So What? Change Management and Digital Transformation

Well, hey there. Happy Thursday. Welcome to another episode another episode of So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. Um I always want to say another, which is, you know, still proper English, but not very understandable. Uh today I'm joined by Chris and Ted Lasso.

We don't know what happened to John. Um he might be off fighting crime somewhere, like the superhero that he is. That's better than Flanders. I was I was worried I'd get Ned Flanders. I only knew it was Ted Lasso because I figured that was like the most recent pop culture thing with a guy with a mustache.

Recent mustache meme. Um today we're going oh my god John, where'd you go? Surprise reveal. Here we go. We're off to a good start.

So today we're going a little more conceptual than we are tactical, but the idea is that you can still start to think about how we're applying this to your organization. So today we're talking about change management and digital transformation. Uh what's the difference between them? Um, how these two frameworks work together and how you can apply these frameworks to your marketing. So before we jump into sort of like what they are and how to use them, Chris, John, when I say digital transformation, like what comes to mind for you?

And please keep it clean. This is a family show. Um but like what's your consulting fees. But what is your definition of digital transformation? That's right.

No job too big, no fee too big. That's the uh it's a classic Ghostbusters. This is right on the mark for 31st. Um yeah, it is funny, it's like fake news. It's one of those phrases that everybody throws around all the time, but that nobody ever really sat down to come up with a definition of the thing.

So you know, most people don't know what they're talking about, or they're just kind of peddling smoke and mirrors. That's my initial opinion. What about you, Chris? To me, digital transformation is the uh adaptation of the technology that the people and the processes in an organization to be digital focused or digital first. Um so you take, for example, a pizza company.

Um it just makes pizza and stuff, and you know, they have they they have you know ads and flyers around town and a digital transformation be looking at things like their supply chain, you know, can that be made more automated, more digital, uh, more real time? Um, can their advertising and marketing systems be adapted to be more digital, you know, mobile first, for example? And even if you want to get like wacky crazy, um, at the highest levels of digital transformation, you start getting into things like digital twins, where you would have the people, processes, and technology of uh real world thing replicated in a digital environment so you could run simulations. So you have a uh a pizza oven and you have this that it's a digital twin. And you could if the simulator was good enough, seem to okay.

What happens if we bake pizzas at 450 instead of 350? And you know, do we get faster pizzas? Do we get better pizzas? Can we cut costs somewhere? So that's sort of that that what that means is taking the existing business and finding ways to up level it so that it becomes more a more uh digitized business.

And when I say change management, what does that mean aside from another uh expensive consulting trick? First call, the change management is what divides like failed corporate projects from ones that actually work. You know, so many projects are kind of like, here's the tools we're gonna roll out over the next month, and it's just built around an RFP. But the reality of like, okay, this project is gonna, you know, this is how we're gonna get the people to come along with this and how it's it's gonna work. Yeah, change management is to me it's the most important part of most major corporate initiatives.

Like without it, you risk you know, obvious failure. Yeah, it feels like much more that it feels like a much more cup of soup kind of uh term, you know, like change management. You're literally managing change and you're you're trying to make change happen. Because like John said, digital transformation could be anything. It's you know, it really is a consulting buzzword.

I know change management and knowledge management and all this stuff are too, but they're like 90s consulting words, so they're kind of like ingrained at this point. No one's surprised when you hear them just like you know, if somebody brings up like 90s music, nobody's surprised to hear that like Green Day is mentioned in there, it's just part of the landscape now. Fair enough. Well, you know, I in preparation for this episode, I definitely did a bit of research. Um, and so you know, what is digital transformation?

It's the adoption of digital technology by a company, uh, and then some common reasons, and then what is change management? It's a collective term or a cup of soup, as you like to say, for all approaches to prepare support and help individuals and teams and organizations make organizational change. And so, you know, stepping back, if you introduce these two terms to someone who wasn't familiar with them, they might say, Well, aren't they just the same thing? And the answer is no, digital transformation is a subset of change management. So, in doing, you know, in looking through, you know, a bunch of digital transformation frameworks and approaches to digital transformation, a lot of what it cut kept coming back to is a culture shift.

