A 15 Minute Foreplay™ Conversation with Mike Stopforth

In this conversation Bronwyn Williams and Tumelo Mojapelo talk to Mike Stopforth about the importance of knowing when and how to pivot your business.

Bronwyn Williams: Hi, I’m Bronwyn Williams. We’re back with a Flux 15 Minute Foreplay™ Conversation. We’ll be talking to different thought leaders from all across the world about different aspects of foresight and thinking ahead when it comes to both your personal journey as a leader and of course your company or your organisational journey too. 

And today our guest is Mike Stopforth and Mike we wanted to ask you about the tool that you’ve been using over the last few years to help leaders navigate the different types of change that are available to organisations, particularly when it comes to overlaying technology and everything that comes with it in terms of the amplification and the increased speed and velocity that technological change brings to organisations. So can you talk us through your transformation matrix or model that you use to simplify the choices available to organisations? 

Mike Stopforth: Sure Bronwyn, thank you for the opportunity to share some ideas. I think what’s uniquely challenging about emerging digital trends and technologies for so many of the organisations that I’ve worked with is that they seem like in many instances shiny placebos/opportunities to magically solve challenges that have been endemic or systemic for a very long time and my job really is to help negate some of the hype and the buzz-worthiness of these emerging trends and technologies because I think sometimes they can be distracting and I think sometimes we can rely too much on technology or software to solve problems for us rather than understanding the underlying principles that make those trends and technologies possible and rather making decisions about them based on our understanding. 

So I’m really interested in this idea of digital literacy or digital capability building. There are several large consulting or accounting firms that have induction programmes that include a base level understanding or introduction of emerging technologies. One of them is called TQ which stands for technology quotient, obviously, both on IQ and EQ, as consultants love a fancy phrase, but I think that they’re really on to something there and that we all need to be looking after our TQ, our digital quotient if you like, our understanding of fundamental basic computing principles because I think if we understand how things like processing power work and we understand things like storage capacity and bandwidth and we have some grasp of trends like decentralisation which fuel topics like Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and the blockchain_, then these emerging technologies and trends aren’t a surprise, they’re an eventuality, they’re a likelihood and instead of looking to them to magically solve our problems for us, we’re looking at them through the lens of feasibility. Do they make sense for our organisation given the limitations and the challenges that we face, maybe our internal complexity, maybe the level of technological infrastructure we have access to right now and maybe even broadly speaking the level of technological literacy in our business? 

So yeah, I’m really interested in elevating that level. Just a final thought on digital literacy. GIBS, the organisation that you and I have a privilege of working with on these programmes, has run for many, many successful years, a program called Finance for Non-Financial Managers, a programme I did a couple of years ago because unlike you, I’m not an economist and I don’t find the world of financial literacy easy to navigate and I’ve never been strategically financially oriented but you reach a certain level in business where if you’re not financially literate, you’re negligent and I believe the same to be true of technology today. I think as leaders there is a level of responsibility that we have for developing our technological literacy, our digital literacy, in the same way that we would our financial literacy and a failure to do so is borderline negligence on our part and so yes, I’m excited about a future where GIBS has a digital for non-digital managers programme alongside their Finance for Non-Financial Managers programme. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: I love what you said about how in today’s day and age you have EQ, you have IQ and now you have TQ, right? How do you gauge as a leader, especially in the face of uncertainty, if you even have TQ? Because assumptions that we have…  these smart devices that we use every day, people think if they hold the cell phone or if they can type emails on a laptop, they have some form of digital literacy. How do you know, like, what is, like, the five-step plan, like, what questions do you need to ask yourself, like how do you gauge what your TQ is? 

Mike Stopforth: For business, one of them is that older people struggle with technology and younger people find it easier and maybe there’s a degree of truth in that generalisation which is a byproduct probably more of the circumstances in which we grew up, more than anything else. What I’ve realised is digital literacy is more than understanding how hardware works. It’s more than having an ability to code and that might be helpful for some people but I know many coders who are really capable engineers but struggle to understand the communication dynamics that come with the digital realm. So it’s more than just the kind of technical bits. Yes, it’s helpful to have some degree of understanding of the technical underpinnings of the digital world but I think we also want to understand how digital tools and trends are changing society which is your realm. It’s how these tools are impacting the way that we connect, communicate, that collaborate, maybe even form relationships today and then how that might look in the future off the back of some of what Bronwyn has already mentioned, the intimidatingly rapid rate of progress that we see happening in the worlds of digital development, AI and so on and so forth. 

Diagnosing your level of digital literacy is really tough but I guess one of the ways is to have an honest conversation with yourself about how technologies are tools around the boardroom table or in conversation with colleagues or when you’re visited by somebody who is trying to sell you a service or a new tool or a new product, how comfortable do you feel that you can be authoritative and credible in that conversation and I think if conversations that are around digital tools and technologies initiate a level of fear or concern then that’s probably a good indication that there’s work to be done on one’s DQ if you like, one’s level of digital literacy. But having said that, it’s a very broad realm so you can have a deep sense of literacy and in data and analytics and still struggle with digital communication and I guess that’s the reality of this universe. But broadening your understanding as much as possible I think can never be a bad idea. 

