[MUSIC]

So they tell you, right?

They tell you that if you're gonna give a presentation you

should always start with the wow factor.

Then right at the beginning of your presentation,

you should hit them with something that blows their mind.

-Ance.

So that's what I'm gonna do.

This is gonna be better, more profound, and

more amazing than anything you have heard so far at Blend Conference.

In fact, I'll go further than that, I will go as far as saying this is

the most profound thing you will hear this year.

>> Woo >> Well are you ready?

[UNKNOWN] Right!

Are we ready, ladies and gentlemen?

Digital has changed stuff!

[LAUGH] Whoa!

You're not gonna get better than that.

All right, it sounds a little bit stuff, you know,

it's not like [INAUDIBLE] let's be a bit more pretentious, I'm now,

I'm, I'm speaking a [INAUDIBLE], you can't get more pretentious than that.

[LAUGH] So, digital has changed our social and economical landscape, all right?

Because it's true, and we so underestimate it.

We so underestimate the huge impact that digital has had on our world,

and on one level it's obvious and as digital professional we all know that but

I think we so underestimate how profound digital has been.

It's changed our very behavior, hasn't it?

I mean in a fundamental way, there is now a new generation of connected consumers.

Who are living in a completely different way.

We're all connected consumers.

We're always on except for when we're banned at a conference.

[LAUGH] Bastards.

[LAUGH] You know, real time mobile interaction.

And, and it's given us all an audience.

Every single one of us has an audience, don't we?

And don't we know it.

[LAUGH] Right?

Jared Spool.

Who follows Jared Spool?

Right.

Most of you.

Right?

Jared's [UNKNOWN] on Twitter.

Hates United Airlines, [LAUGH] doesn't he?

With an intense passion.

And he uses the power of his network to let everyone know how crap United are.

All right.

And we all do it, don't we.

And we know that the power is now in our hands.

As connected consumers and not in the hands of brands anymore.

Brands have to look after us.

Brands have to nurture us.

No longer are we forced to buy certain things,

because the competition are a click away.

If we're unhappy, we complain.

It's the generation of the empowered consumers.

And it's changed the way we make decisions as well now.

It's like, every time we go to buy something.

You know, you can be standing in a shop these days, can't you?

And you can scan the bar code to see if it's cheaper online.

And you could even stand there and

take a photograph of, of two, you know, should I get it in red or green?

And you post it up to, to Facebook or

Twitter, and your get instant feedback from your network.

They're helping you make decisions.

That's sound different.

And yet we underestimate what a profound impact it had on our society.

So, let me tell you a very quick story to this, all right?

British Airways.

Well I, I had a, I was flying back from, from a conference back home.

And with British Airways.

And I went to booking and our flight had been delayed.

Okay, fair enough, that happens.

Even I won't moan about that, on Twitter.

But then then I said, do you know what?

I'm gonna upgrade.

Cuz I, it's a long flight home so can, you know, can I upgrade to business class.

Oh yes sir, absolutely sir.

And, and they went through this rigmarole.

Went to the booth, oh I just need to check something with my manager.

Went out the back and came back and said no, you can't upgrade.

And I said why.

And they wouldn't tell me.

Just couldn't upgrade.

So this made me a bit miffed.

And I went online and I moaned about it as you do.

And, of course, within minutes,

somebody from British Airways contacted me on Twitter.

And then, they phoned me.

And then, they sorted it out.

But they failed to sort it out.

But, at least, they told me what the reason was.

So, the power has shifted, hasn't it, in the relationships.

And there are some companies.

That get it, like British Airways.

And there are other companies that don't, like United.

And it's changing our world.

And our world is being changed politically, because of social networks,

and because of the internet.

Obama's election in 2008 was the first one really driven primarily online.

The organization of that grassroots movement was, was organized and,

and managed online.

Online was a huge thing in that election.

We've seen regimes all around the world try and censor the web and fail.

In order to keep control.

In the Middle East we've seen country after country overthrown by

groups mobilized via social networks.

