Playing with every card in the pack
I like me a good cliche: change is the new normal, Thursday is the new Friday, an apple a day keeps the doctor away.
It is our privilege and responsibility to play with every card in the pack. To deploy every lesson learned, every advantage and every accelerant.
I like familiar phrases like ‘keep calm and carry on’ or ‘in case of emergency, take the stairs’.
I like the way a cliche helps organise our thinking, makes short work of convoluted explanations or helps fuel a joke: the shared familiarity laden with possibility.
But I am also wary of cliches.
Because they pack truth rendered innocuous by familiarity (which, as we know… breeds contempt). Not the looking-down-your-nose type of contempt, but the ‘overlooking the thing you have’ type… looking for better explanations and bigger truths.
Take ‘change is the new normal’ for instance.
It is true.
Truer than it was when we first saw the words boldly emblazoned on a PowerPoint presentation all those years ago. But, as I have said before and will no doubt say again, we have totally removed the shock factor of the phrase through sheer use.
It went from being a warning of dangers to come… the ‘there be dragons’ banking edition… to being something we say as we shrug away another thing we won’t get round to doing.
It’s in ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ territory… double points to me for delivering another cliche as well.
All these things are true. But in themselves they are not true enough to turn a tide.
If you eat one apple a day and fix nothing unless it’s broken, I can guarantee you, you will keep neither the doctor nor your competitors away. And yet for a long time, it is how we lived.
Arguably because if everyone was doing it… there was some sense to it?
But no.
Everyone was doing it because there was some sense to it. From a career perspective, if not an organisational perspective. Not rocking the boat made sense. And you know… eating a sundae made for a more enjoyable afternoon than the apple, so whatever.
And all the while, because the world was moving a bit too fast for comfort, and we were busy anyway… we started looking for silver bullets and unicorns. Single-issue explanations and one-stop-shop answers to the complicated questions of ‘what is my place in the changing world?’
While we were mindful to not take the elevators in a burning building, we were not so mindful of ensuring the building didn’t catch fire.
And look…
It would have been nice if a single POC or a single fintech partnership held all the answers to the future but, even in a changing world, that has been a constant: life doesn’t offer up magic beans and usually spits them out when you try your luck with them.
So that didn’t work, and the world kept shifting and changing.
Meanwhile, the political calculations, realities and constraints faced by change-makers inside organisations have also shifted but not radically changed, and that may be the only constant.
Because the world has shifted around our organisations… it has shifted radically, going from a vague perception that ‘digital’ was a channel and toolkit for our delectation (remember those days?) to an immersive digital economic paradigm wherein people earn, learn and spend online in ways and numbers that we had never predicted no matter what we say now. We knew it would happen, Jetsons style.
But it happened faster and more pervasively than predicted.
And although a lot of the realities inside our organisations have tried to keep with the times, overall, any organisation that had achieved scale in pre-digital times is facing an operating matrix of great complexity.
Tech from different eras, state of the art when it was built, and effective still… but needing different timelines, risk matrices and engineering teams to maintain it.
Budget constraints and new things that constantly need to be done, and with each new thing, the landscape becomes more crowded, the legacy estate more complicated.
The need to modernise is as old as the hills (were you worried I had given up on the cliches?) and just as treacherous.
As are the trade-offs and political realities of making big, bold decisions inside organisations.
And with every day that passes, the world out there keeps moving, evolving, shifting faster and faster because of Moore’s Law. The pace of innovation on existing inventions (system to system connectivity, smartphones and wireless connectivity will do) and the pace of adoption are not on the side of speed control.
So, change is the new normal, whaddaya know.
But it has been the new normal long enough that ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ becomes a treacherous compass. How do you measure ‘broke’? How broke does it need to be?
And who is in a position to tell?
That, friends, is the part where the story gets a lot less bleak, you will be pleased to hear.
Because while the world has been changing out there faster than our organisations in here… two more things have been changing.
The first one is ‘the things we know to be true’ collectively. As a species, if not as an industry. There are people and companies who have navigated the transition better than others. Who successfully migrated systems (and nothing broke). Who modernised (and nobody died). Who navigated hype cycles without getting distracted.