Bronwyn Williams: I’ve got another question and Mike, when it comes to adopting technology and developing your digital literacy, how do you know when that is a necessity and when that is a nicety? In other words, when do you have to use technology to actually change and when can you and should you use technology to do what you’re already doing better and more efficiently? 

Mike Stopforth: Cool, yes, so Bronwyn, I think that there’s two ways to think about the role that technology can play in addressing organisational or systemic or delivery challenges. The one is to think of technology as an antibiotic, so… a magical solution to our inefficiencies or our dysfunctions and the other one is to think of it as an amplifier, so something that takes what is already working, what is already good, what is already efficient, what is already productive and just makes it bigger, more, you know, kind of gives it more reach, gives it more exposure, makes it easier to access and hopefully delivers a better experience to the customer or employee at the end of the day. Now it is possible in some instances that technology can help us leapfrog inefficiencies or dysfunctions or something it’s just not working or to innovate, create something entirely new in a realm that maybe we haven’t explored before and the stories of those types of innovations and digital expeditions into the unknown are varied and exciting and very inspiring to us. But sometimes when we intend for technology to play that role, actually lands up playing the role of amplifier by default so if we’ve got a inefficient customer service protocol in our business and we decide that we want to use an AI chatbot to fix that and the chances are that it’s going to make the inefficient customer service protocol just faster and it’s going to deliver our ineffectiveness to our customer quicker rather than solve that and make it easier, so yeah, making sure we know when we want technology to play the role of antibiotic and when we want it to be an amplifier A is really important and secondly, not mistaking the one for the other is critically important as well, otherwise technology does tend to expose parts of our incapability that would rather our customers not subject to. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: Is there a model that we can use to be able to determine, like, where we are on this journey, like, so like you just said, we have to decide if it’s going to be an amplifier or it’s going to be an antidote,  right, or temporary fix, right? How do… so how do we know what to do in… what are the stages, like, how do we gauge and what would the process be as an organisation? 

Mike Stopforth: So it’s again really difficult to try one formula as an answer to that question that will apply to all organisations of all sizes, shapes and levels of digital maturity but one of the frameworks that we’ve offered our clients, a diagnostic tool if you like, is something we call DARWIN. So DARWIN is an acronym that starts with a conversation around data which we would call the foundations, the DNA of digital, and then looks at things like automation AI and algorithms and then looks at really fancy deployments of those technologies into experiences of augmented and virtual reality or robotics and then we would look at decentralisation under the category of Web 3.0 if you like, IoT and then finally the borderlands of digital innovation, things like nanotechnology, biotechnology and the future of quantum computing and so on. 

And what we’ve tried to do is help our clients understand that as a progression, right, socialising, the idea that you can only do the really cool and innovative stuff if you have great foundations in place and then allowing them to, I guess, score their understanding or rate their understanding of those different areas of capability and then explore ways to advance their understanding in turn. 

The other reality of technology is that it’s not just about those verticals if you like. There’s also a horizontal function that technology plays in most of our clients and that’s probably the best description of digital transformation that I’ve come across yet and I’m going to try and get this across succinctly, is the project around improving your systems so that you can collect and organise and distribute useful information to the right people in the organisation at the right time. In a knowledge economy the business that has access to the very best insight which is a byproduct of the very best information is going to have the best competitive advantage and for me digital transformation is the exercise of getting that insight to people more efficiently than anybody else can. Obviously said that simply, we are… we’re bypassing all of the complexity that comes with legacy infrastructure and all of the billions of data points we could possibly have access to and the obvious problems of getting that to the right people in the organisation at the right time but assuming you could achieve that I would argue that you put yourself in as digitally a transformative position as humanly possible. 

The degree to which you can answer that question confidently, we are capable of getting the right information to the right people in our organisation at the right time, rating yourself I guess on a scale of zero to 10 where 10 is we can do that without any hesitation and zero is we don’t even know where to start. That is in some ways a way of diagnosing your level of internal disruptibility, the opportunity for people to displace you because they have access to and can act on better information than you can. So there are several ways of diagnosing one’s dependence on technological change but ultimately it comes down to an honest conversation with oneself about how capable you feel when it comes to responding to change, that really is the, the ultimate metric. 

Bronwyn Williams: Okay, so I have another question in terms of now not looking at technology from inside out as to how you can run your business more efficient for your problems that you’ve identified, now looking at technology from the other way around from outside in, when it comes to leadership looking at the pace of technological change when or what indicators can you advise people to look out for, or signals that technology is a threat to your business and your business model and when technology is an opportunity for your business to either… again as you talked about, use it as an antibiotic or as an accelerant –  but that’s both I would say in the opportunity quadrant where technology can help your business to grow or to go faster or to do things better at a better degree of quality or an efficiency. But there’s that other side of technology when technology can disrupt your business and can actually make you, force you into a period of change with… where an antidote and an accelerant would not be actually the correct solution for you going forward. 

