Want to engage your CEO in digital transformation? First, take one BlackBerry…. 

Quite rightly, there’s much speculation that 2019 will be the year when CEOs finally become truly engaged in digital transformation. I agree: that time has come for every switched-on CEO to champion digital transformation. But what if you work in an organisation that’s not getting the idea that the CEO has to be the sponsor of all things digital? How do you engage their attention? A little story…

 About a hundred years ago, I did my first transformation and innovation gig. We’d got to the stage where we knew what needed to be done, with all the movers-and-doers agreed on what the scope was and even what the route was. Then someone heard a rumour that the Top Floor was getting a bit antsy, having seen the cost projections.

 My job was to go up and talk them round. As I was only a bairn, then, I tried to put off the evil moment with a spot of research. Not financial, market or tech research: no, it was nosing into what the High-Ups were thinking. By leaning chattily on the desk of a PA for 20 minutes, I found out that most of the resistance was due to lack of knowledge – these guys just didn’t deep-down get why the changes we were proposing would be useful.

 I got the stores guy to give me a Blackberry. For any reader under 25, a Blackberry was the prototype smartphone of its day, a device for which you needed the fingers of an under-nourished four-year-old, which reached the height of its popularity in the Tottenham Riots (don’t ask).

 I got the Blackberry rigged up so that our man could use it to watch the stock exchange do its stuff. I took it up to him and showed him how to work it. Naturally, he was like a kid on Christmas morning: and brainy guy that he was, he immediately understood, by extension, what (the then) leading-edge technology could do for this business. The budget sailed through the next week.

 That’s how I came to understand the first rule of engagement: get the leaders of the business on board. And it also immediately gave me the second rule: engaging the CEO and the top team is essential, but they won’t necessarily come to the table if they find IT/digital issues alien, tedious or even slightly threatening - by being beyond their ken. So make it real. Show the benefits in glorious technicolor, with real-life, concrete, highly-desirable demonstrations of what could be achieved using the transformation plan. Don’t necessarily focus on the risks and threats – instead, show them the sparkling opportunities. If these are mouth-watering, they’ll want the benefits, AND they’ll want to know more about what they need to do to get us there.

 And for teaching me that, the BlackBerry will be forever my idea of a smart phone….