Transformation Is a People Problem

The Financial Times ran a headline recently: seventy per cent of transformation projects fail, and everyone is ignoring the same fix.

I want to start somewhere else, because "transformation" is a nearly useless word on its own. Anything can be a transformation. Moving a mailbox is a transformation. The only question that matters is what you are transforming to.

Everyone is talking about AI right now. Almost nobody is saying where they are actually taking the business. And if you cannot answer that, AI is not an accelerant upwards. It is an accelerant downwards.

A room full of customers who saw no value

I was at an event recently that made this concrete.

A business stood up in front of a room of its own customers and talked about the great things it was doing with AI. Customer experiences improved. Everything faster.

The customers' response was blunt. We do not see any value in the transformation you are doing. Yes, you are going faster. Going faster does not mean anything for us.

That is the whole failure mode, in one room, in one sentence.

It is a classic misunderstanding of your customers. And saying the words "it is not about the tech, it is about the people" does not make it true. That was the other thing being said in that room — it is not about the tech, it is all about the people, we want to provide value to our shareholders and stakeholders. But if you are not providing value, plugging in AI and announcing that you are going faster does not mean anything.

The fix was available the entire time, and it was free. Have a conversation with your customers.

A human understands humans better than AI does

We would all love to make our lives easier by automating things. But some things are simply better done manually, and a customer conversation is top of that list. A human can understand humans better than an AI can understand a human.

If those people had just had a customer conversation, the whole thing would have been so much easier.

Are you even doing the basics right?

The second half of this is cost. AI and technology cost time and money — so before you spend either, have you got the manual process down?

A good example from my own work: how do I go out and get leads? There are plenty of AI platforms and tools I could use for that. But the reality is I have to do a brain dump into the tool first, and that is a real time investment. Then the outreach it produces is impersonal and cold. So it does not even end up working.

It was actively worse, and a bigger waste of my time, than doing the thing manually the way I was supposed to.

The biggest transformation we ever ran had nothing to do with technology

We are going down a data science route as a society, and data is great. But data about people is not the same as understanding people — as an angry room of customers at a networking event will tell you for free.

The largest transformation we have had in our own business was the change with people. It has literally changed everything. We changed our people processes, and the result is that people work harder and, more importantly, they work on the right problems.

When we talk about transformation using technology, yes, we could replace all of those processes with AI. But what does that actually look like in terms of outcome?

Nobody cares that you put AI in your business

Transformation is just a change. Nobody cares that you added AI. They care about the outcome.

Microsoft's Copilot is the clearest example I can give you. When Microsoft first talked about Copilot, the messaging was all about AI, and it was not about capability. It landed flat. When they started saying use it to do your Excel spreadsheets, use it to create your PowerPoints — that is when people got hooked, because they could finally see the time saved.

Not talking about the technology. Showing what it can do.

In transformation projects, people do not get interested when we talk about how good AI is. They do not even get interested when we talk about how AI needs to be people-first. They get interested when we start with the people and work backwards.

Better than talking about how good AI is, talk about what is changing for the people. What is actually getting better for them.

And getting better does not mean getting faster at doing the wrong things. Better means a genuine shift towards value — for your customers, and for your people.

One more thing I took from that event: never talk about how good your business is in front of your customers. They do not care. They care about what is changing for them.

Where to start

If you are considering a transformation project, this is what I would recommend:

• Look hard at your process before you touch the technology.
• Have real conversations with your people, and write down what you hear.
• Define what is changing for your customers, not what is changing in your stack.
• Only then ask what technology actually serves that.

This is where transformation really hits the road, and it is how we work: we help businesses start with people and start with process before we even look at the technology. I think that is a big differential.

If you would like a conversation about data and transformation, come and have a chat with us. We would be happy to help.