Or is it?!

I’ve spent the last 3 months building a transformative digital strategy for my business. Spending the early weeks reviewing articles from the big consultancies jumping to the graphs that say ‘A’ is better than ‘B’, conceiving, executing and analysing my own customer surveys looking for what the customer is doing and where, reviewing articles and info-graphics on ROI’s, KPI’s, and other metrics interrogating the information for insight and relevance, and so on

Having assimilated as much of this information as I possibly could, I discarded the majority of it! There was certainly a lot of data, numbers, reports, surveys, dashboards etc. but what became apparent very quickly was, there is almost no data or benchmarks that can be applied to either what I’m thinking of doing, or even the use of digital in my space! In fact a lot of the data I reviewed could if taken at face value have led to the production of a very myopic strategy, based on what is done today and the prejudices of those that have been in this industry for many many years.

The reason I bring this up is simply because senior leaders and executives often look for data to prove the potential of something. How quickly will I see a change? How quickly will I get my return on investment? How many sales will this lead to? Etc. However in the case of a digital strategy, it’s a theory! Although there may be data that helps support part of a strategy, a strategy in itself should be a unique, untested concept that will be proven out over a period of time. ROI’s, Sales or other KPI’s can be proposed but frankly they’re guesstimates.

So I started to wonder how many truly innovative digital strategies, concepts or ideas have been prematurely killed by the fear of not having a clear line of sight to a metric, or because a guesstimate was inaccurate or datapoint was not achieved on time? I suspect quite a significant number.

How do you get around this, after all this is nothing new? Well I propose 2 things.

The first is for the management teams and is a difficult one, but frankly if you’ve hired a great digital leader or team really shouldn’t be, and that is TRUST! Trust in the leap of faith your employees are proposing. Leave the data blanket alone and just believe in your team.

The second is for those building the strategies and will help with the above point. Keep both the cost and time of execution as low as possible, but without undermining your digital strategy in a way that it impedes the potential success of it. Look for POC’s and Pilots, keep the first set of deliverables manageable, and iterate iterate iterate.

As for my digital strategy, fortunately I have a CEO, CMO and leadership team that don’t mind calculated risks and in fact support leaps of faith! Me, I’m executing on my strategy and I hope many more can convince their leaders and peers that in the digital world, all bets are off!