“The Gorilla Experiment” is the tenth episode of the third season of the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory, where Sheldon attempts to help Penny understand physics to impress Leonard. Sheldon begins his lecture back in ancient Greece, where people would look up at the stars and see some of them move in the night sky. They are going to embark on a 2600-year journey from the Greeks to Isaac Newton to Erwin Schrödinger to the Dutch researchers Leonard is currently ripping off.
“Apparently, ignorance is bliss.” is the funniest line.
Teaching Digital Transformation is not stressful at all
As a digital consultant, I was involved in discussions with several companies and I can guarantee you that, if there was a competition in understanding digital topics, this would be the “quantitative” podium:
- 🥇 Gold medalist: the above-mentioned “gorilla”, or even worse sometimes, the “dolphin” – almost 50% of the total: you need to set up 10-20-30-40 meetings and the outcome will always be the same, you think they get it but it seems like talking to dolphins… and taking forever to make a decision, even when we are talking about a few hundreds of euros of investment (and at the end they decide to allocate double for a printing adv in a magazine.. with no traceability)
- 🥈 Silver medalist: the “Mr. Know-All” – I would say the 40% of the total: they want to teach you how to do your job even if the most digital thing they ever did is to have downloaded and installed Outlook on their € 2,500 iPhone 17 Pro (usually they brilliantly team up with the “fake gurus” I’ve recently talked about in my last article here).
- 🥉 Bronze medalist: the “Neo”, born as Thomas A. Anderson, also known as The One in the Matrix saga – a rarity: these mythological creatures are usually the ones you would desperately want to meet and hug walking any trade shows, no matter if you are in Orlando, Chicago, Dubai, Riyadh, Milan, Rimini, Hamburg, Barcelona, Madrid, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Melbourne, Sydney, London, Birmingham, Lyon, Paris.. (geez, how many live events are there in the Foodservice Industry????) because they understand you, they embrace your vision and they genuinely want to work with you because they think you are a real added value to their business and not just another third-rate huckster. (So here’s the trick revealed: when we are meeting all around the world, if I hug you, you know who you are for me!)
Cost, time, and talent are the biggest barriers to digital transformation
The cost of digital transformation is a growing challenge for many organizations, with leaders saying it’s their main barrier, and reflecting a global increase in concern about cost
control. But given the outsize returns organizations are seeing from their digital transformation investments, cost-cutting measures could have equally outsize negative effects if they impact technology initiatives.
Concerns about cost are followed by the persistent challenges of time and talent, tied as the most-cited obstacles as organizations struggle to meet implementation goals while also trying to do more with fewer resources.
How many times I heard this story:
“We have so many projects, so many client demands to design quickly and yesterday. Enabling our staff to have enough time to be trained and be familiar and ensure the adoption is hard.”
While Time and Cost, and their correlation, can be easily included, tracked and analyzed in a Quantitative Risk Analysis that any company or consultant should be able to write and later deal with, the lack of Talent (or even worse, the lack of recognize talent in an organization) is the one that concerns ME the most.
Talents attract talents, so to overcome the problem you have to take your best talent in your organization and sit him/her with the best digital transformation talent outside your company. Your employee will be the main referent and later he/she will drive the innovation and will spread the word internally, working closely with the external talent and digital provider.
You need to first recognize and later invest in talents, otherwise I will always look for Brain, and you will always get me Pinky.. “one is a genius and the other insane“.. (btw, I love the 1995-1998 TV series “Pinky and the Brain”…):
—–
Stay data-hungry. Stay data-foolish.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Digital Consultant