Good to see you all.

Thank you for coming along.

What I'm intending to do today is share with you probably

the most profound thing that you will hear at this conference

alright so you know I don't wanna big it up too much.

That's the truth.

So I'm gonna tell you something that is more profound, more

life changing probably than anything you've ever heard at all, ever.

So, shall we, shall we kick off?

Are you ready for this re, revelation?

This thing that's gonna just revolutionize your life?

Okay, deep breath.

The web has changed stuff!

That's my revelation.

That, our world has been changed by the web.

Wow, you think.

I never realized that.

That's just blown my mind that the world has been changed by the web.

okay, yes blinding and bloody obvious but is it really?

Is it really?

It's, it's so easy to forget what things used to be like.

Didn't it, doesn't it?

I'm showing them my son, actually just earlier today.

It's really funny, he said to me, he said

dad, did you really grow up before the internet?

[LAUGH] And I said, well yes and

no, because the internet's been around for ages.

But I did you know, I grew up in a world without the web.

And, and the world without email.

What?

Without email?

You know, 'cause to him email is a dinosaur.

You know, it's social media these days.

Nobody uses email.

And he couldn't get his head around this.

So I said, yes son.

And I grew up before mobile phones too.

And he couldn't get over that either.

I think we underestimate how profoundly the web has changed the world.

You see the thing is, is we think of the

web as a tool don't we, especially from a business perspective.

It's a tool, right?

And tools are just tools, they're things you use.

But some tools are more than that, aren't they?

Some tools just transform the world, so take for example the printing press.

When that came along it transformed the world, didn't it?

It has this profound impact on society.

Before the printing press the Catholic Church could say

what the hell it likes because nobody knew any different.

'Cause there's only like a handful of priests that could read the

Bible so they could make up all kinds of shit nobody would know.

And they regularly did.

You could pay for the forgiveness of your sins.

Yeah, you're right, the bible says, give us

some money, and all your sins will go away.

Yeah, that sounds sensible.

But the printing press changed that, cause then suddenly everybody could

read the bible themselves, and literacy went up and things changed.

And then of course, there's the automobile.

It's just a tool, isn't it.

But it's the tool that's transformed our world.

Suburbia, only can exist because of the automobile.

So, some tools have much more profound effects, and

that's kind of really, what I wanna talk about.

I wanna talk about, how much the web has transformed our world.

So for example, what's really, incredibly changed our society.

To a degree that I don't think we really realize.

The, we now communicate in and interact

with one another in a radically different way.

As as Cray said in his talk yesterday.

You know, it's now perfectly acceptable to have a conversation like this.

But not just that.

Its affected us so much more.

So for example, it used to be that you were friends with your

next door neighbors right the people that lived geographically very close to you.

I don't know about you but I don't know my next door

neighbors particularly well, probably because I'm

an anti social git but because.

As well, in addition to that, is I have friends all over the world.

But also that has another effect, doesn't it?

Because that begins to change our perceptions.

Right, if I could be friends with whoever I

want, who do I end up being friends with?

I become friends with like-minded people, don't I?

So, if I'm gay I tend to, interact with more gay people.

If I'm a christian I end up interacting with more christian people.

If I'm a conservative, I talk to

conservatives, liberals and so on, and so on.

So we're very, we're not challenged as much with

people with different views, and different outlooks on the world.

And so we tend to become, becoming more and

more radicalized as the society pull more and more

to the extremes of whatever our social group is

because we are not being balanced out at any stage.

And we're existing within filter bubbles.

So society is changing.

But they in turn has even bigger changes.

It changes the nature of politics.

Have you noticed how much politics has changed?

Suddenly we've got issue based politics.

Like the Occupy Movement, haven't we?

That didn't exist previously.

And yeah there was some issue based politics,

you know CND and things like that what

existed previously, but it's becoming bigger and, and

much more organized than it used to be.

We're also getting situations like the, the election here in 2008 when Obama came

to power was the first one that was really won and lost through the web.

Social media allowed a completely different type

of political campaign to ones we've seen before.

The kind of political campaign where, it was based on

mobilizing large numbers of people rather than on big budget spending.

So that changed things.

And then of course, we've got this bizarre world,

and I, I, I once again, America, you win.

You did this first.

Your leader was the first leader in the world to apologize for a website.

And I think that's a real turning point.

You know, well done for that.

Because you guys, President Obama had to apologize for healthcare.gov.

It was that big an issue now.

So the web is changing politics, too.

It's also, beyond that, it's changing media.

And this is a really interesting one.

Because we've seen trans, transformations in the way the media works, all right?

So there was a stage, for example, if I wanted to write

a book, I would have to go to a publisher, wouldn't I?

