Episode 42: Deep Dive: Digital Deca Part 4: 10 Management Truths for the Web Age

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Transcript

Lisa Welchman:

So hey, Andy, here we are for another Digital Deca. I think we just had a really great conversation I hope folks will enjoy. We are looking at truths number seven and eight. Truth seven is the organization owns the web presence and truth eight is management should embrace impermanence and so I thought this conversation got a little kind of philosophical, floating around in the air. These were really kind of interesting takes on some concepts and actually left me with some food for thought and I think will send me back to my writing. I think I need to talk about that, these concepts a little bit more. What do you think?

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation around what it meant to own the web presence and I think the way we look at the web presence today, it hasn't really changed much, but I think ownership, the thought of ownership and how we can be stewards of our presence is really interesting, and the same thing with talking about impermanence and change and what it takes to really embrace that. I think we did talk a lot about the different people that are involved and how digital has accelerated that pace of change, so lots of good conversation that I hope people enjoy.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, I hope everybody enjoys this episode.

So Andy, today we are on our fourth deep dive on The Digital Deca.

Andy Vitale:

Yes.

Lisa Welchman:

And so I know you really enjoyed the last one and I did, too, but I think these truths, number seven and eight, might be two of my favorites. Truth seven is the organization owns the web presence and truth eight is management should embrace impermanence.

Andy Vitale:

I definitely know that truth eight resonates with me. Truth seven, as I was going through it, I wrote down a couple of things and I'm really interested to talk about that as well.

Lisa Welchman:

Okay, well, let's start with that one. So what did you write down for truth seven?

Andy Vitale:

So for truth seven, "The organization owns the web presence," my thought was just, I think I have a distorted view of time because 13 years ago, I think of... It was a little bit of the Wild West. There were a lot of companies building websites and agencies working on websites, so the teams that were building these things were not in-house at the time, so my thought was that you were thinking that this was around companies using a lot of external agencies, and with that, the ownership of those properties, how clear could that have been? If you've got a consultancy that's building a website, do they actually own that property? Is there a way that they sign that over to the company? What does hosting look like? And just my thought was really around the mechanics of the site being built.

Lisa Welchman:

Of course it would be because that's what you do, whereas my perspective and my intent around this really was from a governance lens. This is probably the most governancy of all The Digital Deca pieces, so my critique in this is probably anywhere where I say web, I should probably shift it to digital, right? And what this really was addressing was this constant thing that I still run into, which is who owns what inside of the organization, so the classic early web thing was who owns the web marketing or IT and so it gave up except for the platform stuff, and now marketing owns it and who owns the content? Who owns the data? There's all these conversations about owner ownership, which usually have to do with who has control and who gets to decide what the standards are or how these things work.

And so my point is, none of y'all own any of this. The organization owns its web presence, and the part that's not written here, but it is in my book and that I say often when I give talks is that you are a steward of the content. You are a steward of the design. You're a steward of this data stream, which means just because you are a steward of it does not mean that you get to decide anything or that you have any authority over how that works, that your online presence, your digital presence, your web presence should be in service of the organization and that all your sense of kind of organizational or group ownership should submit to that.

So it's probably the most authoritarian thing that I'll ever say, but I think it's important for people to understand and people think people do understand that, particularly from a brand perspective, that we need to think holistically about this. This is not the experience that you create. People should not constantly be submitting to the ego-tripping of the staff that creates it and that happens a lot. I mean, maybe you can tell me I'm wrong. I mean, you lead a team and you're around other people who lead teams all the time, but the amount of infighting that I get where the conversation is not really about the UX, the conversation is about, "This person thinks they get to decide that," or whatever, so that's kind of where I was with this. I don't know what your thoughts are on that. I'd be really curious.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. No, that helps it make a lot more sense to me. I think maybe just in some of the organizations I've worked in have been larger enterprise organizations, so I think there's always that understanding of we are creating this property, this solution for both the people that are going to use this, so client-centric, but also the organization itself. Because at the end of the day, the subgroups or the people that come and go, they sometimes want to get their flavor on it, put their stink on it a little bit, right, make it their own.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andy Vitale:

And then when they leave, you see someone else is like, "I have to change that."

Lisa Welchman:

"What even is this?"