And that's the definition of change management is that organizational behavior change. And so that to me says that digital transformation nestles in underneath the overall change management process. And the way that I've been trying to describe change management, because it is sort of a more conceptual. Um see if I can get this to work. Here we go.

Um, change management is sort of these five major pillars of purpose, people, process, platform, and performance. And so purpose being why are you doing the thing, people being who is doing the thing, process being how, platform being what are the tools you're using, performance being how you measure, and so really trying to break it down into that simple framework structure that you can apply to pretty much anything. So, what I did was I started to really think about change management at the organizational level and where digital transformation fits in. And so, what you have both been describing is digital transformation is really that adoption of new technology or moving from offline marketing to online marketing or from you know humans to machines or whatever that is, and that historically tends to only fall within the platform piece of it, but it's a missed opportunity to have that full range of change management. And so, as I was, and so full disclosure, I am not a you know big visual person like I'm a visual learner but I'm not great at creating those visuals and so what I had in my head was sort of that swirling vortex of a process within a process within a process within a process uh but I had a really hard time making that appear in Microsoft PowerPoint so this is what you get instead.

Um you know and so when I was thinking through change management for an organization as a whole you could easily see where digital transformation fits in. And so I really like to define digital transformation as a subset of organizational behavioral change, which is what change management is as a whole. And so you know I want to sort of stop there and see like what are some of the things where this is gonna go wrong where does digital transformation go wrong in general what have been your experiences seeing that the project was set up to fail. The first thing that always comes to mind with digital transformation is like AI it's where um somebody says we have to do it just to do it just to check the box just to look cool just to justify why we have to keep paying McKenzie to to sit in our office somebody comes up with something that says yeah we we've got to do this thing because it's the cool thing to do. And you know it's like everything that's that is pretty much a guaranteed route to failure because there's you know to the left hand box in there there's no purpose behind it.

And there's no purpose. It's going to fail. Yeah. And I like that you've put guardrails around it and said that the digital transformation happens on the platform because one of the things we see all the time is a failure is when people try to digitize the process or reporting and revenue, you know, performance stuff where they just buy some tool and bolt it on without any consideration about where it's going to fit into the whole platform. And so I that's I really like to see that there because yeah, you you can't be just kind of slapping up, you know, automating all this stuff without any kind of plan as to where it's going to go, you know, five years.

Well, maybe maybe you can't look five years ahead, but at least look at your existing tool stack and figure out how is this stuff going to integrate into the platform we've already got, because otherwise you just, you know, you get silos and fiefdoms and all kinds of headaches down the line. Or worse yet, you get problems that affect departments that outside of your own scope, you know, you make problems for accounting, you actually make life worse elsewhere in the organization. Yeah. Uh because part of what digital transformation is trying to accomplish is a culture shift. The fact that it doesn't overtly uh include the teams, the people, the long term, sort of like think about it like the spider web of like how many other people, the customers, like the accounting team, the finance team, you know, the IT support team.

Like, are those people even taken into consideration when you purchase a license to, you know, a brand new platform that you're trying to band-aid, you know, an issue with without sort of really thinking through what are those widespread uh impacts of bringing on a new tool or you know, even something very simple, like, you know, and this is sort of the rant that I've been on, but let's say that you're a new business and you've been mostly brick and mortar, and you're trying to, you know, build a digital presence, you know, it may be a small business, but there are still implications of you know, setting up a Facebook page, setting up a simple, you know, um website, who's going to maintain the website, who's going to update the social media every day, those kinds of things, and thinking through like going digital actually includes a lot more people than just you. You just may not realize it or have the resources to do it. So when I start thinking through, when I was sort of describing this process within the process, what I first did was I nestled digital transformation into the full change management process. But then what I started to do was flip it around and then nestled change management process into every single one of these buckets. So sort of walking through the scenario as if an organization were looking to, you know, digitally transform.

Well, we want to know the purpose is what are the goals, who are the people, what are the efficiencies, and how will we actually do the thing? Uh, what are the platforms, and then how do we measure it? So it's sort of at a high level playing out the scenario of an organization undergoing some digital transformation, introducing new stuff basically. And so I won't sort of spend a lot of time on these other ones, but basically what you do is you take change management, and then it's sort of the process within a process within a process. So if you start with the business goals, you then apply the same change management process to that first goal, so purpose.