That was the way you did it.

Not any more.

If I want to publish a book, I'll publish a book.

I've got all the mech, means of production and distribution

and promotion available to every single citizen that has web access.

The same is true if I want to be a musician.

There was a time, when I'd have to get signed to a record label.

Now we got people like Johnathan Coulton, who is becoming, has

become an incredibly successful musician, with never having a record label.

And just aiming at a niche audience, of geeks, and doing very well, and living

the life he wanted to live, without

gatekeepers deciding whether he's good enough or not.

Yeah, absolutely.

And there are, there are more and more of those kinds of examples.

If you want to be a journalist, you could

be a journalist, because you start up a blog.

Citizen journalism is becoming such a mainstream thing now, that, you know,

even mainstream media is using citizens to promote what they're doing.

So, media is changing.

Gatekeepers going away.

And not just even in media.

We're getting things like.

You know, if you wanted to set up a business, you

had an idea for a product, what would you have to do?

You'd have to go to a bank manager.

Or to a venture capitalist, wouldn't you?

Not anymore.

Just put it on Kickstarter.

You didn't have to, you don't have to get anyone else's permission anymore.

The world's changed.

And that has some profound impacts.

It's changing business, too, obviously.

But in ways that are so much more profound than I think we realize sometimes.

I mean it's decimated entire sectors, isn't it?

The web.

Tower Records, HMV, Kodak.

The list could go, it does go on and on and on.

Companies that have been devastated.

I mean, take Tower Records and HMV, for example.

So, we saw about Napster, didn't we, yesterday.

And there was talking about Napster, and about

how that changed things and it really did.

Okay, what happened with Napster, is people

suddenly realized, well hang on a minute.

I don't wanna go down to the High Street to buy my music.

I also don't wanna be made to buy an entire

album when there's only one song on it I really like.

And it changed user behavior.

And how did business react?

They sued the crap out of them.

Now right, they were giving music away for free.

And they were fair enough, I would have reacted the same way.

Then what happened next was interesting.

They didn't learn.

They didn't realize consumer behavior had changed,

and carried on with the existing business model.

Year after year ticked by, and then eventually Apple stepped in,

said well, if you guys aren't gonna do it, we'll do it!

And then HMV goes out of business, Tower Records goes out of business.

Records goes out of business, and things change.

And we've seen it again, haven't we?

Blockbuster's and Netflix.

Exactly the same principle repeated again in a different sector.

Newspaper subscriptions have plummeted haven't they?

Advertising has moved online, so we're seeing this kind of

complete change in how business is operating and sector after sector

is being changed, in fact, there is hardly a new,

hardly a sector that is not being completely transformed by digital.

Hell, Sarah Parminter proved yesterday that even hairdressing

could be revolutionized by digital, and digital technology.

So there is no sector that is safe from the big changes that we're seeing.

So.

But it's not just any kind of different sector and how business is done.

It's also workplaces

as well.

How the workplace works today is so different from how it used to work.

Think for a minute you're lying in bed, your alarm goes off.

What's the first thing you do?

After you pick your, your ugh.

Although, probably your alarm is on your phone.

First thing we all do is go, ugh, like that, don't we.

And we, we look at Twitter, and we look at Facebook, and we look at our email.

And the day begins, and we've barely got the sleep hat out of our eyes.

So we've got this kind of always on culture.

Work can be done anywhere, anytime, anyplace.

We blurred the lines between home and work.

We work when we're at home.

And then enough to work places if you

notice look more and more like homes these days.

You look at Google or Mail Chimp or Facebook or any

of the, with their pool tables and their comfy sofas and stuff.

That could be somebody's living room.

[LAUGH] So, things are changing.

You'd have a pretty cool loving room actually, if it

looked like a, Google headquarters, if you get what I mean.

We're also getting change, seeing changes in, in how companies are being managed.

So it's amazing that digital is even changing how companies are managed.

Because now they are being influenced by things like the open source movement.

Open source movement doesn't have managers.

Doesn't have a hierarchical structure.

And now we're seeing companies begin to adopt that as well.

Take Valve.

The gaming company, Valve.

Did you now that Valve generates more income

per employee than any other software manufacturing company?

And yet, they have no management.

No structure whatsoever.

You know, if you arrive at day one with Valve, they give you

a desk with wheels on, and a manual that says do whatever you want.

Nobody tells you what to do on day one when you

arrive at Valve, you just kind of get on with work, really.

You have a look 'round the company, you see if there's a project

that interests you, and if there's a project that interests you, you join it.

And if you want to create a project, presumably if you

could get enough people to work with you, you do it.

So we're seeing companies like that emerging.

They're approaching business in a radically different

way, because the work place has changed.

