The world is currently in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution, which is the digital revolution. Everything is being digitised, for better or for worse. Digital is all pervasive and it’s going to continue to accelerate with The Internet of Things (IOT) and the explosion of smart devices globally. So many items will be digitised to have smart conversation / feedback to allow the understanding of behaviour, based on data that comes from that item; mostly the intention is so that the feedback can optimise the item or the customer experience. The opportunity for businesses to use data is huge (and overwhelming).
What is Conscious Digital Transformation?
Conscious digital transformation is not just digital transformation, it is mindful awareness, the art of mindful practice, the art of being present with the process of digital transformation. Conscious digital transformation is the same as digital transformation, just being done with a different state of mind and therefore a different set of questions, a different set of capabilities, and a higher capacity for vision, forethought and seeing what the eventualities of all actions are.
The Path to Conscious Digital Transformation
In my Future Business Growth Model, there are three pillars: People and Culture, Growth Hacking, and Future Proofing Business.
People and Culture
Really we need the people and the culture of the organisation to be not only digitally educated or educated about digital, we need them to be in a mindful state. They have the capacity to understand digital, to think about the consequences of digital and how it can be beneficially included in what we’re doing. In this way, we can start coming up with solutions to problems that we don’t know we have yet.
Growth Hacking
The next path is growth hacking. This is where most people currently think digital transformation lies. It’s the digitalisation of services, the digitalisation of products so that they can be tracked and optimised so that yield can be increased exponentially for the pursuit of increased profits.
Even in this column there is quite a considerable difference to where most people see versus what my Future Business Growth Model references.
Within the growth hacking column, you optimise your systems and therefore you have to digitise them. You have to understand data so that you can you maximise every opportunity you have for growth potential in the organisation and at the same time you have to remember that if you want the customers you sell to today, to still be your customers tomorrow, next week, next year, and for as long as your company’s going, then you must focus on optimising their personal health and building/maintaining healthy relationships.
It’s not just about profit maximisation because when somebody does it faster, better with more whistles and bangs than your business (which will happen because disruption just happens), then your customers will just leave and go elsewhere – unless you have proven to deeply car about them and built meaningful relationships.
Future Proofing Business
The third column is about how to futureproof your business against technological disruption. Firstly, having resources in the business that are focused and committed to understanding what technology is coming and how it will impact your business (Can you disrupt yourself, before someone else disrupts you?). Having the capacity to be able to pivot, alter the path, and test to see whether the new technology is something that a company wants to implement wholesale across the organisation. Is this new technology something that is going to change the way an organisation goes to market? Is it going to change what people do? Test it. See if customers are going to adopt it, and is it the right thing for the organisation? And then the top of that column is business transformation, which is a company recognising it will have to disrupt itself to stay ahead of anybody else disrupting the organisation.
A digitally conscious company is a company which is not only doing business as usual and digitising what they’re doing and therefore profiting from digital. They’re also increasing the capacity of the staff, of the employees, the conscious awareness of what’s happening so they become more able and nimble to change with the times to be more creative, more innovative, and come up with a better solution because we need better solutions right now. (Solutions to problems we are yet to recognise as problems).
What can you do now?
Optimise the human potential in an organisation. We’re talking about computers being so powerful soon, they are going to be more powerful than a human brain and then the culmative power of the human race. We really need to start optimising human potential so that we have superhumans working for us and those that are far better at communicating and are far better at being conscious and mindful of their automated behaviour, so they don’t just react. They respond. They come up with new solutions to new ideas. They are open (as opposed to closed) and this will give us a far higher level of intelligence, both emotional and intellectual to process as an organisation what is happening and to be able to transform.
The Benefits
Transformation. You’re going to become far more efficient and far better at what you do. I’ve seen numbers from businesses double, triple, quadruple, ten-fold their results just by optimising their efficiencies of their go to market digitally and their way that they delivered digitally. (This is without the effects of what a pivot can do now to your business in 10/20 year’s time).
What’s Next
The conscious side of things is the next level. We’re getting past digital transformation. We’re getting to the point where great user experience is pretty much what everybody expects. We are getting to saturation and maturity very quickly. Conscious is about how do we leverage these platforms and utilise the new technology of Artificial Intelligence coming out to really help change what we’re doing.
It is about what is next.