But then you have what's the purpose? Who are the people, the process, the platform, and the performance. And so as you are outlining your business goal of why you're doing change management, you still have to understand like who are the people who are making the decisions that these are the business goals? What other factors do we need to include? Do we have, you know, um stakeholders and board members who need to weigh in on what the actual goals are?

Are we setting the goals ourselves? Do our customers dictate some of this because you know they have bought into, you know, this like a farm share or something, so they have a stake in it. Um, how do we get to understanding what those goals are? What platforms are we using to capture the information that tells us you know what the goals are? And then how do we know that we've met the goal?

And so you can see you can sort of like keep breaking it out, you know, a framework within a framework within a framework of you can include the five P's into each one of these little bullets, which again would get very, you know, cuckoo bananas on a screen, but hopefully I'm explaining it correctly. Uh, Chris, you look like you're sort of like mulling over. Oh, not anything specific to this, it's just it's a fractal. So if you're familiar with fractals, you know, they are essentially every piece is a you know has its own piece of the same thing replicated, you know, infinitely downward inside of it. That's exactly it.

And so it's I would venture a guess. Um, and John, you talk with a lot of you know, prospects and you do a lot of interviews. Have you found that anyone, like as they're setting up their business goals or as they're thinking through like what do we want to do next year? Are they really taking the time to plan it out to this extent? Or are they just like, um, let's increase by 10%?

Oh, yeah, they're always missing this whole mix. You know, everybody looks at platform, maybe at process, they're driven by performance, but you know, people on purpose sometimes are just totally missed, you know, just not in it whatsoever. I like I can't there have been so many times where we've seen a team buy some kind of software, and literally none of the users even know that it's coming, like they just get notified that, like, okay, next week you're gonna, you know, log into CRM.com, and that's how your life is gonna run every day. And you know, better orgs that actually look at people would would have had those people involved in the cycle, you know, months ago. Um, so yeah, having this kind of structure where you you're applying some rigor to doing these projects just makes a huge difference.

Because yeah, again, I've seen so many failures with every crashed project, you go and there'll be at least one to four of these missing. Well, and I think you know, you just said something uh really interesting. Uh, you use the term rigor, and so it's that rigor, it's the you know, uh almost like militant, you have to do it this way. The people are like, I don't have time to go through all of these steps. I don't have time to do business requirements gathering.

I just need to set the thing up yesterday. And so I can't follow anything that's rigor. And so what's interesting is that this is actually meant to be fairly agile. Um, and so I don't know that it comes across that way in the visual, but the way that I approach change management is that it's meant to be incremental. Um, and so you get those small wins uh over time so that you can start to adjust the plan.

Uh so let me just kind of scoot ahead to uh the change management sections because again, you can apply this to your people. So, you know, what are you trying to do with people? You're trying to retain them. What do you need to do? A feedback loop, how do you you know measure it?

What's the success rate? So you can apply the same five Ps to every single one of these things. Same thing with efficiencies. So here we're at digital transformation, because that's really sort of the crux of what we're talking about. So why do people want to undergo this transformation of digital?

Um, and so from what we can tell, you know, some of it is innovation, some of it is you know, to keep up with their competitors, you know, some of it is, you know, they don't really know why. They're just sort of like introducing a new tool because somebody said, Hey, there's this new tool out there, and they're like, ooh, shiny object. And so, you know, to the points that you both have been making, it's a lot more involved in that. And it you can very easily do it wrong because you're not thinking through. And so when I was thinking of applying the same 5P change management, these are some of the high-level buckets that I came up with.

What have I missed from your experience? It's not that you missed the thing. I have a question, which is internality versus externality, uh particularly in the purpose section there, those are are listed very clearly as internal purposes, right? We want to beat our competitors, we want to innovate and stuff. But the biggest digital transformations happened over the last 18 months for a lot of businesses because of an external event, namely the pandemic, saying, guess what?