And then you've got this kind of new generation of people, the millenniums.

Who are beginning to come will be come

into the workforce over the next few years.

And that will change things even, even on, on a greater scale.

And do you know why?

Because they think about management and leadership differently, right?

So I grew up in a generation.

Well, before the internet, where I did what my teacher told

me to, because my teacher told me to it, to do it.

And that teacher was put, in authority over me.

I got my first job, and I did what my

manager, told me to do, because my manager was my boss.

My son's generation is different, however.

Because

my son's generation follow people who they respect.

If someone's doing something cool, they'll follow them.

If they're doing something crap they ignore them.

So that changes the workplace now.

'Cause they come into the workplace and go, who the hell are you?

You've got no bloody skills.

Why should I follow you?

I've got no respect for you.

You've not earned it.

So it's beginning to undermine the very fabric of how the workplace operates.

Now I'd like to say this is an unprecedented change in

our society that we have never seen the likes of before.

But actually, that isn't the case.

We have seen this before.

We've seen it in the Industrial Revolution.

And there's some really cool things that happened

in the Industrial Revolution that are worth noting.

One of my favorite things is that once

the Industrial Revolution had hit full steam, right.

Get, see what I did there, full steam.

[LAUGH] that's a really bad joke!

it, so, it got into full steam and it's really going for it, and it's great.

And then, this thing came along, called electricity.

[SOUND] And electricity came along.

And everything changed.

Things went differently.

'Cause suddenly, there was so much potential.

And they started integrating electricity into their factories and stuff like that.

And electricity changed how things operated.

Now a world, you know, it's ridiculous to have a world without electricity.

Do you know another thing they had in

the ear, early days of electricity first came along.

They have people cook cheap electricity officers, so

you go to business and it's like, you're

going to work so, so this electricity thing, what am I meant to do with it.

Mr. Chief Electricity Officer, how am I supposed to use my electricity.

[LAUGH] Today, you know, if the electric goes out

we go, screw it, I'm going home, don't we?

You don't even try to work if there's no electricity.

So there were the truth electricity over this.

But do you know what?

A decade, right?

Ten years after electricity became mainstream and integrated

into businesses, and to factories, and were powering factories.

Do you know what was still happening a decade after electricity came along.

They were still building factory's by the water.

Why?

Okay, there's some drainage stuff and bits and stuff like that.

But they didn't need it for water wheels or steam, or anything like that.

But their mind set was still stuck in the past.

They were still building their factory's by water.

And do you know why?

That's what we're doing.

We've had now we've had the web with us for 20 plus years

now and we're still building our factories by the water we've just bolted

on digital onto the side of what we've done and haven't really grasped

the full ramifications of how to change the world and how it changes things.

So, where does all this leave us?

Well, we're now entering the digital revolution.

And we have done for awhile, now.

But yet, we're making the same mistakes as the industrial revolution.

We're still building our factories by the water.

We're limiting what we perceive the web as being.

All right, when the web first came along we called it an IT tool and we put it in

the it department then we kind of woke up a

bit and put it in the marketing and coms department.

So that's what-

So that's it, is it so.

That's all the web can do it's just a marketing tool screw that.

It's a hell of a lot more than just a marketing tool!

And we need to be opening our minds as to what it can do.

We haven't let digital change the organization.

And so many of the organizations that I work with

and I'm sure you guys do, are fundamentally digitally incompatible.

Because digital hasn't changed them, hasn't changed their mindset.

So they got top down leadership.

They've slow moving, strictly hierarchical.

Siloed.

The leadership hasn't got a clue about digital and how to use it.

And they're so internally focused all of the time.

They're just not set up and right for the digital generation.

You see the thing is when something new comes along we try to put it in a box.

And we all do this.

You're doing it right now with me.

If you don't know me, you haven't heard me speak

before, you're right now, you're putting me in a box.

Arrogant, opinionated.

Over the top Britt.

Probably, that might be one box you choose to put me in, You know, and so we

all have these different boxes that we put people in, but we also put new things in.

It's a, it's a natural thing, and it's a good evolutionary thing.

It enables us to quickly go this is like this.

So I can make certain assumptions.

Which is about how it will behave.

But then something comes along that is

so radically different to anything we've encountered

before that putting it into a box, saying it is like something else is inadequate.

And that's what organizations of people are doing with digital.

They're going the web, well that's a kind of marketing

thing or, or the web, it's a bit like print.

And for goodness knows how many years, we're designing fixed width

sites at 1,024 by 768, in this kind of delusional world.

And then we all decide, well actually, a million 60 grid works well.

So we'll have that delusion now.

We'll all build for that instead because it's a bit like print.

