Episode 40: Deep Dive: Digital Deca Part 3: 10 Management Truths for the Web Age

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Transcript

Andy Vitale:

Lisa, I think this Digital Decca conversation around standards enabled collaboration and the web as an asset was really interesting because we started in slightly different places in the way we understood it, but like previous conversations, they're so intertwined and so relevant. So I really enjoyed this one.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. It's making me remember as I've said before, how early we are in the web. These are just basically some fundamentals and it was surprising to really have this conversation about standards with you and understanding that the web as an asset and not a liability or a cost center for an organization to realize that while we've made some shifts, we've still really got a long way to go when it comes to maturing digital in an organization and understanding what it means to lead digital teams.

Andy Vitale:

Exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

So I hope everyone enjoys this episode.

Andy Vitale:

Hey, Lisa. It sounds like today we're going to cover the next couple of Digital Deccas, so I'm really excited to dig in. The first one that I know that we're going to talk about is standards enable collaboration. And as I thought about that for a little bit, I wrote myself a note and it really says, "Tell me more." And I think what I'm trying to understand a little bit is what you meant by this in terms of standards.

Lisa Welchman:

Okay. So that's the first one. What's the second one we're going to talk about?

Andy Vitale:

The second one is the web as an asset. And that one I'm feeling pretty good about.

Lisa Welchman:

Oh, you think so? Wow. Okay. Well, let's start with standards and able collaboration. This one, I think in the deep dive when we were talking about your web presence is the digital manifestation of your organization, which was Digital Decca truth number two. Your first comment was, "Wow, that's really feels like a throwback because we don't really just talk about websites as the primary way that organizations interact with people online anymore." There's so many different channels and ways of interacting with folks along with [inaudible] and everything else.

I think I'm kind of getting a little bit of that feeling around standards and able collaboration. I know when I wrote this one, there was a huge push in my practice and way of thinking of getting people to understand the power of standards. So I had a whole presentation that was talking about how not only do technologies use standards, but the world is organized around standards.

So anything that you do, whether or not it's something as fine-grained atomic structure, it's standardized. Things don't happen and function randomly, right? And in particular things that scale, whether or not that be the human family, the population of human beings, plants a forest. I think one of the examples in a presentation I had was the largest fungus in the world, which is some gazillion acre fungus. There's that grove of aspen trees in the US that is miles and miles and miles wide. It's a single organism.

And things are able to grow appropriately based on standards. And so that was my number one piece which was just getting people to understand that standards are not an exception. They are the rule of why we even exist and why and how the world wakes works the way it is. So that's point number one.

And then collaboration and enabling collaboration has to do with, if you're going to do something in a large group of people with any kind of consistency or any kind of sense, or even any level of creativity. Standards are probably going to come into play. It might be one standard. It might be 10. It might be eight. It might be a whole bunch. I often use the example of jazz music operating off of a chord progression, a standardized chord progression, and how extreme creativity and innovation and improvisation come off of that.

But at its core are standards. And so I think more people, 10, 12, 13 years out are from when I wrote this, more people are on that train, but shockingly not everyone. I think there are still groups of people that feel that innovation and growth and product development that's forward leaning goes away from standardization.

I think there's still a group of people that believe that. I feel that that's not only a naive stance, it can also at a certain point become a dangerous stance. It's also a stance of in gratitude. And I say that because the only reason why the web was able to scale so quickly was because not only was it gifted to the world by Tim Berners-Lee and the folks at CERN, but the W3C was an organization that aggregated all the standards that allow us to push things through web browsers and everything else after that.

So the only reason why it was able to scale so quickly and in such a dispersed way was because of standards. So that's a lot of talking, but this one is rich for me, has always been rich for me and still is rich for me. So I'm going to take back what I said at the beginning, which is I think we still have this problem. I mean, I'm really curious what you think really working inside of an organization with a large team that has to scale and has to move quickly, what your take on this particular one is.

Andy Vitale:

I mean, that actually helps me a lot to understand the background of this because I started to write down things like RACI governance process and calling out that there are still a lot of silos in an organization. And a lot of times this collaboration isn't the normal way of working. As much as we talk about how each discipline collaborates and that great things come from collaboration, we see that sometimes you have to force that collaboration that way of working for that to really become common practice, to become a standard for that to be able to scale.