You can't have customers in your restaurant, like you must do something else. And so it's an external event. So does this structure change or how like I guess better questions? How does a company, particularly like you were saying we when you were starting off talking about some of the smaller businesses? How does a company approach digital transformation when it's being forced upon you by the outside?

Um, and you have no control over a lot of the major factors other than you either stay in business, you adapt and stay in business or you don't. Well, I I would say that the structure, the approach doesn't change, but the answers to the questions themselves do change. And you actually pointed out something really, really key that I was hoping would sort of like come up in conversation is that when companies are going through digital transformation or any kind of a change, they tend to forget about the customer. They focus only on themselves and how will this affect me? How do I feel?

What is my job entail? You know, what do I now have to be responsible for? Why am I not included in this thing? But they don't really think about including their customers or what's going to happen to them. And so you're absolutely right.

The example of the pandemic completely just sort of rocked the way that people had to be doing business. And so if you didn't currently have an online presence, if you were a brick and mortar, you had to scramble to figure out well, what is everybody else doing? What's the best way to meet my customers where they are? I don't know where my customers are. And so before introducing some sort of a digital presence that you may not have currently have, you first need to do that research.

So you're not even ready for this stuff. You need to figure out where do my customers hang up? Who are my customers? Do I have that information? Does it all live in a spreadsheet or post-it notes, or do I actually have a CRM where I can mine that information to say this is the general profile or profiles of my customers, and I have a better sense of where I might be able to reach them?

And then you can start to figure out okay, the purpose of doing this digital transformation is to reach my customers where they are online, versus I just want to be competitive to Joe down the street because Joe has a website, I don't have a website, so I should have a website, and so it's a very interesting way to think about it. And you're right, it's absolutely a missed opportunity because people companies tend to forget that their customer at the end of the day is who they're doing this for, not necessarily just themselves. Customer centric digital transformation. I mean, I just I got a little bit of a headache when you said that. No, but it's true because one of the things that we've constantly had disagreements with with certain clients is looking at a major strategic initiative and saying, Did you talk to any customers at all?

Um, you know, or even more important, you are not set up to be where the customer is. You know, we were looking at a product earlier today, uh, that really the the audience for that product really is people age 60 and up, right? And this is in an industry where all the growth and all the customers are 30 and under, right? And so, you know, uh you you have just a massive disconnect that a digital transformation won't help them because they're calibrated on the wrong audience. So, how does that fit in here?

Where you could is that more of a a even higher level strategic thing where you can even say, like, look, digital transformation is a waste of your time, you need fundamental change management to say your audience is literally dying. Yep, that's absolutely it, and the hope is that by asking people to step back and go through these steps, like these five Ps, they would start to uncover, like, oh, maybe this isn't something that is actually the right thing. You know, that's sort of like the idealistic way to look at it. Like, oh, they will learn a lot by going through this process. The answer is they won't.

They're still going to do whatever it is they want to do. Um, but ideally, before you even sort of go into any kind of a change management project, big or small, you've done some research to know that this is the thing that we want to do because this is how we're going to measure it. And so, you know, thinking about you know that performance step, if you are not measuring the right thing, you're not going to get great performance. And so, you know, Chris, to your point, if they are focusing only internally, yeah, great, everybody is now using Facebook uh internally, but then when you step back out more to that bigger picture where digital transformation fit into the overall organization, well, what happened? Did we get more revenue?

Do we get more customers? And then you'll start to see where it fell apart. And so that's why I was really thinking through it's a process within a process within a process. Or what did you call it, Chris? A fractal.

Walk me through though. Walk me through a change managing a change that you don't want to make. So I'll give you a real concrete example, Katie. A lot of people, over a billion people now, are using TikTok on a regular frequent basis, right? It is where a lot of new memes are coming from.

A lot of uh culture is coming out of Katie. What is our change message? What is our transformation so that we can become relevant to marketers who are interested in using TikTok? How do we change ourselves to adapt to that? Given that, you know, as as my uh peers in in my Discord service, I say I I'm one of the olds.

TikTok TikTok is not for you. I'm like, please, I'm here in Discord. Well, even though I'm younger than you, I'm older than you spiritually because I don't have a TikTok. Um and I still, for the life of me, cannot spell it the way they want to spell it. I have to add a C in there, but that's beside the point.

