Digital Transformation: How to Get C-level Commitment and Bottom up Adoption?

Thank you that you're coming to this presentation, because that means that you're highly interested in digital transformation and the adoption side of it. What we are covering today and this morning is that I'd like to speak first about my personal transformation because the key message is digital transformation starts with you and with you, also with me of course. So I'll start off with my personal transformation because adoption starts how you can adopt or how you can change. And then I'm jumping over towards the KPN's transformation. What we are doing there, what kind of techniques do we use there? But first I'd like to ask you two questions. Please raise your hands. Who is busy for more than 50% of your time doing digital transformation activities? A few. So I hope probably to learn today. Second question, how, please raise your hand, in what type of company are you working? Is it over the 500 employees in terms of size? So are you in a bigger company? Yes, majority is. I'm asking that because the way you do transformation is quite different in a larger company where you need to relate to a lot of people and to get the adoption there. So my personal transformation, if you look at this timeline, we are living in such a short time frame, we as human beings now, but if you look at the evolution, how we looked in 10,000 before Christ, we looked like this. And here you see my personal transformation and one thing is sure, my looks have changed. You may decide whether that's for the worse or the better, but that's one thing which is definitely true. And technology and data is driven to change. So that's not new, but it's really accelerating the change. So how do we keep up as a human being with that kind of change? And to answer that question, it's important to look at yourself. So to me, digital transformation is really about changing the fundamentals. You see that the fundamentals of a society, we have a sharing economy, a more hyper-connected economy, so changing the fundamentals of yourself, it's really important. And I'd like to draw a quick picture of a day of my life and that's a short personal story. When I wake up, having breakfast today and I put my eye watch on my wrist and then I get the first notification that I need to step into the car because otherwise I'm late for my first meeting. Then my kids are going to school, I'm chatting with different kinds of people, I'm working fully out of the cloud with my team within KPN, I'm using Slack, using Evernote. During my day, I'm doing the groceries on a list somewhere in between meetings in my Evernote and then I'm going back driving to school, pick up the kids because we're working in flexible times. So later on in the evening, I'm doing my laptop open and work further. And my kids are sitting on the couch with their iPads and I don't know what your kids, if you have kids, are doing, but they are playing their favorite songs on the Spotify playing list, streaming via our Sonos system. So what kind of change is it? It's really a change if I look back five years ago, how a day in my life has changed. But this is to me still the outside, just as the looks. And what's the really change or what's the real fundamental of a human being, of you? And to me, it's your personality. So how did my personality change? Because you need to keep up and what was needed. Again, a very little short story. When I was that little three or four years old kid, which is seen there, my mom was taking me to a big carnival hall and I was sitting on the side, seeing all those partying people. And I had such a bored face. I was thinking, Oh my goodness. I was modest, a little bit shy. And I didn't want to step in the crowd. And my mom was saying, Come on, go in, go in, have party, have fun. And I was not able to connect and go into the crowd because I was a little bit shy. And then later on during my career, I was at a sales meeting. And during that sales meeting, actually I experienced exactly the same because maybe, you know, the big ego sales guys were over shouting themselves with all kinds of brainless texts, in my opinion. And at that time, I excluded myself again. So I thought, What do I need to change here? Because in this hyper connected society and in the type of jobs we do have now, and we heard from LinkedIn, et cetera, the relationships are key and the connection to make with other people are key. So and I found a way to overcome that. And I stepped forward within KPN said this type of role I want to have. And now I'm in a digital transformation role and succeeded to get it. And that's also what change is about. If you get the reward or if you do have a perspective, then you internalize the change because you get rewarded for it. So think of yourself. The key message is think of yourself. How do you look like in 2040? What's the fundamental thing for yourself that you think you need to change? Because people, they don't want to be changed by others, but you can only change yourself. And that's the key in terms of adoption. Now back from personal to KPN's transformation. This is KPN four or five years ago. It felt like this a little bit or a little bit. It was crowded, lots of people. It was hard to come from A to B, no sense of urgency. And then WhatsApp was introduced. And for KPN it was a big thing. Our SMS messaging turnover went down dramatically. And people started moving, but it was quite in an uncoordinated way. And then this is the type of transformation we are now in right now. So we can learn a lot of this V formation. It's a team. There's no one leader at the top because if the first birth is tired, he's moving backwards. They all have a goal. They go to a warmer destination, but they are so flexible. They don't know whether it's Cape Town or it's part of Cape Town or a city. Call it somewhere in Australia. But they do know that they go to a warmer destination. And this is the most aerodynamic way of flying. And if you look on videos on YouTube, they really tune in with their wings. The moves of the wings are really tuned into the one who's flying in front of the bird. And that's about the transformation we are in within KPN. So it's about team communication. It's about leadership. It's about a common goal. So really, yeah, type of cultural new ways of adopting. Our challenge within KPN, the three biggest challenges, and that's not only KPN, I think maybe it's for your company as well, keep up with the rapidly changing customer needs. That's for everyone. The whole technology and new devices, et cetera, are going so fast that it's quite hard to keep up. You can only do that