Wow!

That's incredible.

We've seen issue based politics become a thing, and so it goes on.

Sorry.

And we've even seen the leader of the free world,

puffet have to apologize for a website.

Isn't that amazing?

That's the world we live in now!

The President of the United States, oh, fuck, we've caught that one up.

[LAUGH] And I as a British person could not take a more pleasure at that.

It was possibly the happiest moment I've had all year.

[LAUGH] So politics has been changed as well.

But media has been changed as well.

Citizen journalism.

Anybody can produce content.

Abby is self publishing her book, because she doesn't need a publishing house.

Why do we need that anymore?

If you wanna write a book, write a book.

Self publish it.

If you wanna be a journalist, you don't need to be signed up to a major newspaper.

You can be a journalist.

We've all got the means of production and distribution available to us.

Who knows Jonathan Coulton?

Right. Jonathan Coulton is a musician and he was

a coder, like you guys a lot of you guys.

And, obviously, as a developer, he was intensely miserable with his life.

[LAUGH] And what he really wanted to be was a musician.

And so what he decided to do is he decided,

he's never gonna get signed to a record label.

He knew that was a dead end so what he did was every week.

Week in and week out he wrote and released a song.

Every week for ages and ages and ages.

And then one song, Code Monkey took off.

And now, he's still not signing the record label.

But he doesn't care.

He makes his money from concerts and from selling merchandise, and

all that kind of thing.

He's completely bypassed the existing gate, gatekeepers.

To be able to do what he wants to do.

So the world has changed.

Business has changed too.

Sector after sector have been decimated, because of digital.

Retailing, music, TV, newspapers, all have undergone major transformations.

And then there are kind of weh, established brand names.

The kind of brand names you think are gonna be there forever.

Have disappeared, Kodak, Blockbusters, HMV, Tower Records.

In Britain, we have a shop called Woolworths.

And Woolworths is a British institution.

It goes the Queen, the NHS, Woolworths.

[LAUGH] Woolworth's closed their doors.

It was like having my soul ripped out.

But they, they close their doors, because of digital.

And then there's entirely new sectors that are now possible.

Software as a service has enabled us to do all kinds of things.

That would have previously been impossible.

The internet has allowed us to target the long tail of consumers that we

wouldn't have been able to target before.

And yet more sectors have been entirely redefined.

And now, of course, there's ultimate funding methods as well,

again, another set of gatekeepers that have been swept aside.

You don't need venture capitalists to approve your idea anymore,

you don't need a bank manager to think it's a good idea.

All you need is KickStarter and equivalent services.

So, the business is being changed as well.

And that in turn, is changing the workplace.

What's the first thing you guys all do in the morning?

Right?

Probably even before you open your eyes?

oh, twitter.

[LAUGH] Right?

We all do that don't we?

First thing in the morning.

But then we check email don't we?

And, and, and so it goes on and so our day begins, we are always on.

We can work from anywhere.

And the lines between home and work are blurring now aren't they?

So, a lot of us work from home and then Google makes work like home with sofas

and, and sleeping pods and other pretentious crap [LAUGH] and we're seeing

a breaking down of the hierarchical structures of management as well.

The open source community doesn't have managers.

Let me paint you a picture of a world that is beginning to emerge.

You arrive on day one at your new job.

You guys [UNKNOWN] you get training manual respite.

And then they say, get on with it.

And you say, well, what am I meant to do?

Oh, I don't know, have a look around, see what's going on.

If you see a project you like, join that.

And then you, you go to your desk, and

you notice, on the bottom of your desk, a wheel.

Okay, so you go round, find a project that you like,

and then you wheel your desk over and join that project.

No managers, nobody telling you what to do.

That is the future of business.

And actually it's already happening today.

There's a company called Valve.

Everybody, anybody played Half Life?

And yeah, yeah, you wall know Valve.

Valve, I know my audience.

[LAUGH], so it's a gaming company, isn't it?

And they are the, they work in exactly the way I just described.

