Episode 37: Deep Dive: Digital Deca Part 2: 10 Management Truths for the Web Age

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Transcript

Lisa Welchman:

Hey, Andy.

Andy Vitale:

Hey, Lisa.

Lisa Welchman:

How are you today?

Andy Vitale:

I'm good. I'm excited for today's conversation as we dive deeper into the digital deco. We've got two more truths today to talk about in this episode.

Lisa Welchman:

What might those truths be?

Andy Vitale:

So truth three is decision-making must be based upon expertise and not power, which we'll talk about first. And truth four, the business framework must be inclusive. Both are very, very juicy topics.

Lisa Welchman:

Yes, they are juicy topics, and we'll see what happens. I think let's let you go and go first on this one, decision-making must be based upon expertise, not power. What is your takeaway from that?

Andy Vitale:

That's funny because I was having a conversation the other day about seeing a lot of people waiting for a decision maker that has yet to be identified to emerge. I know this is going to touch upon your governance like muscles.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. You saw my head light up immediately.

Andy Vitale:

Right. The thing that I heard is that when you put the right people in the right room, the people that are experts in certain areas, decisions will emerge. While I believe that that may happen from time-to-time, I think that it is really important to know who the decision-maker is so that it's not chaos and not different groups going back and forth and working in their own little areas and coming back with something when nobody's really aligned on that decision.

So to me, my philosophy is understanding obviously who's accountable for the decision to be made, and then people have the opportunity to see if they can influence that decision in a way that changes it if they don't agree, or then disagree and commit, like leave the room aligned on this is the decision and I've got to find a way to come around on this.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. I'm thinking in the back of my head of what my intention was when I actually wrote this truth, and the timing of it. I think where it came from was a pattern and dynamic, which, unfortunately, I think still happens, which is CEOs and other very senior level people deciding on what's the look and feel of the website? What color are we going to use in the logo, or more ... That's off because I can imagine them having an opinion about something like the logo, the mark, or something like that.

But just making tactical ... Getting their fingers all intertwingled into tactical work of things, because they want it to be the way that they want it. I mean in the really super early days of the web, it was down to ... Particularly in governmental spaces, it was down to things like this leader wants their face on their section's website page. They want just the prominence in deciding of what that is, and they would get it because they had the power to do it and they would just command that this would happen.

And so, I think when I was writing this, and probably early on when I was really starting to define how to make a governance framework, I really wanted to stress that there are people who actually know how to do these things. There are people who have expertise in particular areas, and they should be the ones who are writing standards. It should not be a game.

Now that said, I would have to say that these strength and power behind having clear decision-makers isn't really a ... It's a safety mechanism more than anything else, what you first came out of the gate saying, which is if you get the right people in the room, you can usually collaboratively come up with good decisions. I would say that most of the time that's what happens, and the idea of knowing who decision-makers are is actually important when it comes to the times when you can't-

Andy Vitale:

Great.

Lisa Welchman:

... when you're not able to come to agreement. It's kind of like ... However people feel about it, the example that's coming to mind is a prenup. You hope you never have to use it, but if for some reason you get divorced, it's clear, or at least there's a starting point for clarity around how assets will be divided and that sort of thing.

I think that's the power of actually knowing who your decision-makers are, which is, at the 11th hour or when you have to move quickly and you don't have time to consult anybody, where's the reference point? Where's the sun as it relates to user interface design or tech or whatever the case may be?

Andy Vitale:

Exactly. That's very much my philosophy on the way I lead my team. It's hiring the right people and getting out of their way, letting them do what they were hired to do, let them influence decisions and drive decisions as best as they can. It's funny because it was described to me that the way I lead is here's the wheel, here's the steering wheel to the car. Drive it, you're the expert. I will be there to tap my hand on the wheel to align it along the way if it starts to go out of the rails.

But I see in other places people feel the need to be involved in every single decision that their team makes, and that causes a lot of chaos from time-to-time, especially when the team aligned around a decision, and then someone comes in in that 11th hour, like you talked about, and makes a decision about something that maybe they weren't involved in the process or they just have an opinion on and don't realize the team did a lot of work. Because of their title though or who they are in the organization, that changes the whole decision, sends the team spiraling, like swirling to like, "Did we get this right? How do we change this? What do we have to do?"

