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Zen And The Art Of Digital Transformation

Forbes Technology Council

Bruno Guicardi is President of CI&T, the digital solutions partner driving lean digital transformation for the world’s biggest brands.

Once you realize that someone like Warren Buffett — widely considered one of the world’s savviest investors — has a laundry list of big-time business regrets, you realize that even the smartest and most successful among us sometimes fall victim to poor judgment. We all have different ways of dealing with it. If you’re Buffett, you probably find comfort in the fact that your other investments are worth billions.

If there were a way to spot those circumstances in which we’re most prone to judgment error, could we avoid making mistakes altogether? Probably not, but Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman thinks we can certainly do better just by being more aware of how our minds work. 

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman describes two systems of thought. When we think “fast,” we’re making decisions based on an intuitive reaction. Subconsciously, we identify patterns in information and “automatically” classify that data into pre-existing categories. This system forms and relies on previous knowledge, and when we jump to conclusions, it’s probably to blame.

“Slow” thinking is the opposite. It consists of a higher level of concentration, conscious analysis and creative problem-solving. This system has a lot in common with the “beginner’s mind,” a concept from Zen Buddhism that refers to an attitude of openness, a lack of preconceptions and attention to the moment. Kahneman says, and Zen Buddhist monks can probably confirm, that we spend most of our time using the fast system of thinking, as it is impossible for us to maintain working at the alertness required by slow thinking or the beginner’s mind all the time. 

How can businesses benefit from embracing the beginner’s mind, or “corporate zen”?

A number of legacy, household-name companies — champions of the 20th century like Sears, Toys R Us and Blockbuster — have suffered the ultimate fate of what I’ve observed to be fast thinking in a corporate setting. Referred to in business jargon as “innovation lag,” the attitude that these companies seemed to embody was one of overconfidence in their previous knowledge of the world and ignorance of the new forming reality. “We know our customers,” they seemed to say, “therefore we know what they need; we know our market, and we are comfortable working in the way we always have.” We’re all familiar with what resulted from those businesses’ massive errors in judgment. 

Meanwhile, the companies that arrived on the scene to dominate the 21st century were indeed moving quickly, but they were “thinking” slowly. Success in the digital environment requires a different kind of assumption — an assumption that you don’t know. It requires meticulously augmenting and validating every piece of knowledge about customers and their needs, using hard data and real-world evidence.   

But as I mentioned before, it is impossible to sustain a beginner’s mind all the time. That leads us to the most relevant challenge in life and business: How can we know when it’s the right time to activate the slow mode? To trigger the beginner’s mind so we can learn new things? It is futile to expect that we can figure it out by ourselves — to just know when to do it despite our best intentions. We’ve found that the best way to translate this into the business environment is to introduce disciplined processes — practices that will make us exercise and master slow thinking. Not unlike on a personal level how we practice meditation to master being present in the moment.

Although the ability to be alert to new information is beneficial in all areas of a business, our experience in the digital field has shown that this capability is indispensable in two specific processes: the understanding of customer needs and the creation of solutions. In a fast-changing world, these two processes are critical for an organization to keep pace with what is happening outside its doors and make sure all new solutions are actually addressing upcoming needs. The deployment and disciplined practice of frameworks like design thinking and lean startup are great starters to increase the level of corporate mindfulness.      

One of our clients, a bank with 60 million customers, realized the value of this method when it was trying to understand why a large number of older customers were not using its mobile app; instead, they were using more expensive channels like branches and call centers. Using a design-thinking approach and interacting directly with customers rather than relying on aggregated research data, the bank learned that these not-so-tech-savvy customers were lost in the multitude of options and functions on the app and afraid of making a mistake and ultimately losing money. It was a crucial insight that helped inform a new solution: an additional app with a much simpler interface featuring big fonts and big icons. But still, the bank didn’t take for granted that the solution was known just because the problem was known. So we prototyped the new app and observed how those customers used it, only to learn that it wasn’t as intuitive as we thought. Back to the drawing board we went; we rinsed and repeated, and finally, we did it. With the third version of the prototype, we got enough positive responses to green-light the development of the app — and after only a couple of months post-launch, it amassed 4 million customers.    

If you’re looking for other examples, you could turn to Amazon’s “working backwards” method, which I’ve written about previously, where the company imposes the discipline of looking at new product ideas through the lens of the customer.

The benefits of corporate zen are only realized when we insert it into our day-to-day activities, practice it with discipline and finally incorporate it into what we are. Today, thanks to the unpredictable and uncertain landscape created by digital disruption, the ability to connect, empathize and quickly respond to ever-changing customer needs is the most important superpower your organization can develop — and embracing a beginner’s mind is the first step.


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