Beating Paths Through the Digital Jungle: How Companies Master Digital Culture Change

Abstract

Even companies with strong financial records and glorious histories in exploring opportunities and exploiting markets must take their path into a digital business transformation. But they are sometimes trapped in cultural heritage because worked well for a long time. Corporations invest heavily in employee training to master that change. But investments do not guarantee a sustainable digital culture change and it hit many enterprises by surprise. We see increasing evidence that it is not enough to complete heavy technical training. Rather employees must develop a "digital mindsets". But decision-makers insist that only even more tool training will somehow make that case by magic. Training concepts today are often not well suited to help shaping digital mindsets. Even worse, they miss the point: An abundance of technical matter solidifies questionable assumptions that enough technical skills will be enough to master digital change. In April 2018, PricewaterhouseCoopers Germany started an experiment to understand and resolve this challenge by stepping back and taking a different view. The patterns of this paper emerged from two intense years of learning, discourse and failure on how to teach employees in large organisational settings with a proud record in traditional trainings to systematically beat individual paths into the realm of digitalization. Participants were coached to develop a "cognitive surplus" to deal with topics beyond technical matter. The patterns present a preliminary gist of a coaching curriculum that could contribute to one of the biggest challenges companies will face in the decade to come: The resurrection of daily business out of capabilities deriving from digital means.