And do you know what?

They make more money per head than anybody else in the gaming industry.

So it can work.

Now, I'm not saying all businesses will become like that, but

I'm saying that things are changing.

We've also got a new generation of people entering the marketplace known as

the Millenials.

And they're just entering the marketplace now.

And what's really interesting about the millennials, is they don't follow you,

just because you've been made their boss.

They don't care about that.

They follow people they respect and

admire, because that's what the internet has taught them.

You subscribe to a YouTube channel.

You follow someone on Twitter.

That's how you mobilize.

That's how leaders rise up.

Now, I'd like to say, this is completely unprecedented.

That we have never seen any such profound change in our culture and society before.

Where you live at a pivotal point in the development of humanity.

And all of those things are true.

Except for it's never happened before, because it has.

We've seen this in the industrial revolution,

profound changes happening, because of technology.

Right.

Ima, imagine the industrial revolution is in full swing, right?

So, it's been driven by the power of steam, it's been driven by water.

Turning those wheels, generating that power.

And then electricity comes along.

And electricity changes everything.

And suddenly factories start getting powered by electricity.

But do you wanna know something really interesting.

A decade passes with electricity being mainstreamed in factories.

And a decade on, where are they building factories?

They're building factories by the water.

There is no longer a reason to do that.

But they haven't grasped the full potential of this new technology.

They're using it, yeah sure.

But they're not grasping the depth and breath of what that means.

And I believe we are in that place today.

Sure, we're all using digital.

Sure, it's become this part of pretty much every business, but

we're still metaphorically building our factories by the water.

We haven't moved on.

We haven't grasped the full ramification.

We look at a digital, and we go, oh yeah, that's a marketing tool.

Or it's an IT tool.

And we're not understanding its full ramifications.

It hasn't been allowed to change the fundamentals of our organizations.

It's been bolted on to the side.

And that's led to some massive failures that have been hugely,

hugely embarrassing.

In Britain, there's Birmingham City Council that spent an unprecedented 2.5

million pounds, I have no idea what that is in your funny money, but

two point [LAUGH] 2.5 million pounds on its website, and

that's running 2 million pounds over budget, ri, right?

Another one I like.

The Department of Trade and Industries website cost a staggering 11

pound 78 per visit to the website.

So that equates to $20,

every time you go to that website, it costs a British taxpayer $20.

Can you now see why gov.uk was a good thing?

$20, another one I quite like is Fergo or Frugo.

I think it is, who spent 40 million Euros.

Now I've no idea how you convert that.

That's funny money to funny money.

So [LAUGH] 40 million Euros.

And then it generated 100,000 Euros in profit.

That was a good investment, then well done, chaps!

Then there's, now we start kicking the Americans, which is fun boo.com.

Man it, I mean, this is impossible.

I'm sorry, I don't know how they did this.

$135 million they spent in 18 months.

Now, I'm willing to give it a go, but I don't think I could do that.

That is brilliant, isn't it?

I just love it.

And then my all time favorite, obviously, it's healthcare.gov

that's cost you guys, I love this $319 million,

with that figure set to rise to a whopping $677 million.

That is horrendous, but here's the great thing, right?

The original budget.

Was only $93 million.

Now, let's pause that sentence a minute.

[LAUGH] Only $93 million.

I could build them a website cheaper than that.

[LAUGH] All right?

Because they're approaching it all wrong.

They're approaching it with the wrong mindset.

They're approaching it with the wrong organizational structure to back it up.

They're digitally incompatible, these organizations.

They have top-down leadership, slow-moving, strictly hierarchical,

siloed organizations with a digitally illiterate leadership.

And they're internally focused.

It's summed-up brilliantly in a quote from Leroy Hood.

Leroy Hood famously said, bureaucracies are honed by the past and

can almost never deal effectively with the future.

Replace the word bureaucracies with your company name, cuz that's the truth.

You see what happens is, the truth is that the business models that worked so

well, for your organizations, don't work anymore.