So honestly, where we would start is the purpose. Like, what is the purpose of setting up a TikTok for trust insights and really digging into understanding if we do this thing, what is going to be the benefit to the company? So, you know, if you're going through this exercise and you're saying, well, the purpose of setting up TikTok is to stay relevant, I'm gonna go ahead and slap you on the wrist and say that's not a good enough reason to do something. Like, what is the benefit to your business? Because it always sort of needs to tie back to the so what?

Why are we doing this thing? Like if it's if the answer is to drive awareness to the personalities of trust insights so that people can get to know us better on, you know, for our own pro personal brands, that's a better reason than just because we want to stay relevant, because then it's not the company as a whole. We're not creating trust Insights TikToks, we're creating Chris Penn TikToks, John Wall TikToks, and Katie Robert TikToks. So that to me is a different application of it. And so we really need to get to dig into the purpose.

And so, you know, this is off the cuff. I don't know if this is the right or the wrong answer, but I would say I don't know that TikTok is where trust insights as a company needs to be. But I could be wrong. I have a lot more research that I need to do before I can definitively say that. And so that's where I need to start is understanding the true purpose of why we need to make that change.

So then if you play out the scenario of let's say that we find out that all of our customers, our ideal customers are on TikTok, they're users of TikTok, then that's where we're going to get all of our new leads from. Okay, great. We need to start to set up that TikTok account. So our purpose of setting it up is we need to set it up so that we can get more quality leads of people who want the services that we offer. So the people, well, who are the people who are running this account?

Is it we're all running this account? Is just Chris running this account? Are we going to torture Katie and make her run this account? I mean, that's a great question. So who are the people?

Do we need our you know, friendlies to, you know, have guest cameos on the account? I don't know how it works. Maybe you can like link to other accounts and share other people's stuff. And so like Instagram. Oh, okay.

Well, that's helpful. Um, and so it's like you need to figure out like who are the people who are involved? You know, do we need to maybe bring think about bringing on like a TikTok expert or a social expert to the team who can run this thing for us? And then what's the process? How often are we posting?

You know, how are we creating the content that goes on to TikTok? Um how, you know, how do we extract, you know, anything from TikTok in terms of you know, meaningful metrics platform? We assume it's TikTok, but can you just post directly to TikTok from your desktop, for example? Do you need to have something like an Agora Pulse that you can then link to and then post and then schedule? And so there's a lot of it may be more tech than just you know the app on your phone.

And if you have the app on your phone, can we all access the same account from each of our individual phones? And so thinking through those things. And then the performance is so what did we get new leads from TikTok? Can we measure and attribute those leads from TikTok specifically? So that's me foaming at the mouth for like five minutes on TikTok.

No, that's good. I mean, from what I've seen, because I'm on there you know a couple of times a day. Um, is that for marketers, our customers, our customers' greatest needs are very much like what you just said. What the heck are we supposed to do with this thing, right? Like you know, all these kids are on here, and it really isn't just kids anymore.

It's not it, it's a lot of ages, but the perception is it's still just a kids thing. But so you have all these people, you know, sound like Mr. Burns uh or grandpa Simpson, but what are these kids doing here? You know, how do and and with a billion users, we you can't really ignore it anymore. Um and I I see our purpose as a company as helping people helping folks understand the data coming out of it so that they can make you know, to put the performance at the bottom here is helping them make data driven decisions with data about TikTok.

Like, how do you know this thing? So we had a client um a couple of weeks ago. Um, no, it's it was last month and last month's attribution reports. Suddenly TikTok started showing up in their attribution reports, and we're like, What'd you do? And they're like, Oh, yeah, we got these, you know, with this one influencer just you know, picked us up and started sharing our stuff.

We're like, that's cool. What are you going to do about it? They're like, We don't know, we don't know how to use the thing. And so like, I I feel like there's some data-driven decisions here. We've got the data, it's telling you to make a decision, but from a change manager perspective, you're not ready to make that decision.