And then social media comes along.

Well that a big lie key, well isn't it.

We just broadcast our messages out and missed the fundamental point.

So we need to get beyond that and start thinking differently.

We need to allow digital to change our organizations.

A guy called Leroy Hood said this brilliant quote, he said bureaucracies are

honed by the past and can almost never deal effectively with the future.

And that is true with most of our clients and most of our businesses.

They've been honed by the past and can never deal effectively with the future.

And this has lead to some enormous failures, gargantuan failures.

Failures that just blow the mind.

Here's a few of them, right?

Birmingham City Council, now that's a council in Britain, right?

That's not even as big as a state, all right?

We're talking about some pissy little area, right?

Spent 2.5 million pounds.

Well, that's a gazillion dollars, because the exchange rate's good at the moment.

on, on a website.

That's 2 million pounds over budget.

On one website for one piddly little council somewhere.

The Department of Trade and Industry, which is a group in the UK,

this is a government body, all right, they spent 11 pounds 78 all said.

So that's about $16 per

visit to the website.

Every time somebody visited that website, it costs the British government $16.

For them to visit the site.

It's like, wa!

And then there's something called Frugal or Frugo.

Spent 14 million Euros, and how much did they generate in return?

100 thousand Euros.

Right?

You don't even need to know what Euro's worth to know that's a bad deal.

And there's the famous boo.com.

Boo.com spent $135 million in only 18 months.

How do you even do that?

I want to do that.

It's like, what was that film that was on years ago where that guy had to spend.

Bruce does millions.

That's what it's a, that may, you could've done it easily.

Bruce only needed to do was create a start up.

Job done.

Burn through money like nobody's business.

Then of course there's the famous healthcare.gov,

the shining example of your country's achievements.

Right?

Even better, even better than Vegas this is.

Right?

$319 million have been spent on

that website, set to rise to $677 million dollars.

Exactly.

But, even better than that, right?

The original budget was $93 million, right?

So, wow, what a big increase.

No, ignore the increase.

$93 million for a website?

Right?

Even if it, you know, [LAUGH] I want, have any

of you ever been paid $93 million for a website?

[LAUGH].

Don't think it, you know, it just blows my mind, and

it's because these people are thinking in the wrong way about digital.

They're thinking the most massive IT project, and they're going to huge IT

organizations that are spending a fortune

developing it, like some massive technical solution.

And it's not that.

Digital is not that.

It's something radically different.

And we need to stop thinking of it like that.

So it's time to adapt, it's time to do things differently.

But who's gonna make that

happen?

How are we gonna change it?

How are things going to get better?

[BLANK_AUDIO]

Now in some sectors, it's been survival of the fittest, isn't it?

Tower records have gone under, too slow.

And yet to some degree, it might be that, but for, it'd be

interesting to see, how many of you here, work in house in an organization?

Put your hands up.

Okay, so big proportion of you.

Right, well survival of the fittest isn't really gonna work for you, is it?

Because that means you're gonna be out of the job.

Right?

How many of you have got big clients that you rely on for income.

Yeah?

So you're all gonna be stuffed too.

The

rest of you can sit there feeling smug.

Right, so who's gonna do this?

You know is it going to be senior management?

No, I don't think it's gonna be senior management, I think it's gonna be you.

You've got to change your entire organization,

there you go, get on with it, bye.

[LAUGH] I, you know, if, you got it even harder

if you're not in the organization, well maybe it isn't.

It's, it's a toss up either way.

But if, if you're working with clients, you need

to get to them to change their entire business.

The reason it's got to be you is because there's no one else.

Right?

Senior management, they don't understand that there's a problem.

So is itt going to be them, is it?

Do you really want it to be some project

manager that's brought in and knows nothing about digital?

Are they gonna make the right decisions?

The only people it can be is you.

And that's quite an intimidating thing, isn't it?

Cuz I know what you're thinking is, you're thinking.

Well, that's not really my job.

I'm not employed to do that.

I'm employed to push pixels.

[LAUGH] Or to code things.

I'm the code monkey.

But you gotta say if not you, then who?

A famous person said that.

I'm not gonna tell you who cuz it was

Ronald Reagan and that makes to undermine it's credibility somewhat.

[LAUGH] >> Actually it wasn't.

It was originally said by a Jewish philosopher several thousand years ago.

Well there you go.

See, you learn something new every day.

It's like you know, yes we can, the Obama campaign?

He didn't come up with that.

That was ripped off of a, a, a, a BBC children's character.

Called Bob the Builder.

Says, yes we can.

So, so Obama is a massive big ripoff.

>> [LAUGH]

>> I bet his foreign policy's based on children's TV too.