by having a customer-centric digital data force. And our innovation speed needed to go up. And we are quite in the middle of that transformation. In the consumer market, we do have a very high speed now. And our IT systems and our IT organization has transformed dramatically. But you need to give people a perspective to transform or to adopt to those changes. And the perspective within KPN is that we say, okay, we do believe that we are, within a few years, we are the best service provider, and we do believe that we can do that by enabling our customers doing their business with us in a 100% digital way. And that's how we want to make their lives more easy, have more fun, and that they feel free. And it's a balancing act. A balancing act between three, actually three topics. And these topics are the most important ones. And this is part of my program, the digital transformation program, where I'm focusing on. And it's not, or it is on purpose that the ball in the middle is the biggest one. Because everyone is saying always, customer first, customer first. And yes, customers are important. But people, to me, is even more important. Because if you don't have the right people in your company who can listen to customers, who do understand what they want, who do understand what they need, who can react in the right way, then you are nowhere. So we are focusing on the people side, and we are calling that digital craftsmanship. These are some projects, or some of the projects we are running within the digital transformation program. And what do we then, let me check. Yeah, this one is in between. The digital craftsmanship. Six steps how we boost that digital craftsmanship. And I don't go through all the steps, because in the matter of time, but the most important one, and it was in the title of the presentation, how do we get sea level commitment and bottom-up adoption? With sea level, we are determining the ambition of our digitization. So I don't know in the type of company you are, but the technology is impacting each company in a different way. So you need to define the level of ambition together with the sea level. And we are doing that in workshops in many different ways. We are creating a digital environment, because it's not very, how to say it, in a digital, the digital talents don't want to work in the big corporates with a very corporate culture. So it's really creating an environment where they want to work in, and that's not going only about the furniture, but that's also, or even more important, that's going about the autonomy or empowerment of the people. Can they make their own decisions? Or is the manager saying what they need to do? What kind of structures are in your company? So we are creating new kind of environments where talents can flourish. The last thing I want to pick out is the learning program. We are now looking at what kind of educational programs or experiences do we need to create. Because our champions within KPN, the digital and data champions, they don't use our own academy. So that's strange. And how does it come? Because they learn themselves, or they find on the internet different ways of learning. So we are looking now inside, bringing the champions to a broader audience within KPN, and let them share how they learn, so we can create that bigger effect within the whole company. And actually, I've talked about the how of the digital craftsmanship, and here it's more the what. What type of behavior do we want that they adopt you, or what they need to kind of internalize? And we are actually now running a full program with casting events to cast 300 people within KPN who are our customer experience coaches and guides. And that's the first one. Think customer-centric. Those coaches and guides in the company, our own personnel, we provide them with all kinds of content, and they can go out to their teams with those types of content in order to become more customer-centric. The second one, develop data-driven. So we all know data is very important, but do we use data in our decision-making processes? Do we use data enough in our marketing department? So these type of behaviors, we make it concrete and work with people to get movement on these four behaviors. And where do you start then? Because I do have only a team of four, and I work with the entire company. So bottom up and top down, to me it's like these curtains. You need to pull on the top and you need to pull on the bottom, and then you cover the whole window. So you need to do it, in my opinion, at the same time for the best effect. And where to start? I'm using crowdsourcing techniques. So it's not pulling to someone who doesn't want to change, or you need to find throughout your company on all levels where are the talents who can be your ambassadors in the change. So I work throughout the company and create all kinds of experiences together with small teams. And we are doing that in a hub structure. So we don't use an old-fashioned kind of project management or project structure, but we do it with virtual hubs. And the virtual hub in the middle, the blue one, that's a person out of my team who's driving that kind of transformation. And then we create virtual hubs. So we put to the max six to eight people together and work over the company to create digital experience or the data-driven way of working. So we give them the content to work throughout the company. And to me, connecting in my earlier part of the speech, connecting is essential in this. To drive adoption, you need to be able to connect and you need to be able to have a relationship. Because otherwise without a relationship, people don't want or they are not buying into your technology or your ideas or whatever you want. So this is a model and it's not quite common for marketeers to use. But please try and fit in the people you need for your change and see where your allies are, your adversaries who are the opposers. And then make your strategy. Maybe you need to go into the relationship side, so work on that, or on the content side in a matter of alignment. So you can use there all kinds of inspiration techniques or other techniques. So to the end, digital transformation starts with you. So the key message here is if you don't dare to change yourself, how do you expect other people are going to change? And the ingredients are here. So show a very high energy, change, dare to change your own fundamentals, focus on relationships and don't forget the short term results. Develop the four essential talents and crowdsource change ambassadors and let technology facilitate you. And it's never too late. So I hope I inspired you and maybe you have some questions.