Being “digital” in 2016 means any number of things, ranging from the utterly real to the utterly unreal. There are on the one hand genuinely transformative things that are happening in our economy due to the expansion of mobile and cloud technology. Existing business models are indeed threatened by these developments, and true opportunities to benefit really do abound.
There are on the other hand digital cultural gestures and signifiers that have little or nothing to do with how business is really being transacted. You can let your employees wear jeans, put whiteboards all over corporate HQ, cover them with post-its, and fundamentally change nothing. The flexibility in defining digital allows the real and the unreal to coexist, and also enables a continuous war of one-upmanship waged by those who claim to “get it” against those who allegedly don’t.
Take away the relatively new realities of smartphones, tablets and the cloud, and those remaining cultural signifiers turn out not be very original at all. They are simply the same old gestures of youth: informality, anti-authoritarianism, and the conviction that one’s views are novel and unprecedented in the history of the world. Such beliefs are always just true enough to get and keep traction. Mobile technology really is different than anything before it. As for open workspaces, modular furniture, and so on, those are simply the kinds of things that young people like. They have always liked them and they always will. They fit the cognitive style of youth and reflect its preference for openness and conceptual novelty.
Stylistic change always accompanies substantive change. I learned this firsthand during the dot-com era fifteen short years ago. The period was indeed transformative. The “web” – the term makes us chuckle now – changed our ideas about commerce, cultural production and social relations. Nothing could be more real. But a lot of dot-com style turned out to be empty symbolism. Ironically, many elements of that style were the same we see today with digital — jeans and whiteboards most notably. Others, like the Herman Miller chair, have either been absorbed into the mainstream or forgotten.
While dot-com fashion was mostly harmless, the era’s version of the “who gets it” game was positively toxic. Saying that some company or executive “got it” was the highest and vaguest compliment. No one ever pressed hard enough on the phrase to figure out what it might actually mean. As it turned out, it meant nothing. Or, everything. It was infinitely flexible and hence meaningless. Yet projects and even companies were conceived and funded based on this vapid distinction, this simple subjective sludgy idea. With no one questioning the concept of “getting it” or the resulting business models, billions in capital were wasted. The Silicon Valley glorification of failure aside, a society never gets back that kind of wasted capital. The associated effort and brainpower are gone forever.
I recently read Jeff Sunderland’s book on Scrum. Scrum was one of the first Agile methodologies and Sunderland was one of its originators in the 1980s. The method is one of the cornerstones of digital business culture. The book was brilliant and the method is too. Scrum is based on the idea that we should design teams for how work really gets done. Its track record for building physical and software products is exceptional. When companies tell me they are “looking into” Scrum or another Agile method, my only response is, why? Why deprive yourself of improved productivity and better products? Why stick to obsolete methods like waterfall development that you know are ineffective and unproductive? If it is because you secretly resent the culture of whiteboards and post-its and know-it-all kids – shame on you for confusing style and substance.
To be clear, I do not even think that the style of “digital” is malign. As a committed follower of Warhol I reject simplistic contrasts between surface and depth. As neither a moralist nor a bore, I have no desire to complain about “those digital kids today” or tell them to get out of my yard, or company. But I do study the interplay between style and substance closely to make sure I’m grasping and understanding the bits that actually matter. A lot of digital style, like all fashion, is really just about youthful identity. There are those who are unconsciously caught up in it, those who worry they’re past it, and those who feel definitively past it and thus resent it. Those types of emotions should not cloud your business thinking. Missing an economic revolution because you dislike changing fashion is a grave mistake.
Rob Lawrence 