Who (hold onto your hats): switched systems off and stopped carrying the cost and operational risk of yesteryear.
If you want to eat an apple a day to keep the doctor away, in an analogy where your organisation is the patient and the doctor is the herald of ‘having left your modernisation efforts too late’, then here’s your apple: piecemeal, step-by-step, risk-managed modernisation tried and tested by folks who don’t need to learn on your time and dime.
That’s a change.
We didn’t have this 10 or 20 years ago.
These people were on their first rodeo then. Asking them to learn on your organisational estate would have been risky. I wouldn’t have done it. In fact, I specifically and resolutely did not do it.
But now? Now it’s a different story.
Now these partners, these toolkits have proven track records.
‘Let someone else’s child take risks’ is my mum’s motto in life, and in this case, someone else’s child did, so we are good to go. Not pioneers, but sensible operators.
Because that’s the thing: we don’t need to be pioneers and inventors. I mean… if it’s your thing, go be all those things. But our jobs are hard enough without needing to invent things from scratch.
Innovation within the bounds of a heavily regulated industry is hard enough. Safe, scaled adoption of new technology for the benefit of consumers, businesses and communities is hard enough and, frankly, worthy enough a cause to keep us busy for a while yet.
And it will.
Because that is the other thing that has changed, thankfully this time inside our organisations and the industry itself… while the world was changing out there and our systems and processes perhaps lagged behind… our people didn’t.
There are few advantages to getting older (although, everything is better than the alternative, truth be told), but one of the heady pleasures of getting older in the same industry is that I see the firebrands I grew up with in the trenches now in big jobs across big organisations. They are change-makers. They are digitally literate. They don’t need to be told change is the new normal: they are the people who put it on their boss’ briefing packs 15 years ago.
And now they are in charge.
They know that they need to prioritise and yeah, at times ‘it ain’t broke, so spend the money on something else’ will have to feature: when you have responsibility, you are not unencumbered. They know that what is ‘broke’ is a whole new category though. They know that they need to eat that apple and a whole load of greens to start maintaining a ‘fighting fit’ physique for their organisations.
They know which corners can’t be cut because they’ve been at the coalface of the last 20 years and every choice made and not made by those above them played out in front of their eyes and they probably caught the slack and backwash of it all… so they know.
They also know that while the world is changing rapidly and our organisations are where they are for all the reasons we all take great pleasure in repeating… it is our privilege and responsibility to play with every card in the pack. To deploy every lesson learned, every advantage and every accelerant.
And the truth is, having tried to find silver bullets and unicorns for a long time in this industry, and having learned the hard way that those things don’t exist… we have been doing the work over the last few years. Step by laborious step. Eating our vegetables and doing exercise and you know… accepting that there are no magic beans here.
Which is good, because there aren’t.
But there are accelerants.
And this generation, your generation, the people around the table in every room across the industry right now, know it.
They know it with the same certainty they knew that the silver bullet thing wouldn’t work, with the same certainty they know that there is no alternative to doing the work. They also know that doing the work doesn’t mean taking every dreary step alone: reinventing the wheel and being bogged down with questions others have already answered.
Sometimes taking the stairs is not good for you.
Especially if the building is figuratively on fire.
When time and simplicity are of the essence and there are people out there who can offer just that… not in magic bean form, but in a shape you know you can trust, because they have done what you have done in their particular swimlane: they did the work. And what that looks like from where you stand is an elevator.
You have spent the last 15 years getting here. And so have they.
You can keep dragging your organisation to the future step by weary step while the world keeps doing what it does.
Or… you can take the lift.
You still have to do the work. But you don’t have to do it alone. And if you are thinking ‘here comes the avalanche of cliches’ about teamwork and dreamwork and partnership, I say… nah… too easy. I will let you fill that gap yourself, the saying that best describes the type of partnership that suits you.
All I will say is, the last 20 years have been hard but not all bad. And the truth is ‘we have what we need if we use what we have’ inside our organisations… and between them.
#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.
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 X @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.