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, and then you got the board, basically. I mean, it's nothing.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, and it's like why? Why did someone want to personalize it so much? Yes, bring that influence in your knowledge to build something better, but when someone looks at that website or that digital property, they should say, "It's that company," not like, "Oh, I'll bet they had an amazing art director on that one." Because what happens is that's when you start to see these companies, they change their logos every three years, they change their website every three years. I'm not saying that you shouldn't update it and modernize it and stay with trends and constantly work on that, but it shouldn't feel like an entirely different company every couple of years. That will start to ERO erode the trust that people have in the company and in the brand.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, I mean, what you're pointing to is one of those interesting cultural aspects. I'm writing a lot about the digital maker culture right now, trying to figure out what that is and one of this thing is just this blatant sense of individuality and this almost entitlement of feeling that you get to express your individuality through work. That's different than being allowed to be yourself at work from any kind of human perspective, I'm not talking about that, so let's just push that off the table and be clear about that I'm not talking about that, but what I am talking about is this idea that you get to act out your own artistic vision of something, even if nobody asked you to right on this, that you get to express yourself, and I think that's part of digital maker culture because I mean, that's what we did.

I mean, I have absolutely no visual design expertise and the number of webpages that I designed for Cisco Systems in 1995, '96, '97, '98 is a lot, and so a lot of us who were early in, well, I've taken one coding class, but we were allowed to kind of freestyle and I think that freestyling and that self-expression of, "Oh, let me try it out and see if it works, is really a huge part of the culture," and I think it's grown and become part of who people think we should be and so that sounds really strong and stringent, but it's also kind of a tough love comment because yes, there's always room for that kind of self-expression. And if you select your job well, there should be some integration between how you want to express yourself as a human being and what you do at work, right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

So I think that that's the best of all possible worlds, you love your job and your expression of yourself integrates well with that job, but that's not always the case, and that's not always what the business needs, right?

Andy Vitale:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

And so it's tough. That one's going to be a tough one, particularly on your design side of the camp because it's so designy.

Andy Vitale:

Right. No, it's true. I mean, we constantly want to evolve the design. We constantly want to keep who the company is at the heart of that, though, because if we didn't...

I think the biggest thing, example that I could provide through my interpretation of this is a homepage, like a homepage for a company that sells lots of things and you've got maybe four or five different people working on parts of that homepage. You can't have that look like four or five different companies or four or five different people actually built that thing. It needs to look like it came from that company, so all of those people, while they have their individual or all of those groups within the company have their individual needs, there has to be, like we talked about in the last deep dive, those standards that allow that consistency so that it stays that organization's web presence.

I think another thing that my mind went to with this is data. The organization owns the web presence, which means they own the data, whether the customers have input that at some point or it's data generated through the organization that is, and that becomes the property of that organization that manifests through that digital experience

Lisa Welchman:

Becomes the property and the responsibility.

Andy Vitale:

Yes.

Lisa Welchman:

Right, and so that's the part where that internal passing around of data, not particularly careful passing around of data, not particularly legal usage of data, whatever word you want to pick in that becomes really, really important, so there's a liability of the organization and a responsibility of the organization to actually keep those things together, so I think that's all... Yeah, I think that's a rich one.

That one actually is one I think I might go back and think about again. I think there's a lot of interesting facets on this one that some of which are more that are important, but... No, I shouldn't say "superficial," that's wrong, some of them that are important, like the brand and data, content, but I think neither of us is really able to clearly articulate what that means for a team, at least in this podcast, and I think a lot of the work that I've done around governance is around team organization and how people interact and I've talked a lot about centralization and decentralization and hybrid models, which is usually what people have around that and how a team must organize around this particular truth that it's an organization-wide thing and the fact that there probably isn't anyone inside of the organization that in some way isn't contributing to the digital presence and so that's why I have such an extensive model of team, which involves a core team and a distributed team, and sometimes a dispersed core team and extended team of vendors and things like that, and people outside of the organization sometimes impacting how you have to work.

So I think this one is really, really rich, and well, I don't think we got a really good kind of solid hit on it. I think this might be one that I'll circle back on and maybe write on some more because I think there are some rich things to say about what this type of ownership means because I think there's accountability and responsibility around it that might be interesting to talk about now almost 15 years later.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, and I think the word you mentioned earlier was "steward," which to me, if you think about all of these things through the lens of the organization and even the data, every single person that touches it is a steward of the data and the responsibility that comes with that and if everybody looks at themselves as having that responsibility, then I think we'll see a lot different way that these things are treated and the outcomes that come out of them. I think as you mentioned earlier, there's still this desire to put a lot of individuality around it, but when it's kind of set up that way where individuals have a lot of their own control, that's what leads to a lot of the inconsistencies, and when you think about it from, "This is the responsibility I have to the larger organization, to the larger governing body," then it takes on a little bit of a different meaning and I think that if people just looked at it through that lens a little bit deeper, that we'd see a lot better outcomes.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, and again, as with everything else, I think that's a maturity issue. You have to create that environment for that to happen, so I think it must happen. It will happen. It's happened for every other technology. We're just right in the middle of it and it's just how easy are we going to make it on ourselves or not, so we'll see what goes from there. But it's interesting. That one was interesting for me. So truth eight...

