Transformation Requires a Proactive Approach

Finally, we are having some cooler weather. I make my way to our backyard to pull these five tomato plants up, throw them over the fence and stack my wire supports for next year. It’s going to be slightly more difficult than I had planned as CeCe has her Zinnias planted right next to them and in fact, they are intertwined and growing together. Now I know this is sacred ground as many of these are in full bloom, plus it saves us a little money as CeCe always finds ways to have fresh flowers in our home.

One tomato plant to go and so far, so good. Tomatoes gone and flowers still standing tall. But this last one is the biggest tomato plant and it was really productive this year. In fact, there are two tomatoes still on this one. Oh well, they will never grow and ripen, so heave and crack. That sounded funny as tomato plants are soft and rarely would you hear one crack when you pull it up by the roots.

Then I see it — a big branch of Zinnias has broken off and is laying at my feet. There are at least 10 beautiful flowers on this branch and there’s no way CeCe is going to miss this. Turning lemons into lemonade, I'll surprise CeCe with some fresh flowers when she wakes up this morning

Running inside, I grab two out of at least 30 flower canisters in the cabinet and proceed to make two arrangements as pictured here.  

As our organizations clean up legacy systems and processes and implement new systems, services, and processes, the two will be intertwined in many situations. Frankly, transforming to new digital platforms is rarely easy and this usually has some complexity of having to rely on the legacy systems or data for a period of time, much like sharing the same flower bed.

Without fail, we will break something in the process or find something we need access to that we no longer have. Rather than making a temporary fix, sometimes we are served better by looking at it with a different approach.

What would we do if we were setting it up for the first time? How can we achieve our objectives without the information? Is there another way to access the information or process? Can we use robotic automation to reproduce it?

This will happen repeatedly as we transform to a more digital world in our businesses and our clients. However, by being proactive when we encounter these problems, we can creatively develop solutions that will work and possibly be better than before.

CeCe, have you seen the flowers I cut for you this morning?