[LAUGH]

I can say it, it's not my country, I don't care.

>> [LAUGH] >> We just do whatever you tell us.

Right.

Okay.

So it's not gonna come from senior management.

It's not gonna come from external consultants.

Cuz most of them don't have a clue.

Right?

Reuters and, you know, all these kind of big consultancy agencies.

They have no bloody clue either.

You know, they, they have people who digital strategists.

Cuz they just decided it'd be a good job title.

It's going to have to come from the grass roots.

It's gonna have to come from you guys.

Jonathan Kahn, in A List Apart could put it really well.

When he wrote, here's the problem, organizations are the context of

our work, and when it comes to the web organizations are broken.

So the truth is if you ever feel frustrated by

your clients organizations or by the place that you work,

you're gonna continue to be unless you do something, it's not gonna magically fix

itself i'm afraid and you know for years I waited, waited for something to change.

And I spent years and years you

know, building designs that were never properly implemented.

Or building websites that then got screwed up by the client.

Or, watching as the beautiful website I

launched slowly deteriorated over a period of years.

And eventually I got to the point where I had a choice.

Either I go and get another job, do something else for my life.

Or I try and fix the problem.

And I chose try and fix it.

Flight or fight.

Which it's gonna be people?

Today's the day to decide.

Are you gonna fight, or are you gonna fly?

I'm fine either way.

Actually either's a perfectly valid solution.

You might go with your company.

But you know what?

I can't be asked anymore.

I'm gonna go somewhere that appreciates me.

That's fine.

Cool.

Or you might be a, a contractor or a, a running agency.

You might go you know, kinda work that sucks, I'm gonna build products.

And that's all right, too, I'm fine either way.

But I wanna talk to those of you who wanna fight.

So, and also what's the worst could happen

here, let's thinks about this for a minute.

Right, what happens if you try and change the organizations.

You could be fired, all right?

[NOISE] Is that really a big of a deal?

Really?

In our sector, with people falling over

themselves to hire people with our skill set?

Screw it, let them fire me.

I'll go somewhere that appreciates me.

Anyway, perhaps I'm being naive.

Right, but then you say okay I'm up for giving this a go.

But I've got no authority.

Well, I wanna let you into a secret.

When it comes to this, leaders are not picked, they step up.

Nobody's going to pick you because nobody

sees there's being a problem that needs fixing.

And even if they did, to be quite frank, I think whatever the situation,

at the end of the day, it takes people to stand up and say, yeah.

I'm gonna, I care about this, I'm gonna make this happen.

I'm gonna change it.

So leaders are not picked, they step up.

So where do we start?

Well, I wanna look in the reminding of this

presentation at three areas that we can look at.

I don't necessarily have all of the answers to

these, but these are I think are some pivotal issues.

They are, they are essentially management strategy and culture.

Those are the different areas I want to look at.

Okay.

First of all, let's talk about strategy and having a strategy.

A strategy towards digital and making digital happen.

Organizations are shit at strategy.

They're great at goal setting.

Yes, we're gonna increase revenue by 25% by next quarter.

By pulling magical unicorns out of our butts, you know?

There's always a lack of detail about how these things are achieved.

Let's be clear.

That is not a strategy.

It's an aspirational goal.

And they've got their place, and I'm fine with those.

But that's not a strategy.

Strategy means that you, you have to prioritize.

And how many clients are crap at prioritizing?

Who's your target audience?

Everyone in the whole world!

Yeah, that's not a, I'm sorry, that's not prioritizing here.

What is it you wanna achieve through your website?

Everything.

Which is most important?

All of it!

You know, you know how it goes.

So we need to help them start prioritizing.

Many strategies are just vague ideas that are plucked out of managers' heads.

Others have inspirational goals but they lack detail.

A good strategy consists of three elements.

And the first of those three elements.

It's to decide what problem you're solving.

A good strategy should solve a problem.

It should address the fact that the number of leads are declining.

Or that we're losing long term existing customers because our support is slow.

Or we need to offer a superior service in order to compete with our competitors.

These are real problems.

See, you start by defining your problem.

And then you can start setting guiding principles

that help address the problems that you're working with.

Establish a framework within which you work

to decide what gets prioritized and what doesn't.

So for example, you might have a policy

of designing with data like Sarah Parmentier talked about.

I, we pick what color to use on the website,

not based on, on somebody, the fact that somebody was

traumatized in their bedroom when they were 12 and the

curtains were green and so therefore they don't like green.

That's not a good basis to decide these things.

But we use data to decide that.

That might be an example of a framework.

Or we don't replicate what other people are doing.

Have you ever had a client come to you and say, we want something like Facebook.

So that might be another framework that you work within.