That has always been chaotic in past companies. Actually, I wanted to read a little segue from a book that I have. It's going to make noise as I open it. But where I work now at Rocket, we have these beliefs, we call them -isms. One of the ones that we have is all decisions should be made with a single motivation, the right or best decision for our clients, our team members, and our mission, and the what trumps the who in our shop.

So that belief system is something that I can get behind, and sometimes you have to hold people to that. Having this in writing as a core belief helps alleviate some of those situations for us.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. I mean it's interesting that you're bringing that up in the larger context of the organization, because I think I mentioned to you that I recently published a blog post on maturing digital-maker culture. One of the little stories that I put in there is this belief that people have in the genius or the guru, or the person who is incredibly insightful and gets it more than anybody else. We really, as a digital-maker community, believe in that.

And so, unfortunately, I think that this also plays into this idea that there's going to be a single touch point or human being that has this vision that nobody else has that can make these decisions. Sometimes that's true, but that sometimes is way off on the edge of the bell curve somewhere. Most of the time it's just business as usual normal stuff. But I think within our maker culture, we actually believe in this almost magical way of working, because otherwise it would be boring and mundane.

Most of us who work in digital spaces did not join this club because we wanted to work in a boring and mundane way. We wanted to work in an industry that was exciting and ever-changing. It is exciting and ever-changing, but there's also a full set of things that have matured, and that people do have extreme expertise around and that you can make mature decisions around and come up with a group of decision-makers or competencies that actually understand how these things need to work and not work.

I think that's a sign of both a mature organization and a mature way of managing and governing your digital portfolio when you are taking your hands off the steering wheel and hiring well and letting people do their job. But at the same time, as I was saying, we push against that. We want to believe that there's some kind of crazy secret sauce that only a few very people have. So I think it's going to be really interesting to see how that dynamic plays out around decision-making and maturity.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. I think one of the places that we're starting to see that now is we take someone that has been heralded for many years, and Elon Musk is a genius. Look at what he's done with Tesla. Look at what he's done in the past. Look at the things he's building, the hyperloop. Then whatever's going on with Twitter now. It seems like you've got one person making a lot of decisions, whether they're right or wrong, that were decisions that were made and working well.

Everyone thinks this magic is just going to make such an impact, and from what I see right now, it's not. It's one of those things where just because you are the loudest voice in the room, or you are smart in other ways, it doesn't mean that we can look to a single individual, like you were saying, for every single decision. When we do, things go wrong. They go wrong quickly and terribly.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. I think the Twitter example is a really good one for obvious reasons, but also because it points to the other side of the equation, which is when somebody who's at an executive level is busy-bodying in the tactics of what's going on, it often means that they're neglecting the more strategic other side of their job, in which case, in the Twitter case, it's the business model and alienating advertisers and things like that, things that only this leader can do actually, particularly in an environment where there's just been an acquisition and there's a lot of question around the brand and a lot of hubbub and noise and confusion and negative press.

And so, I see the same in digital spaces where you've got a leader who's super, super concerned about what train are we on and how fast are we working and what releases are coming out, and yet people are scrambling because there's no orienting strategy, that there's no link. They're not really understanding the major thrust of their work.

So I think this decision-making must be based on expertise, not power also leads to this conclusion of what happens when people who have power end up making tactical decisions, right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

It's risky on both sides. One, they're making decisions about things they have no competence or little competence, but only in opinion. Two, they're also neglecting the role that they're supposed to play as a leader.

Andy Vitale:

Right. So oftentimes when we have guests on, I like to ask them for advice on their words, in things, so that people can either hear a new perspective or be validated of what they're thinking. In a lot of your work, it's around how do you help teams organize to make decisions and make the right decisions and come to decisions faster and be aligned?