Andy Vitale:

Truth eight, management should embrace impermanence. I think we're going to come at this slightly differently, too. I think I'm going to come at it from an area where impermanence to me means the ability to evolve the test-and-learn culture, the failing, the being able to iterate, so I think that the structure is never permanent. The web presence, the digital experience is not a permanent thing because it's always evolving, it's constantly moving and we've built cultures around being able to put something out there that maybe isn't a hundred percent ready to get data, get feedback, and then be able to pivot and move in different directions and that leaders at one point in time thought this is a set-it-and-forget-it model, "Because of who I am, I'm going to put something out there, and people are going to have to buy it," and the industry has changed so much where there are so many different factors that go into this. Who you are today as a company through the core may stay the same, but what you put out there in the world will likely change over time.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, I don't disagree with anything that you're saying. I think this is probably the most philosophical of them all. So as some people know, maybe not many people, I was a philosophy major in college, and I really loved the pre-Socratic philosophers, and one of my favorites, which is a favorite of many, is a philosopher called Heraclitus, who we actually really know very, very little about because only fragments of what Heraclitus wrote exist. But one of the most famous quotes is, "You can't step into the same river twice," so water's always flowing, situation's always changing the sea, the riverbed is changing, all these, it's going to be a different experience every time.

And so I think, knowing me, that this was me bringing this reality to the workplace, what you just described has always been the way business is. It's just that I think what digital and the web is added is a level of speed so that you can see it. If something is changing very, very slowly, it's kind of difficult to notice those changes and then maybe you have these plateau experiences where, oh, it's popped to a plateau. I have these shifting light colors and underneath my cabinets in my kitchen and they change very slowly and you barely notice them. But then all of a sudden, it's like, "Oh, the colors changed." It's just done this, so there's many, many examples of that, and so I think in business, that's probably how it's been. Things moved so slowly that an individual manager probably had very little changing in their wheelhouse during the course of their career.

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Right, and now, things are moving very quickly and you can see them moving really quickly, so I think I was probably getting at something similar to you from a philosophical angle and you're being very practical about it. I also just believe that that's the nature of reality, right?

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, right.

Lisa Welchman:

And even the last deep dive that we did, we talked about standards enable collaboration. That's the only way to get ahold of it. Otherwise, it's a fricking chaotic... If you've got no standards core plus impermanence, I mean, that is chaos, so it's the reason why we're not going to get anywhere unless we at least have some handles to hold on, some standards handles to hold on. Doesn't mean we can't change them if we need to change them, but at least you've got a handle on it.

So management embracing that impermanence system, understanding the implications of this fast-moving impermanent model, and to alter and change managing structures to support that, instead of trying to have these same fricking 1955 business silos that are organized by geography, organized by archaic product line, organized by some random thing that somebody picked a long time ago and just leaving and expecting to run this kind of convoluted, impermanent thing through this mechanism. I mean, it's kind of sublime when I go into organizations that are like that, and I'm like, "You're trying to do what? Like that?" It's almost like a really interesting dance, but what you get is a really twisted staff, a staff that's dissatisfied, you get a lot of waste, and it's all because management will not let go of these prior business models. So that's a lot of talking for me, but that's kind of where I was coming from. Any thoughts on that?

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, I mean, I tried to think of when I think of an older process, what that looks like. I thought about maybe the auto assembly line and then knowing all of the work that Toyota did now in the '70s and the way they changed that and how that's influenced a lot of how companies work and how companies build products.

And then I think, "Wow, the working in Detroit and seeing all the large auto manufacturers, now that they're building electric vehicles, it's a whole new assembly line process." It's the same type of product that's evolved, but the way they build those products have changed, so even companies that have been around for hundreds of years that aren't digital-first companies, they're embracing that impermanence, they're shifting with the times, and sometimes it feels like, hey, there's a company that comes out of the gate that does something different that disrupts just a little bit, but companies are adapting to that and the industries that are being disrupted met with a lot of competition, and in a lot of places, the companies that have been around longer and have that understanding of how customers operate and the true meaning of their products and what they are, and have that kind of brand history, they're starting to pull forward again, and it's been really exciting to watch.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, I mean, the one that I think of when you're listening to you talk is newspaper publishing. I mean, disrupted right out of the gate when digital came in, right out of the gate, made some not-great business decisions around giving away their product. Well, and then there was the year of the great paywall. I can't remember that, but there was one year where everybody was like, "Okay, enough is enough. We've got to make some money. We're not getting ad money anymore. We've lost that revenue stream. It's just not working," and watching that kind of evolve over time.