What was safe ground, no longer is.

Because the world has changed around your clients, and

your own businesses, the world has changed.

You see, what happens is,

is when something comes along, right, like, like me.

Right, I'm on this stage now, and you're looking at me, and

you're fitting me into your mental model of the world.

Right?

You've seen me in a certain way, right?

You might put me in the British box, the Basil Fawlty box,

the Monty Python box, or [LAUGH] the just slightly weird box.

You know, whatever you fit me into your box, your mental model.

And that's fine most of the time.

That works great most of the time.

But then, but then something comes along, that is so

radically different that it doesn't fit any of our existing mental models before,

and we try and crow bar it in, don't we?

And digital is that, digital is unlike anything that we have dealt with before.

We tried to make it an IT tool and then realized it wasn't.

Now organizations are trying to make it a marketing tool.

But it's more than that.

It doesn't fit into our existing mental models.

So basically all your clients and if you work in house for

an a organization, all your organizations basically are all stuff.

It's what I'm saying.

Right?

That was supposed to be funny.

Nevermind.

[LAUGH] It's just a bit depressing actually, isn't it?

So we need to change this, don't we?

Something needs to change.

These organizations need to wake up and

smell the coffee, I guess over here, or tea in Britain obviously.

But who's gonna do that?

Who's gonna make that happen?

Is it gonna be senior management?

Don't think they really get it, do they.

Don't understand there's a problem.

Perhaps the ans answer is an outside business consultant.

You need to all hire me to come in and solve it.

But then senior management have to realize there's a problem to hire the consultant.

Okay, we're stuck there.

Maybe marketing people can solve it.

No, they can't solve anything.

[LAUGH] So, so, where does this leave us?

Well, it leaves us with the inevitable.

It's gotta be you.

Who else is it gonna be?

But I know what you're thinking it's not my job, and

I don't have the authority, right?

I can't tell my clients to rearrange their entire business.

Right?

Or if I work in house somewhere.

I was like, blah, no way can I get away from saying that, with doing that!

But here's the problem beautifully put up put across by Jonathan Khan.

When he said, he wrote for a list apart.

Here's the problem, organizations are the context of our work, and

when it comes to the web, organizations are broken.

So you have got right at this point, right in this room,

right today, you have to make a decision.

And it's the most primeval and basic decision that any human being ever makes.

Fight or flight.

What are you gonna do?

If you're frustrated by your clients' organizations or

your own organizations, you have to decide today.

Are you gonna fight to change things?

Or are you gonna fly?

Are you gonna go and do something else?

Are you gonna get other clients or are you going to move to a different company or

are you going to become a landscape gardener?

I've always fancied that.

Though that is the fundamental choice you are faced with today.

So let's make an assumption you've decided to fight.

Okay?

Being, you know, you're, you're, kind of, you're a nation of, of, kind of,

go getters.

Make it happen.

If I gave this talk in Brittain, everybody would just fly.

[LAUGH] But I'm expecting better from you guys.

You're gonna fight.

Now admittedly, you normally turn out late to most fights.

but. [LAUGH].

I'm gonna really overstep the line soon, aren't I?

[LAUGH] Stop improvising, Paul.

Right.

[LAUGH] So, are you gonna fight?

You're gonna fight.

You're an amazing nation, you're gonna fight, right.

So, how.

[LAUGH] How are you gonna do that, right?

How are we gonna make that happen?

Well actually, we are at a perfect point, a tipping point, I believe.

Because at the moment, there's this little phrase that is flying around.

Not the web community so much, but the business community.

Kind of little phrase that maybe, management have heard of,

they don't really understand it, but they have heard of it,

and that phrase is digital transformation.

It is the ultimate in buzz words.

It is totally undescriptive of what it really is, but it's useful.

And what's so great about it, is there are some big-ass names doing it.

Running Digital Transformation projects.

Okay? And you can use that.

You can use this precedent to bring about changes within your clients and

your organization.

So let me what I want to do for

the remainder of talk is look at how to do that.