So from a governance perspective, I'm curious if someone is in that situation where they have that person that comes in and makes decisions that are too far in the weeds than they should be, or they're setting up a project or a program or product for the first time, what are some of the things that they should do to make sure that we've got the right people making the right decisions and them not only coming from a place of power?

Lisa Welchman:

I think as far as governance is concerned, there's kind of the school way of doing it, the Lisa's school of governance way of doing it, which is you sit down, you bring all your stakeholders together, and you think about the things that you need to make decisions about.

I have a workshop that I give that's called ... I haven't done it for years, but it's fun, used to be fun, inputs and decisions. So you sit in the room ... Because usually that's the problem. People make it very binary. If I'm not making the decision, it means you don't respect my opinion. It's like, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that we're going to sit around and talk about this, but at the end of the day, if we can't come to agreement, this is who's going to make the decision.

As I said before, most of the times that works itself out, but a lot of times sometimes you'll end up on the other side of the fence, which is you have this extreme decision-maker, it might be an executive, and they're pushing out all the input, right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

And so, I think having that conversation and understanding who's providing input and who's making decisions and why is a good one. It's also a good way to ... What's the right verb here? I was going to say disempower, but that's completely not the right verb. I think the right verb is to level and make appropriate the playing field on which both these executive person and the team have to work.

It's very difficult to go up to the person who's leading and say something like, "Stay out. You don't know what you're talking about." That's probably never going to happen in real time. But if you put it around the idea of, "Can we sit down and talk about all the decisions that we're going to need to make, how we make them, why we make them, and what type of expertise needs to be in the room when we make them?" most leaders are smart, they'll get it. They'll see it. They'll see, "Oh, I don't actually know what I'm talking about when it comes to this area of graphic design," or, "I don't really understand the implications of this technology platform. I might be able to articulate what I want to have as a business outcome."

So you get everybody's stuff on the field. That's really, I think, what I spend most of my time doing, which is everybody's holding or trying to grab, this, "I control the content," "I control the tech," "I control the business. This is the outcome I want." It's like, look, we're all playing the same game here. Can we just get on here and let's decide that when this happens, this position needs to try and kick the ball into the goal? When this happens, this person decides to do this.

So I think that that's a really important thing to do. The great thing about it is even if you don't want to have a formal framework, that's a conversation that any team can have.

Andy Vitale:

Right. Exactly. No, that's perfect. That's exactly what I was hoping that you'd glean insights into. So I appreciate that.

Lisa Welchman:

Groovy. So you think we're ready to move on to our second truth?

Andy Vitale:

Yes, I think we are.

Lisa Welchman:

So this is also a juicy one, and it has an obvious reference and a not-so-obvious reference. Truth four is the business framework must be inclusive.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. So when I thought about this first, I thought about outcomes, not framework. So one of the things that came to mind are ... We talk about this all the time, the harm that's caused when we're not inclusive. But this isn't what this is about. I mean these are the outcomes related to this, but when we talk about business frameworks, I'm really curious to understand, from your perspective, what you were thinking back then to actually go in it, and describe this a little bit more.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, it's funny because there's this word inclusive, which now in 2023 has so much power and really brings up this idea of inclusivity for human beings. Like the way we talk about safety, it should be useful and safe for every human being. We should take everyone and every human being into consideration when we're designing and coding and deploying.

And so, I would like to think that that was in front of mind for me when I wrote this. I would say that this was part of the conversation for me because I've always been sensitive to accessibility, because accessibility plays such a big range in policy, and we're often talking about policy.

But I believe what I was really talking about here is that when you're thinking about operating a digital portfolio and when you're talking about representing your company and your business online in the digital world, that you have to think about the entire business. It can't just be be IT, it can't just be marketing, which probably at the time that I was writing it, there was more of a tug of war between marketing and IT around who owns and operates the online presence, and I think marketing won.

Andy Vitale:

Okay.

Lisa Welchman:

So I would say if you had to sit ... Look at that tug of war battle. You'd say marketing won and IT has relegated itself to a super powerful corner where it's got the tech stack and it occasionally throws stuff out and says, "You can't do this because I said so," or privacy concerns, or you can't push data that way. They've completely detached themselves from content.