So my thought went to, first, is this... On the digital side, I was starting to pick up as you were saying like how do we create this way of collaborating on these digital products or across our digital ecosystem and what standards can we create to allow that to happen? But going back to just the way we work, and the question that you asked me, I still do see in certain groups silos, different processes.

I see people get a little bit paralyzed when the process isn't exactly written down. Or what we see is when we try to build these autonomous teams, they don't operate exactly the same way. Maybe they have some of the same ceremonies that they all practice, but what I notice is when you pick somebody up and put them on a different team, they freak out. This is a different way than I'm used to working when I don't know that it's entirely that different, but there hasn't been those... There's not the consistencies or the lines that you could kind of color in.

It seems a little bit more chaotic when you're in it in the moment. So I could see why having that standard will really enable that collaboration till it becomes part of the fiber of how people work.

Lisa Welchman:

Okay. So you and I are talking about two different things. I don't think I disagree with what you're saying. I'm literally talking about boring, plain vanilla standard. When you use our mark, this is the color exactly and hashtag 07294 or how many every numbers there are. Don't look that up. That's probably some horrible color. But that's what I'm talking about. And I'm talking about resistance to that standard type of standardization. What you're talking about, these operational components and these cultural components of how we work together are very, very sticky and very, very important as well.

So I'm not pushing those aside, but that was not what I was talking about at all. We should have standards. I mean, I think the closest thing to your world are style guides.

Andy Vitale:

Right. Exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

What are pattern libraries? All of these things that I think people are more accepting of right now, I think that people and organizations don't resource appropriately for them. Pattern libraries and style guides and editorial guidelines and standards usually fall off of the side of a project. Oh, we're doing something, so why don't we make a pattern library for it? So what that usually ends up meaning is that you have an incomplete set of standards.

You have a standard for this instance and not for another. I think that's where the real vulnerability comes in. Not that we need to be completely exhaustive and make up standards for every little tiny instance, but there are a lot of gaps in standards. And that cause creates inconsistency and actually does one of two things. Things that organizations say they don't want.

It either slows things down because you have to run around and check with people because you don't understand what the rule is. Or it creates a bad experience for the people who are using whatever it is that you're building. But people just don't want to take the time to actually invest in creating standards. It also creates a lack of safety. Right? [inaudible]

Andy Vitale:

Oh, go ahead. Sorry.

Lisa Welchman:

No, you go.

Andy Vitale:

I was going to say, I feel so much smarter now than I did about five minutes ago in the fact that I have that clarity on what you truly meant by standards there. And it reminds me, I just actually recorded a fireside chat with this company, Zeppelin. They have a conference. And we talked about the design systems. So our team has a design system, and we also recently moved brand over from marketing to our design organization and seeing how people aren't even fully aware of our brand standards, of the patterns that we use and having to educate them.

That's one thing. That is the reason for standards, so we've got that consistency so people aren't reinventing the wheel every time they pick something up. So our voice and tone is consistent throughout. The other piece there, the collaboration piece of that that I've actually seen firsthand with our design systems team is they've created office hours not only to educate on all of the components, but to also govern and review the work that's in flight to make sure that it's being met and answer a lot of questions.

But where that really opened up collaboration is when you start to identify that there are patterns that some of the companies, sub-companies need to use that aren't built in this version of the design system.

Lisa Welchman:

Exactly.

Andy Vitale:

So we've built a contribution model so there's that collaboration throughout and that living, breathing document will continue to grow and expand and flex the way the company does over time.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. I mean, one of the ways that I teach people to create libraries of standards is going through this exercise called inputs and decision making. Part of that is to break down the battles that people about have around who gets to decide what that Pantone color is going to be. The question is who gets input and who decides? But it's also an exercise in completeness. So clearly when those standards were created, you weren't complete about the input.

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Right? And so a lot of times, because people almost don't want people to know that they're creating standards or because they're control freaks or just by accident. I mean, the gentlest thing is somebody makes a mistake and doesn't talk to the right people, but because of that, the standards end up not sticking because they don't apply to everybody. So then people are like, "Well, they didn't take our use case into a accord, and so we get to be an exception." And they make all of these assumptions.

So the process of creating a standard, making sure that you're sitting down and having a conversation, we're creating a standard on X. I mean, you can fill in the blank of what that might be. Who do we need to talk to? Not do they get to decide, but who do we need to talk to make sure that our requirements set for this standard that we're creating is actually full? And so you can either do it downstream like you do, which is, "Oh my goodness, they're breaking the rules." And the sad answer is because they didn't know there were any right or the rule didn't make sense for them. It didn't fit their case.

