Managing Digital Transformation: a SIMPLE Framework
Across clients, industries and geographies, we’re now seeing a change continuum; business change is no longer ‘one and done’, but instead organisations are in a constant state of change to remain innovative and competitive. In fact, Afiniti partner Sarah Matthews identified this endless state of evolution as her number one business change trend for 2025.
But just having to do more change doesn’t make it easier to deliver or more comfortable for your impacted people. The only way to ‘do change better’ is through structured, strong change management, which derisks your projects, accelerates them and helps you maximise benefits realisation.
To this end, we recently introduced the SIMPLETM framework for managing change, and specifically managing digital transformation, which is a major driver of today’s constant state of evolution. SIMPLETM stands for: Simplify, Incentivise, Mindset, Prioritise, Learn and Execute. These six critical words, when put into practice, are a blueprint for overcoming common digital transformation challenges and achieving meaningful, sustainable change – read my latest Insight for a full breakdown on each of the steps.
In this Insight, I’m sharing practical, simple actions you can take to apply the SIMPLETM approach to your next change programme and enhance the experience and effectiveness for your change leaders and impacted people. So, read on to make sure your digital transformation isn’t one of the 70% that fail.
SIMPLETM Steps to Managing Digital Transformation
To reiterate the good news, managing digital transformation doesn’t have to be onerous or even complex; our extensive experience has proven it comes down to critical few, pragmatic actions that can be efficiently deployed to fundamentally change the course of a programme and increase shareholder value, efficiency and effectiveness. Possible? Yes, it is with SIMPLETM.
1. SIMPLIFY
Managing digital transformation is often perceived as complex, with programmes having expansive scopes that crossing multiple functions. Applying the 80-20 principle to your programme will eliminate bureaucracy, inefficiency and confusion while freeing up resources and streamlining implementation.
SIMPLIFY quick hits:
- Digital on a Page: can your entire digital transformation be depicted simply on a page? Can everyone in your organisation read and understand the purpose of the programme? If not, you may need to further simplify your scope.
- Management Rule of 5: how many parallel digital projects are currently running across your company or department? Are they connected with a common strategy and sponsorship or running disparately? Narrowing the scope of in-flight digital programmes to a critical few (i.e. less than five) helps to remove complexity, align people and increase deployment efficiency.
2. INCENTIVISE
To successfully embed your change, your people need to adopt it, and in order to adopt it, you need to engage them. Incentivising the right behaviours is one of the most effective ways to drive engagement. Conversely, many programmes result in failure because people at all levels are not behind or incentivised to drive the change forward.
INCENTIVISE quick hits:
- Incentive Programme: does your digital transformation strategy include an enabling incentive programme? Are all your leaders aligned and incentivised to support and drive common outcomes? A custom-fit incentive programme, operating in unison with a company-wide performance management framework, is required. Incentives might include financial, recognition, training and development and non-financial rewards.
- Performance Measurement: do you have a tailored approach for your various stakeholder groups to measure progress and evaluate individual and programme results? If not, it may be necessary to implement department and programme level performance measurement.
3. MINDSET
Managing digital transformation is as much a cultural challenge as it is a technical one, and therefore companies must foster a mindset that embraces change, innovation and continuous learning, modelled and championed by leaders who are genuinely behind the change.
MINDSET quick hits:
- Leadership Commitment: leaders themselves must fully embrace the digital change, or it will fail. Even the smallest crack can unwind the best of intentions and undo months or years’ worth of planning and investment. Team agreements, aligned priorities, clear decision-making procedures and key measures must be in place.
- Digital Disruption: digital change is happening at an unprecedented speed, with levels of disruption that have never been seen before. Someone ‘safe’ today is ‘impacted’ tomorrow. Does your digital strategy specifically call out mindset change to accommodate disruption as a critical success factor and driver of your cost-benefit analysis? Unfortunately, very few do. Targeted mindset workshops and training can rapidly help by tabling concerns, articulating changes, addressing confusion and proactively tackling digital disruption.
4. PRIORITISE
While Simplify narrows and consolidates the scope of the transformation, Prioritise zeroes in on the critical initiatives and actions necessary to enable the scope and business outcomes. This requires strong leadership and the ability to make tough decisions. Understanding how these priorities balance with daily business-as-usual activities is critically important for avoiding conflict and overwork.
PRIORITISE quick hits:
- Prioritisation Planning: the best transformational leaders make prioritisation a mission-critical activity at all stages of the digital journey. Too often, prioritisation occurs at the beginning of a programme but is not consistently carried through to the end, resulting in scope creep, confusion and conflicting agendas. Prioritisation for digital transformation needs to be built into many facets of your organisation, including board and management meetings, programme offices and team sprints.
- Prioritisation Measurement: do you measure (or even know) if your priorities are being delivered or achieving the desired numbers in your business case? Ongoing health checks are valuable, enabling you to evaluate and refactor digital priorities. This small activity could have an insurmountable impact on the success of your digital transformation.
5. LEARN
To keep up with the pace of change, businesses must build a culture of continuous learning, where development is encouraged and failures are viewed as opportunities for growth. This is not a quick shift, but learning can be mobilised in manageable, bite-sized ways. Leaders who embrace learning interventions can start to transition from a static mentality to a digital learning culture.
LEARN quick hits:
- Digital Learning Approach: your change strategy should explicitly outline how learning is deployed across the programme. That’s right, learning should be a critical part of your plan and not relegated to the People and HR teams. Identify skills gaps, articulate key interventions and operationalise training required to enable the strategy.
- Digital Improvement, Success and Failures: a critical component of your digital learning is enabling your people to improve, celebrate successes and embrace failure. It might seem trivial, but very few organisations adopt this basic practice as part of their digital strategy. Try executing a ‘Success and Failure’ campaign; celebrating both successes and failures can stimulate greater effectiveness in managing digital transformation.
6. EXECUTE
This is the point at which most failures occur, often due to miscommunication, change resistance, lack of buy-in and conflicting priorities. You must be able to execute your digital change strategy with precision and accountability, including clear ownership, milestones and engaging change interventions.
EXECUTE quick hits:
- Implement OKR Measurements: Many transformation programmes do not have specific measures in place to efficiently monitor and accelerate execution, or planned measures are not truly operationalised, or lived and breathed, in day-to-day work. Tangible measures that everyone understands and works towards, synced with overarching value creation, benefits and ROI are of strategic importance to unite all stakeholders – from board to analyst.
- Adding Change to Strategy: the critical change interventions required to execute and adopt the digital programme are often overlooked. Impact assessments, stakeholder analysis and communications plans are either not considered or get passed off to support functions as afterthoughts. Unfortunately, the discipline of change management has been largely sidelined in the last decade due to perceived unnecessary overheads or ineffective processes. Today, however, given the gargantuan change resulting from constant digital disruption and transformation, people and change must be of top priority and form a critical part of your digital strategy and programme execution.
A Tried and Tested Approach to Managing Digital Transformation
Structuring and standardising your change programmes, be they digital or not, is the only way to consistently deliver successful change that minimises risk, maximises employee engagement and achieves full ROI.
The SIMPLETM framework is a tried and tested approach to thriving in today’s business change continuum, and I hope this Insight has sparked some ideas and inspiration around managing digital transformation by taking a few practical, proven steps.
Don’t wait until your digital transformation is already failing to take the critical actions required for success. Get in touch today and we’ll help you get started on your SIMPLETM journey to begin doubling the value of your digital transformation.
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