Yeah, I think this is an interesting one, the... Yeah, I'm not entirely sure management should embrace impermanence. I think this one's deeper than I think it is. It's just this idea. It's a very long-term statement. It was probably always true, as we've said, is truer now, and it implies different types of management mechanisms. It also, and I'm saying management should embrace in permanence, it also means that we all need to embrace this impermanence. I mean, when we're recording this, we're right in the middle of the 2023 tech layoffs, January of 2023 tech layoffs. I think they started in December of 2022 and people don't work at the same companies for 30 or 40 years anymore, right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

There's a lot of that around, and again, it all points to what does stay the same? Where is the stability? Which is why I've always been so focused on governance. When everybody leaves or when you're turning over your staff or when you're turning your product line consistently over time, where's the wheel? Where's the hub? Not "Where's the wheel?" Where's the hub in the wheel? And I remember we did it on another podcast. I talked about my execution atom which had a nucleus which included strategic intent and standards and this is where that comes from. The rest of it is just electrons flying around and they can change. Some of them reach escape velocity and leave, some of them get replaced, but the thing that is holding it together is this strategic intent, which also includes objectives around revenue, objectives about what we're trying to achieve, quantifiable and qualitative measures of what we're trying to achieve, and then what standards need to be in place to hold that. That's all you've got in an impermanent environment. If you don't have that and you're succeeding, you're lucky.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, I agree, and the digital component of it, just because this is The Digital Deca, it's kind of taught leaders, managers, people that run companies that things change faster than they have before, and that acceleration, like you said, people had the same career with not a lot of change throughout. Now it's not only are they embracing this impermanence or this change, they're leading it. They're leading through it to be able to take the companies where they need to go and as you said, too, with these tech layoffs, the people working together change, yet that can't disrupt the flow of the company and the cycles that they've built, so there have to be those standards in place so that the next group that come in, or different folks that come in and work on it have to pick up where it left off.

Lisa Welchman:

Exactly, exactly. There's no baton passing like in the relay racer. I mean, the other person's gone already, so that stuff's tough, man. It's really interesting. It's tough because I formed a lot of my career doing different types of work in that way, but also just, it's different. It's richly different than the way people are used to working together, but it's also, I think could be highly creative.

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Right, if you can get that core and you can allow people to bring their personal ingenuity, their personal vision, and sense of creativity to an organization that has a clear objective and has enough solidity around understanding their data, understanding their content, understanding how they work, enough machinery, I hate to use industrial words, but enough machinery in place, that person could actually actualize that vision, even if it's just at a prototype level, fairly cleanly, and the organization could evaluate the implications of that, the safety implications, the revenue implications, all of that. That would be amazing and I think we can get there and the only thing that's stopping us is people, right? Because they will not embrace impermanence because human beings like to hoard. We like to just, "I finally figured it out. Okay. I finally figured it out. Now I can rest," right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

And it's like, no, actually, it's going to be different tomorrow.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, and also, like you said, they like to hoard, but they also like to hold on for their own selfish reasons of... Something that someone told me in that's been really helpful in my career is I've taken on different teams, and not only design as we've added more things to it, it's like these things may sit with you now because it makes sense, but it's actually good for you to get it to a place that it can go to someone else, or flourish on its own, and you often see that that's part of that embracing that change and how things are going to evolve and it would be wrong for someone to selfishly be like, "No, it can't go. I still need to hold onto this because..." For whatever reason it happens to be, but it's more around the idea of you don't embrace that change fully, and again, like you said, people are the most interesting part of that equation and their own kind of way that they deal with things.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, and I think just touching on and reacting to what you just said, part of that clinging is that from a very strategic perspective, organizations compensate people based on the sizes of their teams sometimes, so some of the reasoning isn't complicated, it's not even emotional, it's practical, and so part of just embracing impermanence is having an understanding of what these structures mean and how they make people behave. I mean, nine times out of 10, a governance problem is a control problem. Nobody wants bad UX. Nobody wants the product of no governance. They just don't want to give up their authority, or they don't want to move their headcount from this side of the business to the other side of the business because that means their team is cut in half and what does that mean about my job, right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

And so this is just kind of the general vulnerability of people and so management and leadership and organizations, including boards, understanding this impermanence and finding other ways to measure and value their human resources might be required.

Andy Vitale:

Yep. Exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

Anyhow, so I think we've exhausted both of these. You've got any closing thoughts?

Andy Vitale:

I think that... No. I think that this is... Nothing to add. I feel like it's just something that people need to pay attention to and the way that we think about our impact on an organization and what the life cycle of the work that we do and how that will continue to evolve. It's something we just need to be aware of.