of a project — to a North Star vision of how improved technological products or capabilities could solve the business problem at hand — our solutions address the concerns that would have otherwise been fatal, innovation-killing, political roadblocks.
This is often a task that benefits from a neutral third party – just like a couple seeking out counseling. Organizational systems often need an outsider to help them start untangling the spaghetti soup of stasis they’re accustomed to.
Whether it’s rethinking current enterprise systems, reprioritizing digital roadmaps, or creating entirely new digital products from scratch, interviewing is the key art we use to move an organization toward big, strategic changes that have been long overdue.
Of course, there’s also a science to innovation. Ideas are cheap, but execution is expensive, and any significant tech investment needs a strong rationale and metrics for determining its success once implemented. For example, when we observe employee workflows and notice simple navigational issues that are slowing them down, we ask, “How long does this take you, on average?” and “What else could you get done, if it were easier?” and then we use that information as the seeds of a quantitative business case as needed.
If the solution requires significant business investment, we ensure that we’re clear on which parts of the future-state solutions require new code, which could be handled with off-the-shelf capabilities, and which require a strategic partnership. In this process, many stakeholders neglect to ask two questions: (1) How do those options stack up against the needs of the users, whether employees or customers? and (2) Is the path of least resistance going to solve that problem?
It doesn’t always make business sense to say “yes” immediately to every feature and capability outlined in a North Star vision. For this company, there were some features that would cut the costs of training and even remediate some of the company’s ongoing employee retention issues. They would make it possible for employees to have better work/life balance and make it home for dinner on time. But at that moment, efficiency was the pain point that needed addressing first, so that’s what drove defining an MVP.
Digital transformation, like all innovation, is a long game that forces stakeholders to align on the big picture of what’s important and re-evaluate these priorities repeatedly as code gets shipped, new tools reach the hands of users and new lessons are learned. If you bite off too much at once, the result is re-work or worse: project abandonment and inevitable reinventing of wheels while the same old problems persist.
So what did it look like when we presented our work to the executive leaders at the end of this project? That operations executive, who had been understandably protective of the work he’d done, unmuted his mic and rearranged himself in his chair, indicating that he was ready to speak. We hid our clenched jaws behind expectant smiles, and he said: “You know, the difference between you guys and the platform providers and consultants we’ve hired before is they’ve been with us for years and years and they still don’t know what we’re talking about. You’ve gone further than anyone ever has before to understand what we do. The discussions that you’ve had and going into the organization and listening to people — that’s the difference maker.”
Our jaws relaxed into wide, semi-stunned grins as we realized that the person we had previously tip-toed around, for fear of overstepping, had transformed into the biggest advocate for our collaboration. While the project required some science to make sense of the size and direction of the steps needed to move forward, it was the art of bringing people along that made it possible to push off from the starting line in the first place.
