Achieving growth in the digitalised economy

I recently have been in discussion with a technology company offering end-to-end digitalisation to large companies. We made some cogent points about achieving growth in the digitalised economy:

• Customer experience will be more important than operations efficiency in delivering sustainable growth (digitalised operations will become commoditised)
• The ability to shape experiences with digitalisation will create value – and we can argue that this applies across the value chain – experiences shape behaviours and patterning of collective behaviours
• The compelling proposition will come from understanding this and it is an area in which it is still possible to genuinely compete

Having acquired a leading applied design business, they see the ” … benefits of end-to-end innovation offerings that integrate applied design thinking in the fuzzy customer-facing front end, as well as middle office business processes and back office IT applications …”.

In the following chart I offered a dynamic view that can illustrate this:

The focus point is on how ‘Experience’ drives economic value creation:

• Enabling customer outcomes – how we help customers achieve experiences and outcomes that are important to them and for which services, brands and products are foundational to achieving these
• Building relationship, values and trust: emotional and intellectual commitment to the outcomes and the relationship – seems paradoxical in digitalised economy but think Apple Support …
• Establishing value over time including customer value through loyalty and repeat business in an age where switching and choice is made easy (vs revenue)
• Providing end-to-end process quality and benefits becomes part of creating the experience
• Creating employee commitment to create positive experiences for customers whether directly (behaviours + knowledge), on line or fulfilling everything in full and on time at the right price

The chart illustrates the power of creating experiences people want and are prepared to pay that bit more for. Digitalisation of operations and supply chain will drive down costs and improve efficiency – but will it also eventually commoditise basic operations platforms?

If you would like to discuss how we can design and facilitate workshops for your creative and technology teams to explore these ideas and how to apply them to end-to-end innovation please contact [email protected]

Posted by Stephen on January 13, 2015 on  Action Learning Associates Blog

Reflecting on the current winter crisis in the NHS, manifesting in ‘critical incidents’ being declared by a number of Hospital Trusts, I was reminded how complex ‘leading’ in the NHS has become. The focus of this article is on how action learning can provide a powerful process to support NHS commissioners as they grapple with complexity, change and difficult choices.

Dealing with complexity and change in NHS commissioning

Working in 2014 with a number of Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) leaders on strategy development and service model design, I could see the real challenges of prioritising resources today with the need to implement whole system change over the next five years in order avoid the kind of crises we are hearing about this winter. Whilst grappling with budget limitations and in some cases inherited deficits, CCGs’ own resources are limited. CCG leaders are stretched, working across portfolios and are often involved in day-to-day operational matters as well as strategic commissioning and leading change.

In health and social care we are seeing an unprecedented level of complexity facing commissioners relating to whole system change whilst managing in today’s environment (see side bar).  Overlaid on this are the current budget challenges, the political and public involvement in strategy and service prioritisation and the ongoing re-forming of NHS governance and structures.

The pressures, confusion and dynamics of the environment are massive for these leaders. Where can they go to step back, to make sense and meaning of this complexity and change?

Action Learning as a space to explore complexity, change and leadership

In an action learning set we have a number of leaders participating who will bring issues to work on through the group-led action learning process. This is essentially a process of inquiry into the issue and has the effect of enabling the person bringing the issue to explore its different facets. This could involve their own impact and feelings about their role in addressing the issue, exploration of the wider system dynamics and stakeholders and thinking through what is needed to achieve results. This exploration in a set of peers is reflective, supportively challenging and facilitates new thinking and perspectives – leading to action.

We work with the idea that in an action learning set, each participant is bringing their experience of the ‘system’ into the room. This means in a set of peers – in this case health and social care commissioners – there is shared understanding of the system and how it works. The action learning process however, encourages participants to identify and suspend assumptions and to focus on the issue through ‘inquiry’ – open questioning and reflection. This enables the issue bringer to open up to new ways of experiencing and thinking about their issue, and also, under the surface, all members of the group are opening to new ways of experiencing and thinking about their specific issues. This creates a rich process for collective learning about leading complex change.  Specific time in the action learning set is available to share this learning and what it means for leading change.

An action learning set working in this way has the potential to learn together through this inquiry–action–reflection cycle across sets and the issues explored. The learning together will be about leading change in the complex health and social care system. The role of the set facilitator is to support both the individual and the group learning process – to enable insights about system change to surface and explore what these mean in taking forward action.

At a recent session of Action Learning Facilitators Forum (ALF) I ran a session on project-based action learning which examined how action learning can be integral to a business change programme (see previous blog “What comes first, the project or the Set?”) The second part of our workshop explored two models of action learning that can be used as integral to a business change programme and which supports delivery of change projects.  Groups explored the models concentrating on the following questions: What are the strengths of each model? What questions do they raise about the application of action learning? What’s the role of the ‘facilitator’?

I recently ran a session on project-based action learning for the Action Learning Facilitators Forum (ALF) with some 20 people.  We had a lively dialogue about how to construct a learning process around complex change projects, and how action learning can be integral to a business change programme. My blog on this was published by my colleagues at Action Learning Associates and can be found Here.