As Gandhi Jayanti comes to a close, we reflect upon the teachings of the Mahatma.
Mahatma Gandhi has taught the world a lot. His Experiments with Truth resulted in many learnings which he shared with the world and led by example. His life and his legacy are a rich source of lessons. Gandhi asked us to be slow in forming our convictions, but once formed defend them against all odds. Here are 3 of his quotes that reinforce our convictions about doing better Digital Transformations.
“Be the change you are trying to create.”
Probably the most famous Gandhi quote. It’s been plastered on graffitied walls, countless internet articles and motivational posters – but repetition doesn’t make anything untrue.
Many projects start with the leadership wanting to change things in their organizations. They sponsor the projects, hire a vendor, select a product, get the teams together, and then somehow leave the implementation and operation of their new tool to the teams that are key users but may or may not share their overall vision. True transformation needs both – the view that keeps the North Star or the purpose of the project in sight, and the view that keeps practical realities and details in sight. A project without active sponsorship will not usually result in the kind of change that the project sponsors hope for unless that are hands-on and participate in steering committee meetings, decision making and keep a finger on the overall pulse of the project. They have to not only be involved during the development, but perhaps even more importantly during deployment and adoption. They have to “be” the change and be the first brand ambassadors of the new tool. They should be seen using it, and involved in the process of rolling it out. They should be talking about it to their people right from the get go. This causes a lot of people to see it as a more organic change and not something sudden and unwelcome.
“There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
Speed is typically one of the main things we want from any digital transformation, right besides cost savings. This, while understandable, sometimes becomes a hindrance to getting something better. We must decide on other, and better metrics besides just speed of execution. Afterall, we are what we measure.
If we take bad business processes and digitize them to make them a whole lot faster – we have created ways to be terrible, faster. We have to descend into the details of each project, understand how we can re-engineer our processes to make them better processes, and then make the execution of those processes faster!
“My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.”
He believed that truth is self-evident. He said truth emerges when we remove the cobwebs of Ignorance. His famous Satyagraha is simply the insistence of truth. His autobiography isn’t called “The Truth” or “My Truth”, but rather consistently with his overall believe – is called “My Experiments with Truth”.
All ERP/EPM implementations are done, at their very core, to collect data that can be reported on. The entire point of large, cross-functional systems like Oracle Fusion is that a single environment helps with cross-functional reporting. But all too often we using reporting as just that – a report to be read. What’s worse – sometimes we use it to feed our Confirmation bias. The aim of these transformations is often to support great reporting. But that reporting will only turn into value when we design for truth-prompted and data-guided actions. We at Orbrick build solutions that represent the truth of the organization we work with. Analysis, KPIs and KRAs that accurately show the reality of businesses and organizations, and not just an aggregation of data left to be interpret. We don’t lie with statistics. And we make our analytics actionable. We want our partners and customers to be able to spring into action when the truth changes from what it was a while ago.
We want to grow with them, from truth to truth!