So does that cut does that company just lose the opportunity because they're they're simply not ready for it. Yeah, well, they have to. I don't I think people get wrapped up in the you know, all the buzz for this, but when you boil it down, it is just a video channel, right? I mean, and the problem is you're handcuffed in that it's you know, 15 seconds, 60 seconds, or three minutes, which for us is like not even enough time to set up the problem, you know. I mean, we and now not to say that that's because we're too advanced or our projects, our products are too crazy.

Maybe that's a blind spot for us. Like, maybe we need to be doing more sound bite stuff and boiling stuff down into you know, 15 minutes two of somebody getting punched in the crotch, and then 12 of, you know, hey, if you had better analytics, you'd be able to do some cool stuff. Visit Trust Insights. Not at um, yeah, it's it's uh, you know, I I mean, part of me is like, yeah, TikTok is just an open sewer, like it's all a bunch of sound bites, you know, and it's it's garbage. But the crowd is there, and yeah, you already see.

I don't know, I've been following some marketing TikToks, and it's a lot of it is like the hey, let me tell you in 30 seconds how to you know do these five SEO things. And I don't know, to me, I want to kill myself watching that. It's like, yeah, these are the three most topical, you know, garbage tips ever. But you know, there there are people out there that's their first time hearing those things. So if they watch that and then they click through to get more content, that's it.

But yeah, I don't we I don't know, we're just our culture is long form video, like that's just who we are. Um, but again, not to say that maybe we don't need to think about how to get in there, but yeah, that is hilarious. I could totally see clients like throwing some videos out there and being like, oh, wait, these caught on fire, what do we do? And they just have no idea that's deer in the headlights still. Well, and that goes back to you know the crux of change management, which is that cultural change, that organizational behavioral change.

And so, you know, John, you and I are in a slightly different camp than Chris because Chris tends to stay more up to date on the latest and greatest, you know, whatever's out there in the internet, whereas you and I are both like, well, if I can't create a 45-minute webinar, then what's the point? I can't describe the thing. Like, how do I break it down? Like this is where the kids are, and so that's a cultural shift for us is to start to rethink what where do we have a place in some of these new social media uh platforms? You know, do we have a place?

Is it worth you know, testing it? What does that look like? What do we do? And that's that culture shift, which goes back to change management, which is how this digital transformation framework came about, is it's using the change management framework to do some sort of a digital transformation. And in this scenario, it would be does trust insights belong on TikTok.

And so you run through all of these things, and then you come up with some sort of a proof of concept of let me test it. Is it working? Okay, let me go back and readjust and see. Did we get the right purpose? Did we measure the right things?

You know, should we have, you know, a third party running it for us versus ourselves because we tend to deprioritize it with everything else. And so continually learning from you know what we're doing and restarting that change management framework, that process over and over again. One of the things I think digital transformation does really wrong too is where people lead off in this. Um a lot of folks start on the platform, right? They start here's the new cool technology.

And it's interesting hearing all of us talking, you know, in the example of TikTok and stuff. The first indicators of a need for change come from people. They come from listening to people. So, you know, the the difference between the three of us about why I know some of this stuff earlier is with the people we hang out with. Right.

So I spend a lot more time probably online than than both of you do. Um and I spend time with a lot of very, very different people who are way outside our market of you know, B2B marketing professionals, which is typically who we hang out with because they they're usually our customers. Um, you know, in one of the Discord servers I'm in, the average age of the server is like 17, I think. Um so it's like super, super young kids. I've got a teenager upstairs of my own.

And the people part is where all those things are are are coming from. You listen to people like, oh, like what are you talking about? You know, they're they're you know, playing Gardeck Phone or Among Us or Cards Against Humanity online. It's like, huh? What are all these things?

You know, just poking your head and going, Oh, that's interesting. Seeing people using stuff in ways it wasn't intended to be used, like how people curate Spotify playlists and stuff. I it's funny to hear people talking about how you know how music discovery happens and watching other people doing it, going, that's not at all what the the marketing trades are saying is happening. Like that's that's you know, that's not reality. So, how do we help companies and and customers and ourselves become more people-led, even in digital transformation?