Now obviously, that starts with convincing management of the need to do something.

So I recommend starting with a really simple presentation.

A going in and highlighting the problem.

Now you might wanna get some outside help for

that, but actually at the end of this talk, I'm going to leave you with a URL,

which gives you everything you need to do that presentation.

All right?

To just outline the problem, okay?

To say, the, the way they've always been doing things no longer works,

not presentation should highlight pain points within the organization.

So yo need to understand, you need to say, you need to use that same rigger you used

in understanding users to understand management.

Why that pain point?

What are they struggling with?

Are they worried about not making a bonus this year?

Are they worried about what shareholders are gonna do?

Are they worried about new competitors in the marketplace?

Find those pain points and then put a, build your argument around them.

If it's a young company, that's hungry, talk about opportunities.

Talk about opportunities for them to reach new market sectors.

Or to, to challenge the incumbant within that sector, and

how digital can help with that.

If it's a well established brand that's been around for years and

is, is stuck in its way, talk about threats.

Talk about how what worked before isn't gonna work any more.

How there are, there are new competitors and

new environment, things that are gonna undermine the existing model.

And then, like I said, this can be some resources you can use.

But what you need to do out of that is not say,

we need to change the whole organization.

Because the minute that comes out your mouth, they can run [SOUND] away.

That's too big, that's too scary, that's too intimidating.

So you give them this presentation, and at the end of it, you just say,

we need to do a bit of research into this, let me go away and do it.

That's it.

So you show them a problem, and then you make the solution so easy for them to do.

Right?

All they need to do is say, yes, go my son.

And that's simple.

Don't cost them a lot of money necessarily.

It's just permission to focus on that.

Right. So, they could said yes to that.

The next thing you need to do, is start helping them find their focus.

There's a lot of wooly thinking amongst leadership within organizations, for

the simple reason they don't understand digital.

So what happens when you don't understand something, is,

you tend to lash out randomly, right?

And you tend to grab onto anything that looks like a quick fix solution.

Somebody's sending me this piece of technology that will solve all

my problems.

Yes, I'll have that, thank you.

And of course it never does.

See, you need to in your research, as you go and do your research, and

you report back on that, you need to re-focus on users.

And how user behavior has changed.

You need to research into how it's changed, and

what impact that has on your organization.

We also need to help them define clear digital objectives.

Why they've got a website, why they're on social media?

What are the point of these things?

Because it's not enough to just say, because the competition have.

And you also need to highlight to them the need to start thinking digital by default.

Now what does that mean?

Digital by default says,

instead of just doing the thing you have always done, consider the alternative.

So a great example of digital by default thinking is,

we've released a new product or new service.

So what we have always done is we've put out a press release.

Okay, put out press release.

You product service, press release, you product service, press release.

But I'm actually thinking digital by default says, well hang on,

before we do a press release, let's consider some alternatives here.

Would a blog post be better?

Would a social media campaign or SCO or a pay per click work better?

So it's not saying, don't use those old tools.

It's just saying consider the alternatives.

Let me give you an example, right.

We worked with a large charity in the UK,

that had always spent a fortune on TV advertising.

That's just what they did.

Campaign, campaign, campaign.

TV advert.

TV advert. TV advert.

And they were spending millions of pounds per year on TV advertising.

And always with the TV advertising, it ended with a call to action.

Cuz you have to.

Now, the call to action has changed over the years.

it used to be, you know, the visit one of our shops, or then it might be telephone,

or you'll get something through the mail that allows you to donate.

But of course now it, it points to the website.

Hoping that people will donate, and

they'll get return on investment from their TV advertising

[BLANK_AUDIO]

The problem that they had, and they didn't realize it, cuz they were just doing

what they'd always done, is that the website had a conversion rate of 0.32%.

So they were drive, spending all this money on advertising,

driving them to the website, and then the website was failing to do its bit.

When people did give, they gave quite a lot,

they gave 35 pounds per gift, which is good, but we said to them,

let's think differently, let's, let's be digital by default.