Or putting user needs ahead of short-term business gains.

So look at gov.uk and do some searching on gov.uk in service manual and you'll

find some great examples of kind of frameworks,

principals within which you operate, so I'd encourage

you to start looking at those cuz they help you decide what actions you should

or should not take, a kind of plumb

line against what, which you can measure things.

And then you need to explore some specific actions.

Richard Rommel is one of the kind of foremost figures on strategies.

Talked about good strategy works by focusing

energy and resources on one or two, one

or very few pivotal objectives, whose accomplishment

would lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.

What is that actually mean in practice.

It means, that instead of building a micro site, for a specific campaign.

We are going to improve the cost of action across the whole site, right.

Which will improve, which will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.

Newsletter sign ups will go up.

E e-commerce.

Transactions will increase.

Donations will go up.

So it's identifying things that have multiple

favorable outcomes and focusing on those first.

So that's a little bit about strategy, I mean there's

so much more I could say but it really helps.

So for example, Sarah talked about a or b and b, didn't she

in her talk I don't know if you remember that but the professional photos.

And that is an example of an action

that they took that had multiple favorable outcomes.

Because the professional photographs dramatically increased revenue.

The properties were over the moon because they got professional photographs taken.

And it attracted people to the service on both sides, consumers.

And, and people with properties.

So have multiple favorable outcomes, isn't it?

So that's a bit about strategy.

Let's talk about management and changing the rules of management.

We need to update our out of date management styles.

Our management styles are left over from

the Industrial Revolution and the factory line workers.

In the Industrial Revolution, there were

low skilled, low paid, low motivated workers.

So you needed a manager to sit on them all the time

going do it, do it, do it, get it done, get it done.

But we don't live in that world anymore.

We live in a world these days where hopefully you guys are highly skilled.

Highly motivated and reasonably paid.

Right?

You don't need a manager.

You just don't.

You need leaders.

People to support, to inspire you.

People to accommodate you, to enable you.

So approach to management needs to start changing as well.

We manage digital all wrong.

We need to give our digital staff more freedom.

Freedom from endless bloody meetings.

Freedom from, you know, patronizing appraisals, and

all of this kinda legacy left over.

Freedom to work how they want.

Freedom to work on what they want, within, you know, some limitations.

Freedom to work where and when they want.

And the nine to five is ridiculous in the modern world.

It makes no sense.

And freedom from endless distractions.

We also desperately need death to committees.

Death to the stupid situation of everything having to go

through a web steering group, or some other archaic organizational structure.

Because, the problem is with committees, is they make no sense, right?

So, yes, we're going to have a new website.

So let's form a committee.

Who needs to here, and what stakeholders do we have?

We need someone from marketing, yes, the head of marketing needs to be on this.

And of course there's an IT

infrastructure, whoever head of IT on there.

Well, with the HR department needs to be involved.

So, they sit on it, and so it goes on

all right and then right we got a decision to make.

We need to make a decision about the design, look and feel of the new site.

Head of IT.

You're an expert on design.

You tell me what you think.

Right?

Or now we need to decide on, on our underlying architecture.

Head of marketing, what do you think about our underlying architecture?

Duh.

Doesn't make sense, does it.

You've got the wrong people making the wrong decisions at the wrong time.

What you need.

Is a responsibility assignment matrix, not as cool sounding as a committee.

Actually committee doesn't sound, I just wanna quickly show you this thing.

So you have different areas.

Right?

I think this has even got pointy thing.

Oh!

Exciting.

Right so we've got different areas here of like

branding, analytics, user testing, accessibility, et cetera, et cetera.

Different areas involved in the project.

And then with each of those ares, you

have different kind of responsibilities or areas of involvement.

Alright, so, for example, the responsible person

are the people that actually do the work.

All right.

So, that might be multiple individuals.

So if you've got designers.

You might have a designer from Combs who's actually doing the work.

Right?

Or if we're talking about user testing, you might have

an external contractor that does your user testing and so on.

Then what you have, and that could be more than,

it could be more than one individual, on those things.

But, then you have the accountable group.

And the accountable is one individual,

one individual where the buck ultimately stops.

Because that's the other problem

with committees is nobody's ultimately responsible.

There's no one person that you can say, Dave you screwed up.

Right?

So you need an accountable person.

Then you have those that have consulted.

And that's people that need to know what's going on

and also have got something to contribute to the process.

They're not a decision maker, they don't decide but

they are consulted and you ask them their opinion.

And then finally there's a group called the informed,

which are people that really don't need to be

involved in the decision making, haven't got anything of

value to add, but they need to know what's happening.

For their own things.

That works so much better than a committee.

It's so much more effective and appropriate.