So I think that's a really good downstream way to catch those types of things and it's also sounds good because it sounds like your team is learning about the community of people on the team who they are and their diverse needs.

Andy Vitale:

Right, exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

And that will allow them to create that. The next step, the next level up, Andy, would be do that outside of the context of a project.

Andy Vitale:

Right, exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

Right? Those standards exist and it should be someone's job to make sure that they're right or some set of people's jobs to make sure that they're right and that they're always tuned and proper. I think that when that is the case, you'll see this shift from catching of violations downstream, and then you'll catch them upstream or they just won't happen. Right? And that's where the agility gets built in. But you actually have to take the time to create this mechanism so that people can be agile because nobody wants to nitpick somebody.

I mean, the great world would be that people could. You don't have to review stuff because people... You've created a culture and environment where people can follow the rules. They're enabled to follow the rules. Right?

Andy Vitale:

Exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

I think people who write really appreciate that you don't need everyone to... You hire good writers. You tell them what the guidelines are and the standards are for writing in your organization and you let them roll. Right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

And do what they need to do. So it's actually less control for people. As you can tell, this was and is an issue for people. I think it's counterintuitive. We've talked a lot the last time about innovation. It's counterintuitive for people in an innovative environment to think about hardening standards, but I think they go hand in hand.

Andy Vitale:

I do too. I think it gives people that are building something new, the tried and tested things that have been successful so that they're able to learn from past mistakes or past failures and leverage some of those standards and best practices even if they are going to create something new.

Lisa Welchman:

It also gives them the toolkit to play with.

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

And you'll easily find out if something doesn't work or something needs to change, though this is the same old, same old, we need to add something in order to be innovative or this isn't working. It doesn't mean you have to stay within that, but it least it's a good starting point, one that's been tested and that is relatively safe.

Andy Vitale:

I think that covers the first one for today.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. So what about truth number six, which is the web is an asset. What's your takeaway on this one?

Andy Vitale:

That's another one that I jotted down so many notes. So the first thing when my brain went to asset was I thought about intellectual property, and then I thought about is a website or a digital manifestation of the organization that intellectual property of the organization, or does it contain intellectual property of the organization? And where I think I landed is it contains intellectual property of an organization. The website by itself is part of that company, but it's not something that they would protect.

A lot of companies have websites, they all have information on them. So then I thought, what else is an asset? Well, an asset is a tool and a website is that. It's a tool for selling or for giving people the opportunity to buy a service or a product. It's also a tool for communicating, whether it's educating customers or even now through the rise of chatbots and AI, the ability to have a conversation with somebody to continue to learn or find out more information or get a more personalized service. So that's what I thought of first.

Lisa Welchman:

This is so funny because this is one where I think we've completely disconnected and it's a learning tool for me about language and what people hear. So when I wrote this, I was mostly thinking about asset from a financial perspective, not in the financial realm, but it's an asset, not a liability.

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Right? It's a benefit to the organization. It's not... What's the word that I'm looking for? The web is an asset, it's not a cost center.

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Right? So this probably has shifted a bit over time because I think when I wrote this, and you know what, maybe I'm wrong. I mean, I'd love to hear real time more than I do. People were almost complaining about money that they had to invest in digital development. They wanted something for nothing. There was this perspective of somehow we're going to glue together two web pages and it's going to make us a lot of money.

This is just easy money making thing, and we don't have to invest in it. We don't have to take care of it. We don't have to mind it. We don't have to staff appropriately for it. So I think this one has really shifted a lot over time, but at the same time, I also don't think it has the same type of maturity of that other aspects of the business have.

I mean, some of the things that we were just talking about in the other ones, which is some of the operational systems that need to be installed and taken care of, some of the support mechanisms and developmental aspects of supporting a digital team that are very, very mature in other parts of the organization might be less mature for your digital team. So some of that is because I think the digital profession is diverse and UX might be very mature. Lots of conferences to go to, lots of education to go through. Content strategy is maturing.

But then there are other aspects like understanding taxonomy and metadata and how it integrates with a digital platform less so. Where are you going to go to talk about that, these pure play digital aspects. So I think for me, in pointing at this, this is an asset. It's an investment. It's like we've built a building and what are we going to do to keep it up? How are we going to keep it clean? Are we planning to re-roof it? This is not something to just be taken lightly. Does that make sense to you?