Let's stop our TV advertising, just for a little bit, not for long.

And let's take some of that huge amount of money you spend on TV advertising, and

use it to improve the calls to action on the website.

Don't need to redesign the whole thing, sure,

it's not responsive, but you know, let's leave that for another day.

Let's just focus on improving the calls to action.

And we, we reckon.

Well let's say, we can just raise the conversion rate from 0.3% to 1%.

RIght? Now that's still really low,

but let's just say, we could do 81%.

But let's say we could increase the giving just by 2 pounds per, per gift, okay?

We worked out that would generate an extra 2.5 million pounds in revenue,

based on their existing traffic levels.

For them to achieve the same thing,

through advertizing, through TV advertizing, being

driven to the existing site to create that 2.5 million pounds of extra giving.

They would have to drive a,

a 31 million extra visitors to the website, to achieve the same thing

[BLANK_AUDIO]

You see the thing, digital by default.

Thinking about digital first and not as our, an afterthought.

And they need to have a clear strategy for

how they're then gonna bring about this kind of change within the organization.

So they need to find their focus.

Then, I think what,

you, what will probably come out of your research once I give you permission to do

that, is the fact that you need strong digital leadership.

This is what's so lacking within many organizations.

Most organizations that I work with manage digital by committee.

Cuz they've realized that digital was cross disciplinary, so

what's the answer to that?

Well, you just bring everybody into a room to make a decision together.

No, you don't.

That's terrible.

The problem with committees, is they're so slow.

You know, you have to get all these, and then you no,

normally senior people, because everybody likes to get their all in.

So, the senior people, you have to get them all in the room together,

which only ever happens once a month, you know.

And, and you, you can't make decisions like that, it's too slow.

You also get this weird thing, where you get the wrong people making decisions.

Right?

You have the head of IT commenting on the color of the website,

cuz he's on the committee that's discussing it.

And there's no overall authority, is there, with a committee, either?

No one's ultimately responsible.

So instead what you need, is an executive sponsor at the very highest levels of

the organizations who owns and oversees digital.

Then you need a strong digital lead to head up a digital team, and

I'll talk more about that in a minute.

And, you may,

you have oversight using something called a responsibility assignment matrix.

Write that down.

Cuz I'm not gonna explain what it is now.

But if you go in and challenge and

say, we should be having a committee, you need to offer them an alternative.

I wrote a smashing magazine article on Responsibility Assignment matrices.

Cuz it sounds so sexy and exciting, doesn't it?

Nothing sounds more sexy than having a Responsibility Assignment matrix.

So yeah.

Check that out.

And she got this from Digital Lead, and

that digital lead's job is to implement the strategy that you draw up.

They have the authority to make decisions and maintain momentum of projects.

And, the executive sponsor's role is to protect the digital team from politics and

institutional thinking.

So let's talk about that digital team for a minute.

I think, when I talk about forming a digital team I diff,

I differentiate from a web team.

Right, they probably lot of organizations who already got web teams.

So gonna get rid of our web team, and

we're gonna have a digital transformation team.

How arsey and pretentious does that sound?

Right?

But there's good reasons for me calling it that.

One, I used the word digital rather than web.

Cuz one of the biggest problems in organizations is

that the digital is fragmented across the institution.

There's a web team.

Social media is managed for marketing.

There's people responsible for the intranet.

There's people responsible for every different aspect of digital spread all

across the organization, with no collaboration and no central control.

So what does that mean?

It means that user user experience is fragmented.

They're hearing different things in different tones of

voice from different people at different times.

They're pushed from department to department.

For a time, it needs centralizing, and

needs bringing together in a new strategy putting it into place.

The reason I picked the word transformation is for two reasons.

First, it's to make it clear, this is not a service department.

It does not exist to implement other people's ideas,

because what has happened is, web teams have come out of IT.

IT is a service department, so therefor web teams are.

So that means, they exist solely to put other people's ideas into action.

