Unlocking the Secrets to Board-Level Buy-In: Key Insights from Adobe Experience Makers Event
At the Adobe Experience Makers event in November, there were some valuable insights into how to get your digital transformation programme the board level buy-in that it needs.
As you will know, one of the key points for digital transformation is that in order to be successful, they need to have senior, board-level, sponsorship. Often, but not always, that means sponsorship from the CEO.
In conversation, board advisers, including Caroline Silver, a Non-Exec on Adobe’s board, and Luc Dammann, Adobe’s President of EMEA, discussed how best to sell in such programmes. Here are the key insights I took from that session.
1. Board members are topic rich, but time and detail poor
Many people running digital or data or AI programmes tend to be practitioners, and will find the detail very interesting. CEOs won’t. They will care about the outcomes, and what it might mean for improved performance, but also increased costs and potential risk. So, don’t spend lots of time going into technical detail – your CEO won’t care how you deliver the results, just that you will.
Get to the point, and express the opportunity in terms of outcomes, and the value to the business.
2. The best title to use is “Personalisation at Scale”
Brevity is the source of wit. And that’s particularly true for board-level communication. Make it really simple and use straight-forward terminology. At the moment, most CEOs will understand the concept of personalisation, and doing this at scale. Language like that will resonate, and CEOs will understand what you are talking about.
3. FOGI vs FOMO
At the moment, every board is working out what to do about AI and data. This puts them, and their underlying concerns, into two camps – FOGI “The Fear of Getting In” – and FOMO – “The Fear of Missing Out”. It’s worth establishing which one your board is in, and more specifically, who around the table is in which camp.
My thought on this is that, in reality, most companies are already “In”; it’s just a question of how far in they are, or want to get. Most businesses have great volumes of data and have been doing at least some data science activities for several years. So, for many, it’s not really a question of FOMO.
4. Any transformation starts with skills and people, not technology
This is such an important point, and it’s too often overlooked, especially in a sector dominated by the next cool technology feature. But transformations are about skills and people. If people don’t want to use a new technology, or if they feel uncomfortable about what it means for them, then they will not use it, or will seek to undermine its success. The best way of ensuring success is to start any programme with your existing technology, and identify where the gaps are, and then, and only then, bring in any technology to support or enable that.
This is something that I discussed as part of a joint seminar with Adobe a couple of months ago; I’d be very happy to discuss further if you are looking to start such a transformation.
5. Personalisation is about trust
Just as gaining trust with your teams is essential for success, so is gaining and maintaining trust with your customers. If customers feel like the messages are too “creepy” or invasive, then they will reject your brand. So, whilst access to customer data is important for any such programme, so is working to ensure you have the trust of your customers. That means ensuring you have your “guardrails” in place about how data will be used across the business and your data governance processes are clear and fully integrated into any technology and ways of working.
If you have a spare 25 minutes, watching the full session is worth the time.