Assuming you are not dead

My little godson was in town last week.

Open-ended plans rarely come good. When do you know the work is over?

He likes it here. He is a well-travelled little mite and he knows he likes it here which suits me just fine.

So we were negotiating when he will be deemed old enough to travel to London by himself (he is four, so not quite yet was the verdict). But he is looking forward to it, in a vague and open-ended way. As in, it’s a thing that he likes the sound of… that will happen at some point in the future by some means that are unclear.

In fact, he looks forward to it the way we all look forward to our digital transformation being complete and our organisations being battle-ready for the future (see what I did there?). In that open-ended, directional, non-specific way we define digital strategy across our industry. Planning bordering on wishful thinking.

But unlike most bankers, wishful thinking wouldn’t do for Gideon.

“How do you know you will still be here, when I am bigger?”

Good question.

I tried answering convincingly but he remembered that I wasn’t born here. That I haven’t always lived here. What guarantees could I give him that the offer was real? That I would still be here to host him when he was big enough?

Plus, there was more uncertainty to this plan the more he thought of it.

“How do you know you won’t be dead, when I am bigger?”

Another good question.

And I don’t.

I mean, at some point I will be dead, inevitably, and I hope it will be many years after he’s done getting bigger and when he’s started getting older himself. But he was right. I was making a promise that was too open-ended and non-specific.

In fact, I was making a promise that, in its current form, I couldn’t guarantee that I could keep. Me keeping it was possible, but the variables were too nebulous. Too much was left to chance.

Do I need to spell out the parallels to digital strategy or are you happy doing it for yourselves?

Right.

So back to Gideon. The promise didn’t hold water, he decided. So, we reframed it.

The way maybe, just maybe, your strategy shouldn’t be ‘doing the digital thing’ only with better vocabulary and expensive slides.

Our plan became, for as long as I am alive (which is an open-ended proposition truth be told) he can come hang out wherever I am. And we can always come back to London together, if I no longer live here. And he would quite like to show me Hawaii actually. So we have a slightly richer plan now. More places. More planes. Some of it is a lot more immediate. The variable has stopped being ‘when he gets big’ because he decided to let his parents tag along to avoid an open-ended wait. And I am just tasked with not dying, which, as jobs go, I like.

It’s a cute story. But that’s not why I am telling you.

If a four-year-old can work out that the loosy-goosy part of a plan may mean the plan won’t come good, what excuse does a business executive truly have?

And look, I am well aware I have a very special four-year-old on my hands, a gem of a child with a very sharp take on the world for which I can take zero credit and all the joy. But special and smart as he is, he is four. And yet. He worked on the loose ends of the deal. He called out the parts that were impossible to commit to and adjusted them.

How can it be that almost two decades into the digital journey, we still see open-ended strategies that allow for variables to be listed but not managed and dependencies acknowledged but not mitigated? How can it be that we spend billions on ‘progressing’ without a clear sense of destination and journey duration?

And of course, some of this is unknowable (how long will I live? May I move cities? What new technologies may come down the pipeline?). Gideon knew how to take an open-ended promise (you can come here when you are big… so your equivalent would be ‘you can have a digital estate that enables full participation in a digital economy with viable unit economics, scalability and security) and turn it into an actionable set of plans (he will come back to London with his mum because that can happen sooner than being grown up. She can also join us in Greece. And now we are going to Hawaii because I promised before I even realised what was going on and if you don’t keep promises made to a four-year-old, you are scum, frankly, and I am no scum). So, what would your actionable plans be?

It would be working out if the important thing is to keep travelling or be in London at a specific time in the future. You know which one Gideon picked. What have you picked? Are you done talking about platform economics at conferences while still struggling to price an API call back in the office? While still fighting internally over the ‘cannibalisation’ of your existing revenue streams as clients demand digital services? Did you really expect that everything would be additive revenue?

Seriously now?

Are you still looking for guarantees of future growth before you commit to the journey?

I am not really asking, you realise. I know the answer already.

And all I am going to say is, open-ended plans rarely come good.

Because how do you know that you won’t waste time and resources ambling in all directions? How will you know what’s working and what’s not? How will you know you won’t be dead by the time this work is done? And, frankly, if it’s open-ended, when do you know it’s over?

Gideon and I would rather go to Hawaii than wait around for death.

It wasn’t the original plan but as he pointed out… the original plan was no plan at all because nobody could tell him when it would happen, what would trigger it and what would protect it from derailment.

He likes his plan better. And so should you.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.

She is a recovering banker, lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem. She is chief client officer at 10x Future Technologies.

Leda is also a published author – her first book, Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition, is available to order here.

All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!

Follow Leda on Twitter @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.