Hey there, fellow digital warriors! 🚀

Welcome back to another exciting dive into the ever-evolving world of digital transformation. In our last post, we discussed “STOP ✋ transforming 🚧. START 🌱 evolving 🔄!” Today, let’s deep dive into the burning question: why do we need to evolve?

The reason is pretty simple and arises from the fundamental differences between transforming and evolving. According to the vocabulary and evolutionary theory, transformation is an external push 🔨, whereas evolution is a natural 🌱 change influenced by both environmental conditions and the behavior of a species. This concept is well-illustrated by Darwin’s theory of evolution, such as the adaptive changes seen in amphibious species.

For the past 20 years, many digital transformations have failed because they were externally forced changes. Companies felt the need to transform to survive, resulting in external pressures on employees to meet new milestones without proper support or environment changes. This is where we went wrong.

Transformation is often seen as a quick fix, but it’s an illusion. Imagine repainting a company’s logo, plastering Agile posters on the walls, conducting massive training sessions, and pushing leadership to enforce new processes. Beneath this fresh paint, nothing significant has changed—the vision, leadership, and environment remain the same. The result? Burned-out employees and stagnant performance. Empty chairs are a stark reminder of the failed transformations. This situation reminds me of the 🦖 dinosaurs’ extinction process, where a too difficult and radical change killed them off because they didn’t have the time to adapt and evolve. This is what many companies are facing: a too harsh push forward.

This process is not only painful but also costly 💸. It destroys employee morale and company performance, leaving you back at square one. Despite adopting Agile, DevOps, and AI, your company struggles, stocks plummet, and leadership faces constant pressure.

At the upcoming XP2024 in Bolzano, during my talk “Behavioral Engineering at the Software Craftsmanship Dojo: A 14-year Adventure Empowering Over 15,000 Developers,” I’ll showcase how companies should start evolving instead of transforming.

The key is a holistic, data-driven approach that evolves the organization sustainably and rewardingly for all parties involved. As the Romans used to say, ‘do ut des’—give something to get something in return.

An evolutionary approach should look like this:

1️⃣. Clear Vision and Mission: The organization states a clear new vision and mission, an evolved one based on new marketing challenges, and sets bold and aspirational OKRs.

2️⃣. Supportive Ecosystem: The new direction requires evolution, supported rather than pushed by the board. Employees and leadership are offered an ecosystem that evolves them towards the new vision and mission.

3️⃣. Leadership and OKR Alignment: The ecosystem supports leadership in cascading and aligning OKRs from the board to the teams, using appropriate frameworks and coaching to shift mindsets from predictable to experimental.

4️⃣. Upskilling and Reskilling Dojos: Establish dojos for technical profiles, product management, agilists, user designers, etc., to help employees find the best way to evolve from A to B following market and technology trends.

5️⃣. Modernizing with Data-Driven Insights: Once the environment has a sufficiently evolved population, begin modernizing the company from a product perspective. Sustain this evolution with coaches who can correct dysfunctions using a data-driven approach, measuring flow from multiple perspectives: business, engagement, technical excellence, user satisfaction, etc.

By following these steps, you’ll ‘STOP ✋ transforming 🚧, and START 🌱 evolving 🔄’ your organization from a disengaged battleground to a thriving hub of innovation and passion.

– Stay tuned for the next ⏭️ episode, where we’ll delve deeper into the underlying principles behind this approach and explore why it works. Until then, keep evolving and pushing the boundaries of possibility! 🌟

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