Mike Stopforth: I guess there’s these three levels. One is that that macro level where Open AI has made Chat CPT available to the public and everybody’s publishing stories that say the world is never going to be the same again and there’s something happening at a global level that you can look at and go wow, like there is technological shift here that I should probably be paying some attention to. My caveat to that is that those things are almost always overstated and that we should always temper our response to those with the underpinning principle that you can quite safely assume you have more time than everybody’s making you believe you have to respond to those changes. Then there’s more proximal metrics.

So one layer down would be at an industry level. You’re a cardiologist and a new piece of technology has been introduced that allows for a level of intrinsic scanning that you didn’t have access to before now. It’s a case of going, okay, like I’m being affected at a competitive level here and that this particular competitor has access to this technology and I don’t and I need to fashion a response or plan a response to that in some way. But even then we might find that adoption of that technology or that practice around that technology takes that particular player off in a direction that opens up space for you to operate in another realm so it is even then not necessarily a determinant of success or failure. 

And then I think the third metric would be if we see an external technology having a significant impact on our most critical metrics, whether it be customer churn or you know price point, so whatever it might be, then I guess we would have to figure out a way to respond to that very directly and sometimes that can become… that can be because those macro technologies or trends have become more proximal and are affecting us on a on an intimate level. But that would obviously require pretty immediate and deliberate response in the interest of keeping yourself alive. 

Bronwyn Williams: And then one last question from my side. This is more a management question … I certainly worked with clients in the banking sector who had invested a whole lot of money in new technologies and I’ll give you one example without mentioning names. They invested a whole bunch of money into this new voice recognition software to better protect their bankin g clients, right, to biometrics by voice seemed like a very good idea at the time… invested a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of technology but then I came along to do a workshop on the future with them and I happened to bring along some case studies about how exactly that technology they just adopted in the UK had just been exposed to a massive data breach and massive security risks because it turns out, cloning people’s voices ask Scarlett Johansson and the like is actually not that difficult when it comes to AI… so how do you go about disinvesting in technology and walking away from sunk costs when it turns out you’ve moved in this direction, the markets moved here, without demotivating your troops and your corporate culture? How do you walk away gracefully from a place where you’ve led people, where you now have to lead them in a different direction? 

Mike Stopforth: Yeah I’m gonna… that, that’s, that’s such a big topic. I mean one of the reasons why we don’t talk about IT anymore, information technology, is being the domain of innovation and and our technology, our proactive technological response as an organisation is because the department that we called IT was poo pooed by the failures of all the investment that happened into big ERP in the late 90s, early 2000s, and service providers that these tools were going to magically solve all of our problems and what has happened to IT, is that it’s become in many instances a department focused on damage control and and essentially catering to the inefficiencies of, of the software that we spent a lot of money on.

It’s really difficult to know when to cut costs and reinvent versus fix existing infrastructure and obviously there’s so many variables that, that go into that mix. One, one of the ways to do that is by spinning off innovative little battalions of capability that are independent and autonomous responses to that change, that… one example of that might be an organisation like Multi-Choice choosing a vehicle like Showmax as a response to an emerging threat rather than trying to reinvent the whole DSTV architecture to, to respond to streaming. But the reality of that situation is that we are inherently even on a kind of cognitive capability far, far more aware of the costs of changing, so the costs of new software or new infrastructure and new investment than we are on the cost of not changing… 

Tumelo Mojapelo: The final question I have is you may mentioned the cost of changing versus the cost of not changing, right, and I’m a leading… I discover that I need to change . How do I pivot? 

Mike Stopforth: Sure. Again a really, a really tough question but I think that there are one or two thought experiments that can help the willing pivot here, orientate themselves towards meaningful change and my favourite thought experiment is one that I stole from an author and public speaker called Tom Goodwin who wrote a book called Digital Darwinism. And Tom says start with the question, what would this business, or this business unit, or this product, or my service, what would this look like if I built it from scratch today? And how would I build it if I…  if I had none of the legacy thinking or infrastructure or, or pain or bureaucracy from the past to, to deal with? And, and if I, if I, if I look at what I would create, if I sketch that out as an idea, as a utopian possibility, what are the differences between the thing that I would create and the thing that I have, right? And then when I look at those differences what are my reasons for those differences and what you’ll realise is there are some reasons…  that have behind them really, really great reasons, like really, like, maybe I’m protecting thousands of jobs by doing it this way and that we could argue is a very good reason especially in our context but you might find that there are other things that have very few good reasons supporting the way that they are other than the way we’ve always done it, right? That’s how we do things around here and for those things I think if you’re looking to pivot that’s where the easiest wins are, is… that’s where the, the most meaningful change can come in the shortest period of time is…  is angling yourself towards the thing that you would build by displacing the assumptions or the, the, the things that we do that have very little logical value underpinning to them. That would be one starting point but obviously every, every case, every scenario and every project is different.

Tumelo Mojapelo: Thank you so much Mike for your time. I think we could talk about this forever because I think me and Bronwyn have so many questions around digitisation, digitising, pivoting your business especially with regards to, um, using technology, integrating it. For those who are viewing please continue to look at our other 15 minute conversations. Like, subscribe, share and also just, like, follow Mike on his social media platforms just to get more context and more depth on how to actually pivot your business model from one, especially technologically, from one point to another. Thank you.

By Flux Trends 

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