And finally, in this kind of management

issue, we need to break the project mentality.

The never, you know, this kind of never-ending boom bus

cycle of we're gonna redesign the website every three years.

Makes no sense.

Websites Seth Godin said something and I thought it was really interesting, he

said, he wasn't just talking specifically about

websites but let's apply it to websites,

he says, websites are not like building a building, when you build a building

you plan it, you execute it, and then you do a bit of maintenance.

A website is like a garden.

You tend it, you prune it, you improve it on a continual basis.

It grows into itself over time as you understand more what users want.

So we need to end them these finite

projects, and the problem is management likes finite projects.

They like things that are over.

But there, the trouble is is these have become big projects.

And big projects will now overrun.

They go over budget.

They take too long.

We have moved away from that to a more agile flexible approach.

That's why I like our job cuz it's a

really useful tool for, to, for shifting management's thinking.

You can turn around and say hey,

we're gonna try a new project management methodology.

You say that, they like the sound of it.

Oh yes, new, progressive project management.

Wow, let's do that.

As you can shift their thinking.

And, and they like Agile, because they get to see results quicker.

Cuz you're putting stuff up on a beater sign.

Seeing things appear, rather than eight months down the

line, nothing's been launched and you're massively over budget.

So we need to start breaking that project management mentality.

An organizations need to start investing in your ti, in their staff.

Really, I'm talking to the wrong group of people, cuz you're here.

Right?

You're at the conference.

So many organizations just use up their staff and spit them out.

Don't put up for, with it.

I'm horrified at the low level of

investment that many organizations put into their staff.

Our industry changes at such a rapid rate.

That you have to be continually investing

in staff otherwise their skills atrophy and die.

You need to be sending them to conferences, getting

them training, and buying them excellent books like Digital Adaptation.

>> [LAUGH].

>> They need to be constantly learning, but

most of all you need to give them time.

Do you guys have time, to play?

To experiment, to try new things.

>> Yeah.

>> Good.

But a lot of you were shaking your heads.

That is so important, so important that you

have that kind of time available to you.

Anyway, again, there's so much more I could say on

that, but I am now running out of time entirely.

So I'm just gonna.

quickly, talk about management.

How do we solve this management issue?

How, managers who start, causes problems.

We need to apply our massive skill set, to our managers, all right?

Who would describe themselves as a kind of, I, I'm,

I'm afraid of using the word now, a UX designer.

All right, who designs interfaces?

Put your hands up.

Right.

So, you know, who would consider themselves user-centric, that you put

the user first, you like to understand what the user wants.

Put your hand up.

Okay.

So you guys, have got no excuse.

Apply those skills, to your management.

What makes them tic?

What do they care about?

We need to learn their language.

Speak in terms of return on investment, and do SWOT analysis.

We need to highlight threats in such a great way to managers.

Show them if they don't act, if they don't change things, what's gonna happen.

What are the consequences of carrying on as they currently are.

Right.

Show them your opportunities that digital offers.

Strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats, the SWOT analysis.

It's really easy.

It's not complicated stuff.

Anyway, so that, finally we need to just talk

quickly about, culture and turning the culture upside down.

Changing your own team and your own strategies is not enough, you need to

start challenging the culture of the organizations you work in and for, you

need to see if you can start instigating a culture that embraces and allows failure.

Start running web projects on maximum efficiency, that's left over

from the Industrial Revolution where the cost of failure was high.

If you make a mistake, you have to recall a product line.

Or you have to redo your print advertising.

We live in a digital world where it's easy

and okay to fail, to experiment, to learn through iteration.

And we need to try and get, create that kind of culture.

And that means proactively engaging with our colleagues.

Talking to colleagues about how digital can help them.

We cannot hide the way, waiting for people to come to us.

We need to actively pursue people and work with them.

And try and show them the potential of digital for them.

Because otherwise you're just a service.

Right?

I want to launch a new microsite, so I come to you to make it happen.

Right?

You're only ever gonna be pixel pushers or code monkeys that way.

But if you're going out and saying hey.

I noticed how this digital could help you in this particular area of your business.

Then you become something more.

You're not a service department but you're setting digital strategy.

You're changing the culture and how people perceive you.

Identify, what problems your colleagues are facing, by talking to them?

And then suggest how digital might be able to help them.

Meet with departmental heads.

Build relationships with your clients where you

can proactively suggest stuff, rather than being passive.

But most of all, do you know what?

We need to be educators.

Right?

You remember I talked about chief electricity

officer, didn't I, and how ridiculous that was.

You know what?

It wasn't ridiculous at all.

Make bloody perfect sense.

New technology, nobody knew how to use it.

It's only ridiculous now because electricity is ubiquitous.