And that's where things go wrong.

So a transformation team is not a service department,

it owns a transformation project across the organization.

And then finally, the reason I picked the word transformation is because

a transformation is ultimately done, because the danger of centralizing, and

[LAUGH] he walked off the edge of the stage

[LAUGH] the danger of centralizing is you create another business silo.

And we can't do that.

We can't do that for two reasons.

One, is because the other people in management won't allow that to happen.

They will see that as a threat.

But two, we need to create something that's cross-disciplinarian.

One day, we want to get to the days where digital is ubiquitous.

Going back to the electricity example in the Industrial Revolution.

Do you know what happened when electricity first came along?

You, you'll like this.

They appointed a Chief Electricity Officer, right?

So you would go into work in the morning, and you would say, hello, Mr.

Chief Electricity Officer, can I use some electricity please?

And the Chief Electricity Officer would say, yes of course, you can.

Let's sit down and discuss how you want to use electricity.

And how we can make the most of it.

I might be exaggerating for comic effect.

This is not an historically accurate representation of events.

But there were Chief Electricity Officers.

Now that seems ridiculous to us today.

From the moment we get up to the moment we go to bed,

our entire lives, are rely on electricity.

Everything we do at work relies on electricity.

Do you know we need to be in that place with digital one day.

There will be a day when digital is ubiquitous across our organizations.

Where everybody gets it and understands it, and

uses it without even thinking about it.

But we are in an awkward transition period.

And I believe, just like in the Industrial Revolution,

we need our own Chief Electricity Officers.

We need digital, a digital transformation team to

help make that transition until everybody gets there.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

And the part of that is, that team needs to have a startup culture.

And what do I mean by that?

What I mean,

it needs to work in an experimentative, iterative fashion that tests continually,

where failure is acceptable because a lot of organizations don't allow failure.

And there's good reason for that.

If you're, if you're commissioning an advert, TV advertising campaign, and

you type URL wrong in the TV campaign, that has big bloody consequences.

So there has to be a lot of checks and balances in place.

If you're commissioning a building to be built, and the plans are wrong.

That has big consequences.

But that's not true in digital.

So we need to start creating this little bubble within the institution,

that has different culture, that can over time permeate out beyond that group.

A group that's unencumbered by the large institutional systems they exist within.

A group that works in agile springs, not agile with a big a but

agile with a little a.

That they work collaboratively with people across the organization.

[UNKNOWN] I did this once,

I went into a university, University of Strathclyde, and I met a guy called Harry.

Harry was a great guy.

I, I liked him.

He was a developer.

And, but I didn't hold that against him.

And Harry was just beaten down.

He'd given up.

He fought and he fought and, over the years to do stuff and

he'd been pushed back the whole time.

And we used to worked with Harry, for one, we set up this new startup culture,

and we, we transformed the way that it working,

we started the digital transformation project, et cetera, et cetera.

So we've gotten running, we got them working, and then the curse of being,

an agency is that you have to eventually pull out and let you to it.

So I met up with Harry, again a few months down the line,

almost a year down the line.

And do you know what?

The first thing he [LAUGH] came out of his mouth was, you made me cry.

I was, like, shit, what have I done?

[LAUGHTER] But he meant it in a good way.

His job, had transformed.

He loved his job again, and he's now the head of that digital team.

And he's doing a brilliant job.

And he's excited, and he's enthusiastic and he's passionate.

Because we created the right culture for him to bloom.

And for me, everything else in that, that organization can go to hell for

all I care, but Harry's happy, and that gives me job satisfaction.

And then you need to build a framework within which you operate.

A set of rules within which digital exists.

A set of policies and procedures.

Now, everybody hates policies and procedures, and

standard operating procedures and all that crap.

It's annoying.

But it, it's a tool of organizations that they've used over the years.

They get it, so let's use it.

Let's create policies and procedures.

Policies and procedures about how social media is used.

Policies and procedures about what gets on the home page, right?

Here's a great example.

