History lessons for driving technology-enabled transformation

The big challenge for today’s enterprises is not just fixing legacy systems, but fixing legacy thinking.

Digital transformation has quickly become one of the IT industry’s hot topics, but it is not all good news. While there have been some clear successes, there have also been some high-profile failures. One of the key contributors has been a lack of attention to driving cultural change. Leading change is about leading people. It is about creating alignment, building commitment and constructing partnerships. This is not a new message, and variations have continued to resonate through the ages.

In recent history, much has been written in the media about the potential negative consequences of the internet and social networking. In 2008, Nicolas Carr wrote a popular article: Is Google Making Us Stupid. He argued that people were losing the ability to focus on detail and follow logic, because they had become more accustomed to skim reading information off the internet.

Carr was not alone in maligning the way technology development is affecting the way people are able to think. Indeed, there are many historical equivalents where similar claims were made about technology.

More than two thousand years ago, the classical Greek philosopher, Socrates, complained about the invention of writing, and that it might be having an adverse impact on people’s brains. He believed that writing “will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it. People will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing.”

Complaints about technology’s adverse effects have continued throughout history. In 1815, Thomas Clifford Allbutt (famous at the time for inventing the medical thermometer) complained there are “a number of nervous maladies resulting from living at high pressure — the whirl of the railway; the pelting of telegrams; the strife of business; the hunger for riches; the lust of vulgar minds for coarse and instant pleasures…”

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we now know the practice of writing did prove to be extremely useful. People did not lose their memory, but gained a valuable tool for recording far more than the human memory could have possibly contained. We also know that telegrams and locomotives did not fry people’s brains, and the internet did not create an epidemic of stupidity.

Good leadership needs to draw upon the same underlying qualities of human ingenuity that has helped humanity to adapt and succeed across the millennia. Today, we are again faced with challenges that are not just about managing projects, but also about leading people.

It is also time to consign the phrase “I am not an IT person” to the rubbish bin. This phrase no longer reflects business reality, and it is clear that the next generation of millennials frankly do not even care. Technology has become an inevitable part of the business landscape. It is no longer appropriate to cling to a past where it was the practice to separate the two. The big challenge for today’s enterprises is not just fixing legacy systems, but legacy thinking.