So, you know, it you're absolutely right, Chris. Like, I don't think John and I spend nearly as much time, you know, in those forums that you do, but that's just who you are. And to your point, you have a teenager at home. I don't have kids, and so I don't have that person, you know, coming into my life every day saying this is the new latest thing. Like, I am relying on myself and my group of friends who aren't marketers, but who are very similar to me, of like none of us really use social media all that much.

Um, you know, and so you know, I tend to read a lot, and so sometimes I've learned some new things through reading. Um, you know, not always, it's not always going to be as up to date as like real-time internet chat rooms, forums. I don't know. Clearly, I'm not using them. Um, because in my brain, I just brought up an AOL chat room.

I think it was the last time I was in a chat room. So I'm but what John and I need to do is maybe set aside like you know, an hour a week on a Friday and have you just sort of walk us through. Here's all the stuff that I, you know, experience this week in the forums. Here's the stuff that I learned. Here's the stuff that could be interesting for you guys to go research more on to see how it fits into what we're doing at Trust Insights.

And so that way you are like so. John and I aren't necessarily changing our everyday habits, but we're changing the way that we think about some of this information because you are driving that culture and asking us to research more and get more involved. And so you're sort of acting as that filter of like all the other noise and just bringing sort of the stuff that we should explore a little bit more. And that's sort of how that culture shifts starts, you know. And so that one, if you sort of play it out, the purpose is to get more up to date on what's happening online.

The people, well, Chris would be sort of the main research lead, and John and I would be the research assistants in that scenario. The process is, you know, once a week we sit down and say, what's new, what's different, what do we need to learn? Platform. Well, it's wherever you feel like getting your information from. It sounds like a lot of it is Discord, there might be some other places.

And the performance, the measure of success is did we as a whole, as a company, start to introduce new technology into what it is that we're doing to drive awareness, to drive leads, to service our clients. And just boil it down to 60 seconds. There's your TikTok. We could do like TikTok for olds. That would be it.

Oh, John, we would be so good at it. You kids in your sus. What is this sush? Did I shut it off? Is it still recording?

What does this do? Dude, I think we've already got it. That would actually probably do astonishingly well, particularly if we all got like the Ted Lasso mustaches. That's right. Me especially.

Excellent. Um I do want to uh bring up so someone from LinkedIn had the comment, sort of going back to John, your comment about rigor. Um, and this is exactly it. This is the issue with a lot of digital transformation is the desire for shiny objects versus a resistance to rigor and transformation reminds me of the gimmicks and fad diets versus the pain of diet and exercise, we all know actually works. That's absolutely true.

And so using a process like the five Ps of change management, it sort of gets you out of that ability to do it as a fad diet. Like it forces you into that, okay. Let's find some consistency. Let's see if we can repeat this, let's see if we can do it, you know, today and tomorrow and the following day, and if people have a good communication plan so that they understand what it is that's happening. One of the things that's not in here that needs to be called out a bit more is that communication plan.

And so it's fine if you list out, you know, okay, Chris is gonna start, you know, researching TikTok. Um, and then Katie's gonna start running the TikTok account. Well, I can just put that down on paper, but if I never actually have a conversation with Chris, or if Chris never tells me what we're doing, then this is already set up to fail. And so that communication is absolutely key to this whole thing is it's fine to write it all out on paper and write the plan to start doing the thing, but if you don't tell people, if you don't set expectations, you're still set up to fail. That's just that's the fact.

You're gonna fail. It lands like a rock, though. It's so true. Because yeah, that's like the million dollar quote from our LinkedIn guest there. Is there's so many times where we go in and everybody wants the shiny thing to see what's in there, and then after all the digging is done and you find out where the problems are, suddenly there's just never the willpower to actually go work on the problems or fix the things.

Like that's the greatest challenge that we face is yeah, we can use these analytics to get down to the truth and what you need to do next. But now, you know, do you have the um the drive to go do the next thing? You know, are you gonna change the campaigns you're doing? You know, I'd we I can talk all day about doing a TikTok video, but am I gonna crank one out by the end of the day Friday? Uh, that's a tough call.

