Embrace change and collaboration like a digital native
- Summary:
- A missed session and my dislike of conference apps set me thinking about why digital natives are better than us oldies at embracing change and collaboration
It all started because I didn't download the conference app. I had been joking about this in a break with a colleague. Why was there no printable agenda on which you could mark up sessions of interest with a pen? The difficulties were compounded by poor signage that didn't match up to the room names and numbers shown in the online agenda, which had no plan or map to help delegates find their way to their sessions.
Thus it was that, instead of quickly transferring from one session to another that (as I eventually discovered) was taking place in the room next door, I ended up taking a 10-minute detour around the building. It would have been 5 minutes had I not stopped to ask for directions from an attendant, who consulted a dog-eared map before sending me even further away from my intended destination.
Now it's quite possible the app wouldn't have helped at all — many event apps are of questionable value — but let's assume for the sake of argument it would have. Why didn't I download it?
Outdated habits
As I examined my reasons I realized that I had instinctively followed ingrained habits learned in a pre-digital world.
Downloading an app would mean investing time (even if only a minute or two) in learning how to use it — and in devising workarounds for the features that it would inevitably lack. Then I would have to access the app whenever I wanted to look anything up, and remember to delete it when the event was over.
As someone who grew up at a time when all reference information was delivered on paper, I would much rather keep a sheet of paper handy in my jacket pocket that I can just pull out and make notes on as I go. But that's because I learned all those habits a long time ago.
If I were a digital native, I would never have learned the habit of writing notes on a printed agenda. I'd be proficient at rapidly learning apps that I know I'll be deleting in a couple of days' time. I would not want to clutter up my phone pocket with scraps of paper, and who carries a pen around with them anyway?
My colleague and I don't download apps because we grew up with habits based on stuff being static and partitioned off from each other. To be successful in this pre-digital era you had to be good at doing things sequentially and following static processes learned once. No wonder we reject these new-fangled mobile apps and all the redundant learning and relearning they involve.
Conventional wisdom says that it's our age that means we prefer to stick to what we know, but I don't shy away from learning new digital tools when I feel they're useful. I suspect it's not merely age but also a product of the way I learned to approach the world as it was when I grew up.
Collaborative effort
So onto the social selling session, which was a team presentation by Kevin Ryan of LinkedIn sales solutions and Chloe Basterfield, marketing manager for UK enterprise at Oracle. The session was titled Who owns social selling? Bridging the divide between sales and marketing, and of course the conclusion was that social selling has to be a collaborative effort shared by the two functions. As Ryan explained from LinkedIn's own experience:
Sales found they needed content they could share and generally having a voice in the market. Who does that for you? Your content team. So we found marketing and sales increasingly were working more closely together.
Thus we see that organizations just as much as individuals have to change their habits. Collaboration is crucial to digital transformation because you can no longer complete a project in your own little domain and then throw it over the wall to the next team.
We're all connected now and the ability to share ideas and communicate in real time forces us to adopt a new form of distributed, cross-functional teamwork. Similarly, relationships with customers must be built and nurtured continuously, from long before the sale to long after.
The old habits and business processes that confined activities to discrete functional domains are no longer fit for purpose. And because the new modes of real-time, cross-functional collaboration enable continuous feedback and iteration, change becomes a constant.
This is not about age but about ability to adapt. Today's generation expects to learn new stuff all the time because yesterday's processes aren't up to date any more. They know they have to collaborate because that's the only way to keep pace with change. This is the new world all of us have to adapt to, whether we're growing up with it as digital natives or relearning everything we previously learned in a slower, more static and siloed era.
Image credit - Feathers in blue sky - escape from empty cage © viperapg - Fotolia.com.
Disclosure - At time of writing, Oracle is a diginomica premier partner.