The thing behind the thing

I’ve been doing this work for almost two decades now.

There is no passion like that of the defender of ‘the way we used to do things around here’

I mean.

I’ve worked in half a dozen organisations and held a bunch of titles that, on the surface of things, mean I’ve had a very varied career. And don’t get me wrong: I have.

The places I’ve worked, the problems I’ve had the opportunity to tackle, the people I’ve met and the things I’ve done have been incredibly varied.

The work, however, has been consistent.

And when it comes down to brass tacks, the work is this:

We (not ‘we’ the people, but rather ‘we’ the organisation) need to do a thing differently.

The thing may be big or small, but it has to be done differently.

And the two parts of this sentence are hugely and equally significant:

1. The thing (whatever it is) has to be done.

We do not have the luxury of not doing it. We do not get to stop it, scrap it or even neglect it.

It could be because it’s core business, because it’s a regulatory requirement, because it’s a contracted client deliverable… you name it. For any particular configuration of reasons, the thing has to be done.

Not doing it is not an option.

2. Additionally, this thing that has to be done cannot continue being done in the way that it has been done up until now.

This is equally important. Change is not a ‘why not?’ space in finance, no matter what our innovation banners say. We don’t engage in painful, time and resource-consuming transformation work as a ‘nice to have’.

We work towards doing the thing differently because we have to do the thing differently.

And why is that?

Because the market is shifting, because the competition is raising the bar, because the regulator said so, because the way we used to do the thing is no longer available to us (be it because all our systems are reaching end of life or because our COBOL engineers won’t come out of retirement any more). It could be any, many or all of the above.

Or it could be because, in rare and wonderful situations, our organisational leadership chose to pursue a different and more visionary strategy, and therefore to achieve said strategy, what got us here won’t suffice for what comes next.

Whatever the specifics (and don’t get me wrong, when doing the work, you live or die in the specifics), the shape I describe is the work.

It’s the work I’ve been doing for 20 years.

And I am a glutton for punishment, truth be told. There can be no other explanation for why I keep at it: it is a pain in the proverbial. But I do love it. It frustrates me to hell and back, but I love it.

Still, I can’t help thinking that one of these days we will accept that the work of doing the important things differently is hard enough that we shouldn’t go out of our way to make it even harder for ourselves. We are not there yet. We are still firmly in the space where we make life harder for ourselves once we have decided to do the hard work of changing the way we do things that we absolutely have to do.

And this is how we actively get in our own way after deciding we need to do the work of doing the thing differently.

Having decided we need to do the thing differently, we bring people to the table (our people, partners, vendors and advisors galore) and start discussing the three things that matter:

• What are we moving towards?
• What are we moving away from?
• What does getting from where we are to where we are going look like?

And then the fun begins. Because, having decided we need to do the thing differently, we then start a dance of defending the way things were with a passion and a flair the likes of which you’ve never seen unless you’ve been in this business as long as I, and then you have definitely seen it.

There is no passion like that of the defender of ‘the way we used to do things around here’ inside a big organisation.

People defend and protect the exact thing we all agreed had to change.

They defend whether it was a good idea at the time. Even though nobody argues against that. They protest throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Even though nobody ever suggested that. They question whether the thing we just agreed needs to change actually needs to change.

And on and on.

But here’s the thing.

I said the work lives or dies in the specifics, and that is the case. But the objections don’t.

For every ‘can’t’ that’s thrown at you… oh we can’t do that… for every single ‘can’t’, there is a plumbing gap somewhere in the organisation that people don’t want to or don’t know how to fix.

And for every ‘won’t’… oh we won’t take that risk, oh we won’t make that decision quite yet… there’s a leadership gap.

And you need to plug both.

And until you do, the specifics are irrelevant. And you will live or die in the banality of generalities.

And that, my friends, is the work. And the whole ballgame.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.

She is a recovering banker, lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem. She is chief client officer at 10x Future Technologies.

Leda is also a published author – her first book, Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition, is available to order here.

All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!

Follow Leda on Twitter @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.