Digital transformation, the discovery-driven way

Talking about digital transformation has a way of freaking people out. They then do the exact wrong thing, which is to throw money and effort at anyone who can promise that — Poof! — digital is right around the corner! Here’s a smarter way to approach it.

There is no doubt that the advent of digital technologies has presented executives in companies with an inflection point of enormous proportions. An inflection point, as I discuss in Seeing Around Corners, is something, typically outside the boundaries of your organization, that exerts a 10X change on the way you operate. Ten times cheaper, ten times faster, ten times more valuable — you get the idea. So kudos to executives for taking the future seriously and moving to prepare. But, before leaping into an immediate solution, think through the implications of a plunge into the uncertain.

The more things change….

When I co-authored the article “Discovery Driven Planning” in 1995, the lean startup was years in the future, we didn’t have concepts like “minimum viable products” or “agile” and people planned their big projects the way they planned everything. Big budgets, big targets, big teams, and a project management process that was based on a mistaken assumption: that in an uncertain venture, you actually know what you are doing.

What we proposed, instead, was inspired by the way we saw successful serial entrepreneurs go about building businesses. Rather than a big monolithic plan with a huge up-front…