Digital
Transformation
The incumbent’s dilemma
Digital future is not yet well understood within the life sciences industry. Executives and leaders of MedTech and Pharma companies are not sure whether to embrace and follow digital transformation or whether to wait until this trend matures and the winning business models and technologies emerge. Traditional life sciences businesses generate a sufficient enough return on investment and the market seems to be well protected from disruption by long and expensive R&D cycles, established business models in healthcare, and heavy regulation.
Having spent almost two decades at the digital forefront in the MedTech market, I can appreciate this incumbent’s dilemma, but I can also see the inevitable change that is coming to the industry. Executives of life sciences companies who ignore the trend or pay just lip service to it, take a significant risk for their organizations and themselves. When the need for ‘digital’ is finally obvious, it might be too late to introduce the transformation, leaving their organizations and themselves obsolete – as has happened to other industries and individuals before them.
The first step is an open, honest, and deep discussion about opportunities and challenges introduced by digital future. Coaching sessions are a great space for these conversations – both safe and inspiring. My clients report that it is a rare place where they can talk freely about their doubts or inertia of their environments, but also avoid artificial pressures of ‘digital hype’ and resulting ‘me too’ strategies.
Digital transformation framework
Digital transformation is a complex process that requires advancing or sometimes completely restructuring a number of interrelated areas in an organization.
It is by definition a multidisciplinary effort that requires experts in business, technology, regulatory, cybersecurity and many other subjects. However, what guides the concerted effort to introduce and manage the change is a digital transformation framework – a holistic model that considers all aspects critical to digital future and helps to introduce them in an appropriate order. The model should be tailored to every organization based on their corporate goals and digital maturity, but it typically describes the digital transformation journey from the high-level strategic aspects to operational specifics. The high-level aspects include developing business strategy, building an understanding of the external environment and stakeholders, and designing engagement with end-users. They guide the identification of particular digital opportunities, designing new operating models and securing internal alignment and long-term commitment. While doing this it is also recommended to develop internal repeatable building blocks like data, platform and regulatory strategy. Eventually, the solutions are offered in the market which requires creating specific Go-to-Market plans for particular digital products and services.
Digital transformation is, by necessity, introduced by multidisciplinary teams. Such a collection of individuals stem from diverse backgrounds, and they operate in complex organizational dynamics. Additionally, most often the digital transformation project is a first-of-a-kind endeavor that such a team is tasked with. Significant challenges must be overcome before such a group turns into a singular unit and reaches an elevated level of effectiveness. An efficient mechanism that facilitates this development is team coaching. This method extends the coaching framework from focusing on an individual to working with a team. It reuses the same outcome-based approach – working towards continued high performance, and ongoing development rooted in team values and identity. While working with a team as a whole, the method still identifies and leverages individual strengths and perspectives that particular team members bring to the program.
Building blocks
Digital transformation requires mastering numerous new skills and capabilities, some of which are not traditional strengths of life sciences companies.
In some of them, executives and leaders of these organizations have to truly excel – like in change management or redesigning organizational processes. With other skills, like analyzing and exploiting data, they have to internalize enough to be able to set the strategic direction and review outcomes and related costs. In numerous other digital technologies – like artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality, blockchain or robotics, they have to be familiar enough to understand their value for the organization and either attract new talent or partner with external expert organizations.
In any case it requires reaching out beyond ‘known knowns’, understanding the delta to ‘known unknowns’ and leaving enough margin for ‘unknown unknowns’. What is required is not only new knowledge from new domains but often new methods of learning for individuals and their organizations. This is the domain of competence coaching in which I help my clients with the identification of the areas to learn, build sustained motivation to stay on these subjects, design methods to acquire feedback and validate their progress.
Services, platforms and ecosystems
Digital transformation requires advancing a number of specific competencies like R&D, manufacturing, marketing, sales and finance. However, at its core are more fundamental mindset changes related to business models, value stacks, ecosystems, solution architectures, competition and many other aspects.
An example of such a mindset shift is the realization that the value that was previously created mostly inside the company, after digital transformation, can predominantly come from outside of the company – from users and partners. Another fundamental shift that is particularly difficult for life sciences companies is treating digital services as an equally vital component of their offering as established physical products. In this context, product-related processes like manufacturing and sales must be supplemented by platform and ecosystem building as well as ongoing user engagement. The ability to disintegrate vertical supply chains that are traditionally considered a threat can actually create numerous new opportunities where the aforementioned services can be offered and continuously improved on using an agile approach.
Coaching is built to support such mindset changes. Sessions are designed to take the client to the most resourceful state and then use this state to broaden perspectives and generate innovative insights. With my clients, we explore logical levels, perspectives, time shifts and idea inverting. We use different sensory perceptions, visualizations and more complex exercises and frameworks that leverage mental resources, personal strengths and past experiences. My clients report not only pragmatic insights but also lasting mental superiority and great intellectual satisfaction.