I think one of the really interesting things about that move that happened is that this other thing came into prominence since I've written this, which is the use of data and the use of metadata for good and for evil. Data and metadata, data lies pretty solidly in most people's mind leans IT, and metadata leans a little bit marketing but only in the context of I'm trying to personalize this and serve this content up to particular people.

And so, that left this really open space where nobody was actually paying attention to what I call the exhaust, which is, okay, we're running all of these machines and this tech framework, and there's all these log files.

A long time ago, I gave a talk called Zero-Waste Content Management. One of the things that I was talking about, obviously, was reduce, recycle, and reuse. I was talking about reusing artifacts that come out of the digital space, and one of them were these data logs and all this metadata and information and flow and how we could repurpose this.

This was really way before ... We were talking about some of the more sinister things that are happening with use of it. But to just tie it back to the business framework is that it needs to be inclusive and it needs to consider all of these things.

I think one of the challenges ... And I'm looking at this truth and I'm being a little bit critical around it, because I'm saying the business framework, but I might want to actually put digital in front of it, right?

Andy Vitale:

Okay, right.

Lisa Welchman:

Or how we think about digital has to be inclusive. It has to be end-to-end. It has to be encompassing everything, and I think we've done a poor job of that. We've let some things fall on the ground, and that's an opportunity for them to be picked up and used in not great ways, sometimes in great ways, sometimes in fun ways. There's all kinds of ... I'm not saying it's all negative, but I think because of this kind of siloing and disintegrated and non-inclusive way of thinking about digital inside the business, there are just these whole swatches of ignored or ill-intended things.

Another really super boring thing but is a total mess is records management. I mean nobody knows where their digital stuff is. Where is it? I remember many, many years ago, there was this big kerfuffle because there was a change in the White House. I think it was the second Bush administration or something, and they hadn't archived anything. I was like, "And you're surprised? You're surprised that this hasn't happened?" I know just from working with different people that this happens in the enterprise. So this non-holistic, non-inclusive way of thinking about how digital impacts the business is really probably what I was getting at.

Andy Vitale:

No, that makes a lot of sense. What I was thinking as you were doing that, I started to jot down some things of all these newer by name areas that have emerged to maybe try to land some of those spaces that sat in between marketing and data or IT.

Right now a couple of things have emerged. So product management as a discipline has really become front and center, which included product design and product marketing. So there's all sorts of visions around there. A lot of companies may organize under chief experience officer and in that might sit marketing plus technology, plus data, plus product, plus design.

Then we're seeing how are analytics used? Is it personalization for marketing? Is it data towards the rest of the organization? Are there things around growth and performance marketing that can leverage that personalization and those signals and things we pick up from customer behavior to start to drive different outcomes? Then where does content sit?

So I think we're still, as an industry, trying to figure out where those things best can live and collaborate. But I think the thought is the importance of them is there, and the inclusivity of all of the areas to work together to try to solve some of these things of what do we do with this data? How do we leverage it for clients? How do we leverage it for offers? How do we leverage it for just learning and analytics? Then how do we market that and how do we drive decisions based on that and come up with new products and come up with new tech stacks that support them?

I think that work is well underway, which is the sense for a lot of these things. What's most interesting to me is this was something that you wrote over 10 years ago, and it's another thing that we're still not solved as an industry, the idea of how important those things are in this way of thinking is, but the efforts are still underway to find a best practice for it.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, I mean I think just the way things are with digital and the way that I've always seen it has been, it's the tail wagging the dog. It is eventually going to just consume everything. It's going to consume the enterprise. It's going to consume all these jobs. It's just going to come out of the other end completely evolved and completely integrated. I mean I smile when people talk about digital transformation in this kind of controlled business-specific way, and it's like this is it, man.

The other side of this is a very, very different way of living and a very different way to exist in the world. And so, we see that starting to come out now as everybody's fiddling with artificial intelligence and, what is it, ChatGP ... I can't-

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, ChatGPT.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I fiddled around with it as well. I put in all of my hard meditation questions and it actually passed. I was like, what is dependent origination? How can I learn ... All of those sorts of things.