And you know what, that's because the chief electricity officer did his job.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

That's our job!

Our job is to make digital ubiquitous,

across our organizations and with our clients.

Our job is to empower our clients, clients and our colleagues to

be able to use digital on a daily basis in their job.

Our job is not to become a silo for digital knowledge.

Now it's kinda scary because it means that

ultimately we're gonna do ourselves out of a job.

And in the same ways that there's no chief electricity offices anymore.

But that's all right.

The world will move on, we'll do something cooler, we'll be doing holograms and shit.

>> [LAUGH].

>> Right?

And we're talking about years away.

Our job is to educate, empower, equip.

That's our primary job.

Our job should be to build stuff.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

It's not enough just to build things to people.

We need to educate them.

And that needs a whole different skill set, doesn't it?

Soft skills, that we're shit at, because most

of us are on the Aspergers' [LAUGH] spectrum.

I can say that cuz I am what my son is.

So yeah.

We need to also instigate a service driven culture in our organizations.

The web has become a service platform.

Zappos, Amazon, Google have all raised customer expectations.

So it's so important, that we create

a culture that is constantly talking about users.

That there aren't just a handful of people in sales talking to users.

But everyone is.

As was said in the panel yesterday, we need

to be running regular usability test sessions open to all.

We need to be gathering and sharing data about user behaviour.

So there you go.

I could have said so much more.

I've kinda glimpsed the very surface of, of what I have

to say, you know, what have got to say on this subject.

Of course there's an excellent book you can buy for the rest.

What I'm asking you is not easy.

I'm asking you to step out of your comfort zone.

To, to cause waves in your organization to become the mavericks.

To risk arguing and disagreeing with your clients.

To have to develop a new skill set, of softer skills.

And to do all of this when no one's giving you permission.

Knowing that you will meet a lot of resistance along the way.

But if you don't do this, you're gonna be forever frustrated.

I don't know about you, but I'm fed up with that.

You will fail.

But please do not give up.

So many internal web teams I worked with said, yeah we tried that a few years ago.

And it didn't work.

And it crushed and defeated.

It's time to try again.

Now, I'm British, so I'm gonna quote Winston Churchill to end.

Winston Churchill said, success is going from

failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

That needs to be your mantra, as you try

and change your organizations with each, with which you work.

It's time to.

To change stuff.

Where this unique opportunity at the moment.

Where organizations are waking up to the fact that they can't just bolt on digital.

We can shape that change, if we don't shape

it, it's gonna people from marketing, or project managers.

And I'm, fucking not gonna let that happen.

>> [LAUGH].

>> We're the ones that are gonna change it.

And I wanna leave you with a little trailer, And also a URL, okay?

This is a, a trailer that, that we created for the book,

but it's a great thing to show to managers and clients, all right?

Because it shows them that things have to change, and can continue.

So here you go.

[MUSIC]

>> The web has changed, the rules of business.

[SOUND] The best practices of the industrial

economy no longer apply in the digital age.

What was once safe ground is no longer certain, and organizations need to adapt.

Sector after sector have been transformed by the new digital economy.

[SOUND] Newspapers have found advertising revenue and readership to evaporate.

Music retailers have shut their doors in the face of digital downloads.

And companies like Blockbuster have been

supplanted by digital offerings such as Netflix.

To think that your sector will be an exception is to

underestimate the profound impact of the web on society and business.

It will not be long before new post

digital companies begin to disrupt your sector, too.

[MUSIC]

Digital brings incredible change, [SOUND] and with change comes significant danger.

However, it brings opportunities too.

Opportunities to out maneuver the competition, [SOUND]

break into new sectors and transform your offering.

But adapting to digital is not a matter

of hiring some smart techies and sitting back.

It will require a willingness to change fundamental aspects of your business.

Change is coming anyway.

It's just a matter of embracing that change before your competition does.

>> Okay, check out that URL, right?

I'm so determined that we need to start shaping the organizations with

whom we work that I've put everything I can possibly think of.

To help you do that, at that URL.

All right?

So, you've got that video, you've got a longer

20 minute video where I talk through a lot

of the things I've talked about here, you can

download that presentation, customize it, use it however you want.

I've got a manifesto for digital transformation, which is

a nice little short document you can give out

to your, clients and colleagues to make, you know,

to, to convince them that things need to change.

There's posts on digital transformation, posts on web governance.

There's a digital health check on there, that you can do to

see how your organization is doing on the digital side of things.

And, all the rest of it.

So it's all there, check it out, and hopefully that will

enable you to change things for the better in your organization.

So there you go, that's your URL.

Thank you very much, guys, I appreciate your attention.

[APPLAUSE]