Cuz everybody fights over the home page.

Somebody comes to you and

says, [SOUND] we're doing this event, it needs to go on the home page.

Okay, we have a policy for that.

Our policies and this is a real policy that I put in place.

Policy is that first of all, you appear in the fat arse footer.

Right? The footer at the bottom of the site.

That appears universally across the whole site.

Okay?

Every single page.

Actually, it's almost more higher priority than the home page in some ways.

Okay.

You appear on that, and

you are now in competition with every other thing in the fat arse footer.

Right?

If your page generates significant enough traffic,

it will then be promoted to the homepage.

That is our policy.

Right? That's not personal.

It's not saying, no, your content's not good enough, no,

your job is not important enough.

It's made it a policy, so you can have all kinds of policies.

Policies about how content is removed and under what circumstances.

For example, another policy I put in place, is that content has to be rev,

rem, re, reviewed every six months within the content management system.

The content owner needs to log in, go and

look at their content and say, yes, this content is up to date.

If they do not do that,

the content will not be removed but will instead be isolated.

It will not longer appear in the navigation.

It will no longer appear in the search results, and

it will have a banner put over the top of it says, this is archived content.

That's a policy for managing content.

It might not right for your organization.

It was right for them, but you see what I'm getting at?

And then finally, we need to be educating.

Our digital transformation team, their primary job is one of education.

Right?

Their pri, listen to me, and this applies to all of you.

Your primary job is not to build websites.

If you want to be the most effective and

give your clients the best service, your primary job is an educator.

It's to educate colleagues,

clients about the potential of digital to transform their businesses.

You need to work collaboratively with people across organizations.

As the Chief Electricity Officer no longer exists,

ultimately, you need to do yourselves out of a job.

Don't worry, there will be other things to do.

Right?

The Chief Electricity Officer doesn't exist anymore because he was successful in

integrating electricity with the entire organization, and making it ubiquitous.

Our aim as digital professionals, is to educate our clients and our colleagues so

that digital is ubiquitous.

And our digital transformation team can go away.

We need to help other people understand quite how powerful digital is.

And we have to help them go through this awkward transition period.

The next generation that coming into the market place, they get digital.

They'll use it.

It'll be fine.

But for right now, we're in a difficult position and we need to help people.

We need to help them move into digital by default thinking.

I want to leave with a qu, leave you with a quote from Charles Darwin.

It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that

survives, it's the ones that have a most adaptable to change.

That's why I call my book Digital Adaptation.

Because it's not about whether or not you your organization is

doing great at the moment, whether it's strong and vibrant.

Doesn't matter how clever your leadership team is?

How clever your employees are?

It's about how adaptable your organizations are.

So I promised to leave you with some resources at the end.

So boagworld.com/blendconf/ and that has a whole load of stuff.

Has a version of this presentation that you can show to management straight away.

If if you want this stuff you can download to help you prepare your own presentation.

There's also a two minute trailer,

if all you can do is get two minutes of your manager's time.

There's a trailer designed to scare the shit out of them.

[LAUGH] If they want something in written format, there's a manifesto for

digital transformation which is a thousand words,

even your manager can read 1,000 words, right?

There's also resources to blog posts that I've written about,

where to start, how to start in this.

And then there's also a link to an amazing book on the subject that I

highly recommend you get [LAUGH] by a very talented British author.

[LAUGH] So there you go.

That is, that is what I'm saying to you today.

I wanna encourage you to go for it.

To fight rather than flight.

To change the organizations you work with.

Whether you work inside them or rather you're a contractor.

We need to stop piddling around the edges.

Putting wall papering over the top of the problems in our organizations.

But we need to, as Abby said, go down the rabbit hole, in her talk.

Go down the rabbithole and deal with those underlying issues.

And do you know what?

It actually a lot of fun.

Because what's the worst that can happen?

They can fire you.

[LAUGH] But we're so frigging in demand,

that you'll probably end up with a better job in a better company that gets it.

So what the hell?

[LAUGH] Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]