But what's really interesting about these new, next level types of things is that they're leveraging the foundational pieces that we've already put in play. So they're leveraging our old-world knowledge by way of books and information that it's ingesting. They're leveraging patterns of human behavior. It's machine learning constantly learning and re-upping its knowledge base. And so, everything that we've gotten wrong in the world is going into that pool. And so, a lot of it's just out of our hands.

I think I get frustrated sometimes when I work with teams, because they're so focused on the tactical product development. They're so focused on the individual quality of something that's being put out. Don't get me wrong, we need good human experiences with all of these things as well. And we also need to take the time to understand that what we're putting out there is going to be consumed and reused by other people and other technologies.

It goes back to kind of that involves inclusiveness at another level. It involves an inclusive approach to how you manage your team. I mean you've heard me say, and I think I've said it on this podcast, a lot of times that one of the interesting things about team modeling is ... One of the first questions I've asked is what do you got? What are you making? Because in a lot of ways, the team has to mirror what's going online, like the dynamics of the team. If you are really doing highly personalized, cutting across channels, cutting across business silos type of experience for your customer, your team has to be able to do that too, right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Not only does your design have to do that and your content have to do ... Your team has to be able to interface with each other like that. So when I look at this new world of AI-enabled content pushing, metadata-driven, highly personalized, almost out-of-our-hands experience, and then I look at these wonky teams arguing with each other about, "Content's more important," "No, design's more important," but the leader ... And I'm just like, "People, get it together. We don't have time for this." We are the ones supposed to be saving the ship, right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

So it's like we don't really have time to be this self-absorbed about how it works. It's get the team together, get it working together, drop your ego, and truly be human-centered, truly care about the user experience. But I don't see a lot of that. So that might sound a little bit more negative than I normally do, but it's mostly fear, because these technologies are so powerful.

Andy Vitale:

Right, and they're gaining ground so quickly, or they're just emerging so fast. I played with one the other day. I was taking photos of people and myself. It's called Face Dance. From a still photo, it literally can animate the face and lip sync to a song and have movement. It's so much fun, but at the same time it's like, wow, that would've taken me an hour, days, days maybe, to be able to do that, and it's just instantly.

I'm sure the way digital came on board and emerged years ago, that same feeling was what people had that had worked in an analog way their entire lives. So it's faster, it's highly accurate, it's not perfect, and we've got to get ahold of this thing, this technology before it gets out of hand.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, and the inclusivity in that is, as I've mentioned before, whatever is in the seed is what's going to grow. We can be intentional and inclusive about what we put into the seed. One of those things can be care and safety, right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Saying that you want to be careful isn't against scalability. Being careful is making sure that when you plant your garden, that you put everything in that you're going to need and everything that you want to grow, and I think that care is one of those things. But there's just something about our dynamic in Western Europe, in the US that just really pushes hard, right?

Andy Vitale:

Yup.

Lisa Welchman:

I'm picking on those two parts of the world because they're the ones that I know the best. I'm sure it's everywhere else in the world as well, more or less to a certain degree for people who are doing business online and digitally enabling things in the world. But I think there's going to be a lot of interesting debates around this. I could talk about this one for a particularly long, long time.

I wrote my ... Long ago in the '80s, wrote my college thesis on Keith Gunderson's book Mentality and Machines. A lot of it was around the Turing test and can machines think and what does it mean for machines to think. One of the weird conclusions I came up to, and that I'm still saying now, like it's only going to be as good as we are. It might get to interesting places faster, but it's only going to be fed with the knowledge that we have and the experiences that we have. It's not going to make us better human beings.

Andy Vitale:

Right. Exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

Right? And so, I think that that's something that we really always need to remember. So this was an interesting conversation. I think we stayed on the point, but I think maybe for this truth number four, the business framework must be inclusive, I think it's good. I might take back the adding digital. It might be that ... Anyhow, I don't think I have anything else to say.

Andy Vitale:

Perfect.