Andy Vitale:

It does. And it makes me think a little bit about what Sam Quan Krueger said when we talked to him where he said the web presence needs to meet the needs of the organization. And you and I have talked about that too. When I think about that asset and the way you described it and knowing that this was written many years ago, I think we looked at the web then a lot as like we're going to stand up this marketing tool. This is going to be what we use to market our company. And then through the rise of more digital tools and software as a service, the web experience for a lot of companies is becoming that product more so than the marketing tool.

So having that shift, the shift in focus and the desire to get more out of it, and increasingly more as our workflows have become digital. The way we work has gone completely online. I think that it's interesting to see how there is a marketing component of every website, but there are not many websites that exist strictly for marketing purposes only anymore.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. I mean, you're saying that and it's going in my head and I'm hearing you, and it's also a pet peeve of mine. Well, I always knew that was true, and it bothers me to this day, and it's interesting to me intellectually that the web and digital has landed deeply in marketing arms, right? Because I think at the end of the day when we tell the story of the web and how it disrupted the enterprise and how business is done, we'll find out that marketing is the least of it.

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Right? It's kind of like it's the most easily seen. It's the icing on the cake. It's the candles. It's the flash. It's the this, it's the that. But at the end of the day, the deep shifts are this data. We're hearing the internal rumblings of how much this data pushes and pulls and the value of that data, right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

So that was something that I always knew and understood. In fact, my earliest work on the web was really around workplace stuff, intranets. Because I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is really going to change the way people work internally." But it's really taken a long time for that to mature. I'm a fast processor intellectually, and I think it all just rolled out in my head and like some gleaning technicolor digital movie of what was going to
happen.

I was like, "Oh, 10 years from now we're going to be here." Of course we're not because people on systems move more slowly than Lisa's technical and movie about digital or slower than I can process what I think is going to happen. But I think that the depth and breadth of this type of shift, and as I've said before, the sort of tail-wagging the dog, the deep transformation. I mean, anybody who can manage digital in all its complexity and the richness and diversity of that team and the richness and diversity of design, technology, data, content, that person can run the business. Right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

So I think that this is a little bit to the side of this truth of the web as an asset, but this is where I was coming from of, "This is a thing." Because at the time people were like, "I don't want to fund this. This is a cost center. Why should I put money in here?" And it's like, "Because it's an asset." Right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

And you need to develop it, and you need to build it, and enable it to grow. And I think that this one really has shifted hard because I think while though people may not have emotionally caught up with this, and I think that enterprise business systems and top level jobs have not caught up with this, it's happening. It's happening.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. I think we're starting to see this the same vehicle, the same digital presence being used in unauthenticated and authenticated spaces and that has a lot to the levers that pull the different amounts of data and how it's leveraged and what companies feel comfortable collecting. It introduces a whole new complexity on privacy and safety like you talked about.

So this is an asset that in some ways especially as more and more companies are digital, this is the primary asset for a lot of companies.

Lisa Welchman:

That is correct. I mean, obviously, for a digital first story dot com, this is the case. But for everybody else, I mean as slowly but surely, digital penetrates every single process, every single way of being. And I think that the pandemic really accelerated that process because we had to invent ways of doing things in different ways. And I think that's showing some of the capacity of what can actually happen in this. And then there's just natural maturation. I mean, there's been, what, 13 years since I wrote this. So there's just 13 years of mobile.

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Right? I mean, who can really exist in a mobilized country? I mean, I moved from the US to the Netherlands. Honestly, I could not function without this. It's all there. So I think this one's a big one. While I think organizations have become less reluctant to underfund digital, I would say I still think they don't get it. That's too strong. That's a little bit maybe ungenerous. I think they're still challenged to understand how to make this transition, when to make this leap.

It's a huge shift from business to usual. It's not an insignificant thing to not be a digital verse company and then to try and become one. All of your infrastructure, all of your HR, all of your internal processes, everything is framed around this other way of being, and you're going to make this leap. So I think that's interesting.

Andy Vitale:

I think that leap also comes with a... I don't want to use the word power struggle, but there's a different skillset that people need to have and be familiar with. As we see the last bunch of non-digital analog companies that have been around forever are struggling to make the leap into digital as easy... Or their digital transformation as easy as companies that are run by somewhat digital natives or people that this is... They've grown up being able to understand these experiences and how these digital experiences come to life. So I think we're still seeing a little bit of that, but I think we're coming to the end of that as well.

