I’ve always found the word “digital” as a big word. My internal “alarm bells” would ring when I hear it mentioned in corporate meetings. Personally, the word “digital”, has joined my list of “watch-out” buzz words like strategy, vision, data analytics and business algorithms. This group of words when mentioned in meetings require unpacking, contextualization and confirmation. The need further heightens when folks start combining these types of words together - What is our digital strategy? What is our digital vision? What is the brands digital algorithm?

They are important and critical topics but could mean so many things to different people. Moreover the topics most likely contain multiple layers of ideas. The use of these words requires a higher level of scrutiny. 

Digital technology’s ubiquity and pervasiveness in all aspects of our lives is in itself reason for us to apply “focus + slow thinking” when discussing this item in board room meetings. Leaders should step in to ensure clarity and eventually common understanding across the organization to translate these initiatives to meaningful results for the company. I would assume that most of the confusion happens in companies dealing with products, goods and services; where folks are trying to make sense of its impact or are distracted by the novelty to experiment on applying the latest gadget or program provided by a technology firm to their brand. 

In my experience, I found it useful crystallizing and guiding such discussions through a framework of filters and principles that help navigate around the “buzz words, jargons and exciting battle cry” uttered in such forums. I assume that most of this type of confusion happens to incumbent “product and service based” businesses figuring out how to move forward in today’s world. To share a couple of pointers I learned along the way, to those belonging to these types of industries: 

• “Digital as a priority agenda”, does not mean doing digital initiatives for the sake of digital. A nice sounding battle cry – but interrogating this slogan through the basic “5 whys” framework would most likely distils this to an urgency  to digitizing activities to ensure the company engages the market, acquire and analyse data to know how to better serve the customers as well as improve the health of our business. Anchoring the initiative to clear objectives ensures clarity all through execution.

• Ensure the discussions are properly contextualized by your organizations’ vision and mission. A question on whether “digital technology/solutions” is or is part of the company’s core offering helps set-up succeeding discussions on digital initiatives and resources.  Another way to ask the question – “is it the business or the way of doing the business?”. Anchoring the discussion by re-affirming first what value is the company creating for the market with its “core offering”. It questions whether digital is core to the organizations business model or is it an operating model. “Business models” are how the organization creates value for its customers and how this value is captured by the organization in the form of revenue. Note that it needs to deliver on both “value creation” and “capture” – in capture I mean monetized. Whilst an operating model is how an organization executes and scales initiatives whilst learning and innovating on their offerings. Ideation, proposals and eventually initiatives in this stream could be bucketed into either driving “effectiveness” and “efficiency”. An operating model is a business model only when it generates a clear value appreciated by the customer and captured as a revenue. I find this filter important as it grounds everyone on what the ultimate goal should be on any initiative.

• Key questions to asked - What scale-able value does this create over a length of time? Does it drive Competitive Advantage, Company Reputation and move the organization closer to its vision?   

• Ensure that you asked “down-stream and up-stream” questions when dealing with digital initiatives. People are at times blinded with the potential of the digital initiative and forget to broaden their queries to ensure that the initiative is feasible, scalable and sustainable. Blind sides usually involve existing systems, interdependence with other activities/departments, lack of infrastructure, talents and even culture.   

• Lastly one more coaching tip on such a big topic – “Truly meaningful digital initiatives would have a clear view on data”. I would always try to draw this out in any meeting or proposal. The scale of the proposal on digital is commensurate with an expectation on a robust stance on data generation and mining. I would view any proposal on digital incomplete without touching topics on data cleaning and integration, data hierarchy and usage on Data analytics. A robust stance on data is essential for the success of any digital project      
  

So, the next time the word “digital” is uttered in a strategic meeting, I hope that the thoughts shared triggers you to down shift to “slow thinking” – take a moment to apply these filters, to question and to distil. For when dealing with such “big words”, clarity and precision moves folks to action rather than an ambiguous slogan loaded with jargons.