And fundamentally, it always has to come back to the people, and so if the people are the problem, nothing's gonna change. And we talked about the few weeks ago uh when we were talking about Facebook, right? You know, because of the ownership structure, Facebook will never change because the uh the the leadership, the which is the problem can't be changed out, and so you know, the it comes down to the people when you have a consultant you know coming and saying you need to do digital transformation to to modernize your organization, and the people don't change, then you've got expensive new toys with the same old people. That's exactly it, and that's why, at least from where I sit, digital transformation is nestled under change management as a whole, because if you want to make a culture shift with digital transformation, what you're talking about is an organizational change, and an organizational change needs to be done in a methodical way, in a thoughtful way. You can't just say, All right, we're gonna use this thing now.

Nobody's gonna want to do it. Everyone's gonna resist and go, Why? How does that affect me? Where do I fit into this thing? Do I even get to use this thing?

Why can't I play with the shiny new toy? And it's just like you you can go ahead and try. I was gonna say you can't do it, but the answer is you can do it that way. You absolutely can do it that way. I guarantee you you're gonna fail if you try to do it that way.

So the answer is to eliminate people. Again, I feel like you've not listened to a single thing I've said in the past 40 minutes, Chris. I've quoted this to you before. You're like, I'm driving this train, where did the passenger go? Um, so another uh question that we have from LinkedIn is is part of that inevitable failure, the perception of the magical trans transformation, yes.

Uh, when we should behaps uh be talking about an incremental evolution, that's exactly it. And so, you know, part of why I'm saying that you know, change management needs to be agile versus this sort of waterfall static rigor, is you can't change too much at once and have people feel comfortable. Think about it from your own personal life, you know. Um, we've used the example of exercise, we've used the example of you know any other thing. If you suddenly wake up tomorrow and start to try to run a marathon and you've never run before in your life, it's gonna suck, it's not gonna go very well.

But if you incrementally do like a couch to 5K, or okay, maybe I will do 10 minutes of cardio today, maybe I'll do 15 minutes of cardio tomorrow, you know, and start to incrementally build upon what you're doing, that change becomes easier to adopt. And the same thing is true of a digital transformation. If you say, okay, we've never been online before, we've never had a digital footprint. Tomorrow we're introducing 20 new tools that you guys have to just go ahead and figure out and use because we need to be digital, that's not going to work. So you need to start with, okay, what is the most critical thing that we need to start with?

All right, let's build a website. What are the elements of building a website? Let's start there. Then you can build out, like, okay, now that we have a website, maybe we should have an Instagram account. Okay, now that we have an Instagram account, maybe we want a newsletter.

If we want a newsletter, maybe we should have some sort of a marketing automation system. And so building upon it, and that whole plan can be written out, but my suggestion is you don't try to do it all at once. You build the thing, you let it sit, sort of see how it's doing, and adjust that before you move on to the next thing. And that's the idea of that agile methodology built into this more rigorous process. Okay, so what?

I'll ask I'm always asking. So what now it's you gotta go do the thing? Yeah, yeah. Now you gotta go do it. Time to go crank out some TikTok vids.

Well, so John, uh, we definitely gave you a to-do, so you're cranking out um TikTok videos this week. So that's the um you know tradition of giving John a to-do list. Um but I would say the so what is if you're an organization that is looking to try to undergo a digital transformation, I would say you need to stop and think is like why why are we doing this? Who's affected by this? How are we gonna do this?

How are we going to measure success? Which is the purpose. Unsurprisingly, is those five P's of change management. And so if that's the so what. If you can't answer these five questions about a project that you're working on, I need you to stop what you're doing and just sort of take a step back and you know see if you can try to get the answers to these questions.

Or I will come and eliminate you. You heard it here first. All right. Well, as always, folks, if you have questions, you can hop on over to our our Slack group analytics for marketers. We'll have a bit about that uh in just a second.

Uh any final uh uh thoughts, Katie, in terms of what like what people should be doing. Is it really just do that first stop and like consider uh what you're doing? Yeah, it's you have to stop, you have to collaborate, and you have to listen. Ice is back with a brand new edition. With that, we out.

Oh god. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it for more resources and to learn more, check out the trust insights podcast at trustinsights.ai slash TI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at trustinsights.ai/slash analytics for marketers.

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