Lisa Welchman:

So from your seat, I mean, you're in a leadership position, a pretty senior position. What do you see rolling out the next 10 to 15 years? If we do this again in 10 years, what do you think is going to have happened?

Andy Vitale:

I think we're going to have found ways to leverage digital solutions to have full conversations with folks, to intake data, to process that data through natural language processing, artificial intelligence. And we're going to really start to see that the information that we collect will allow us to put together a whole personalized experience for people if they allow it, that will hopefully be safe, but at the same time will reduce a lot of time spent with having to track down information, having to figure things out.

I think we're seeing processing speeds that are faster than ever. We're tying together information through the way we segment audiences. So I think we're just going to get... Companies are going to get smarter if they know what to do with this data. That's what I expect. I mean, it's not shocking, it's just there are large organizations, the way you bank the go to the doctor, all of that is going to be so much, hopefully easier for the end user to track down the things that they need and get the answers that they need in a way that they've never gotten them before.

Lisa Welchman:

So I'm going to push you a little bit on that. Don't disagree with any of that, but it's very much product focused and customer focused. As a leader and a team leader, what does that mean for your team? What does that mean? Because honestly, my wheelhouse is how does the organization have to organize itself and govern in order to do what you just described?

I mean, here's the thing. You could do that now, right? But the question is how do you get a team where that is counter-cultural. What you just described is completely counter-cultural. How do you get them that way? What do you think is going to happen with team structures, centralization versus decentralization? I'm writing a lecture on that for my class on that right now. When do you decentralize? When do you not decentralize? What do you think is going to happen in terms of the way teams are enabled internally by leaders?

Andy Vitale:

That's interesting because we've centralized a lot of parts recently. So thinking about how we can take these centralized disciplines and break off pieces of them to form working groups so that there's representation from everyone in a working model. What we're seeing is the team is just thinking about things at a different level. They're thinking about how we solve these problems for people and how that impacts the business in a way that's like... The way that businesses have always looked. How do we leverage these digital tools to lower the cost of acquiring a client? How do we leverage these digital tools to help people earn trust with our organization, gain trust in our organization?

How do we leverage our... And it's a group effort. How did the designers and the technologists and the product people work on this while we're pulling in marketing to make sure, how do we market this right out of the gate? Does it make sense to what data do we have and where do we leverage it?

So I'm seeing more collaboration than ever before where it felt like we used to just, this group will take it and then throw it over a fence to another group and then hope that like, "Oh, someone from marketing eventually get them plugged in." So I think the faster that we have access to all this information, and we've got the customer at the center, I mean, we're just leveraging people's expertise. And like anything else, what would've taken us weeks or months to track down information, we're getting it faster.

So we're able to make changes and pivot and put things out in the world faster. And if they're wrong, we're able to learn faster and pivot faster as well. So I think it's increasing the speed.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. Just to tie this up because we're almost done with our time here, but that all ties back to our truth that we talked about early, which is standards and able collaboration.

Andy Vitale:

Exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

So that only works if you've created a standardized system and that you have standards so that you can pass that information with ease and speed amongst each other. And you don't have stuff falling between the craps... Cracks, excuse me. And you don't have stuff falling between the cracks. So I think that is super important that people understand that you need to design this, right? You need to design the work mechanism. You need to design a system of standards to actually enable you to work in this more integrated way.

And it's from a safety perspective, absolutely crucial because it will be moving so fast and there'll be so much information moving that you can't see the harm. If you have not engineered the harm out of it, you won't be able to find it after the fact. It'll be too robust and too complex. And so I think that sort of ethical responsibility is one of the things that leaders are going to just have to take on. I think it's been the case that usually it's like everyone is looking at a financial return or they're looking at a UX return. But I think this idea of safety and ethics, which is why you and I are even talking to each other at all, also has to be factored in because not only will you get this information about customers faster and be able to make decisions and will they be able to interact with you with more speed and ease, the harm will also be served that fast. So I think it's important to do that and the standards play a role. So that's it. What do you think?

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, I think this was one of my favorite episodes we've done on the Digital Decca just because we started in slightly different places, but then came around to the core of what that was. And you know what, just like the rest, some things may have shifted over time, but they're still very relevant today.

Lisa Welchman:

I think so too. So I hope everybody enjoyed this convo.