In a nutshell
I cannot state how many conversations I’ve had recently with CEOs, transformation leads and people across the C-suite where the constant theme is: “We need to take our people on the journey.”
The problem is that change is stacking. Your transformation programme is only one layer on top of AI, changing jobs and ways of working, industry disruption and a pretty chaotic world. For loads of people there is genuine fear about what it all means for their jobs. It’s all getting muddled together, creating anxiety, confusion and sometimes paralysis.
We can’t make the wider world more certain, but we can create much more clarity around where the organisation is heading, what that means over the next few years and how the work people are doing today connects to it. Great roadmaps and storytelling can make a huge difference.
We get to see quite a lot from the inside
One of the more interesting side effects of running a digital agency is the range of organisations you get exposed to. Different sectors, sizes and levels of digital maturity, whether that’s through existing clients and programmes, pitching and RFPs, or simply the networks you build up over the years.
At Alphero, our three service lines give us lots of exposure to different parts of these organisations too. Through Advice we might be working with a CEO or someone at C-level to shape and bring to life a 2036 customer or digital vision, create the roadmap to get there, support an investment case or operating model, or look at future-state architecture. Through Digital we might be deep inside a major transformation programme as a digital delivery partner, while Intelligence is exploring the future in our futures lab.
Right now some clients are focusing on a load of catch-up and modernisation. Others are already planning for intelligent and agentic experiences, hyper-personalisation, platform and experience consolidation, “one front door”, composable experiences and architecture, brand in an agentic world and the reinvention of omnichannel. (‘Omnichannel’ is back! Just like the mullet!)
Yet pretty much across all types of organisations at very different stages, the same conversations about change keep coming up.
“We need to take our people on the journey”
…Or another version I hear a lot is: “How do we give our people a clearer line of sight to where we are going.”
One transformation director recently gave me an example of an organisational objective: “Achieve omnichannel excellence.” Imagine you are a developer or BA working on a new product or backend system. Wth does that actually mean to you? How does the work you are doing today contribute to it, and what are you supposed to do differently as a result?
Another version is: “How do I get my team to look further ahead than the next three months?” And here’s looking at you… Big Room Planning.
An organisation might have a long-term vision at one end and a visible backlog for the next 6 months, but not enough in between to connect the two. You can tell people you are heading somewhere exciting in 2036 and then send them back to the task they are working on that has very little obvious connection to it. That gap matters even more when people are already dealing with so much other change.
Change isn't ‘over’ when your transformation programme to finish
Traditional change management generally assumes change with an end-date. You might be restructuring, rolling out new software or transforming a contact centre, with a change stream covering impact assessment, communications, training, launch and embedding. Eventually, the change is more or less “done”.
That change management still needs to happen, but now it is happening inside a wider environment of constant, rolling (roiling!) change. People are trying to understand what AI means for their jobs, adapt to radically different ways of working, keep up with technology and industry shifts and make sense of wider economic, social and political change.
It all starts to blur together. People can struggle to separate the change associated with your transformation from everything else happening around them, while leaders are trying to provide direction in a future that is itself increasingly hard to predict.
So if we genuinely want to take people on the journey, we need to give them something a lot more tangible to navigate by.
The bit between 2036 and the current backlog
We do a lot of long-term vision and roadmap work. As part of that we might create aspirational vision statements. We might imagine what a customer experience could look like in 2036, creating concepts around it and use that future view to challenge decisions being made now. But the further out you go, the more aspirational and less substantial it inevitably becomes. That is fine, as long as you don't pretend otherwise.
Increasingly, we are putting much more emphasis on making Horizons 1 and 2 feel real. I think of this as a bimodal roadmap, with one view optimised for shaping the future and another for connecting that future back into the organisation and the work already underway.
Horizon 1 should feel concrete. By Horizon 2, we should still be able to describe clear objectives and target experiences, architecture, outcomes or functionality. Horizon 3 can be more aspirational because its job is to provide direction, not pretend we know exactly what we will be building in ten years.
If someone can understand what the organisation is shooting towards, why it matters and how the work they are doing now contributes to it, that is a very different experience from being told they are an important part of the journey towards omnichannel excellence.
Make it real
For us, the roadmap is only part of this. Storytelling is the other. The joy of having not just great strategists but some fab creatives and storytellers is that we’ve been doing a lot of work where we bring future thinking to life through concepts, prototypes, videos, animation and interactive storytelling. The point isn't to make the strategy prettier. It is to make something inherently abstract easier for people to understand, discuss and challenge.
In one recent ideation programme, more than 100 frontline people contributed ideas about what future digital experiences could look like. We progressively shaped and refined those ideas, brought them to life visually and ultimately turned the strongest thinking into clickable prototypes and an interactive storytelling artifact.
We were explicit that the prototypes were not intended to be built. They existed to make the thinking tangible, so the ideas could be challenged, pulled apart and fed back into the digital roadmap. Importantly, the people who contributed could also see what happened to their thinking.
We’ve done the same thing in lots of different ways, from videos for boards to animated storytelling for contact centre teams, interactive lab experiences, prototypes and creative roadmaps. Different audiences need different things, but if something is important, make it understandable.
“We don't have time (to involve everyone)”
I get this one too. Things are moving fast and people are ridiculously busy, but taking people on the journey does not mean putting half the organisation in workshops for six months.
We have run large strategy, discovery and futures engagements involving a lot of people in very short timeframes. The important thing is creating mechanisms for people to contribute and making sure that contribution doesn't disappear into a spreadsheet somewhere. Show people what you heard, what changed as a result and where their thinking went. It can be done! We just have to get creative on how we do it!
That combination of involvement, storytelling and structured communication can be done even when time is tight. Lack of time makes it harder, but it isn't a great excuse for leaving people completely disconnected from the direction.
We decided we had better practise what we preach
All of these conversations eventually made us look at Alphero itself. If we weretalking to clients about giving their people a clearer line of sight, could every person at Alphero genuinely see ours? So we created what has become known as the Great Alphero Roadmap.
Because we work on long-term roadmaps across different sectors, we started by consolidating the client and market themes we could see and creating client archetypes based on digital maturity. From there we built our own five-to-ten-year roadmap aligned to where our clients are heading, with connected roadmaps underneath for Digital, Advice and Intelligence and for the different practice areas across the business.
Architecture is a good example. Our architecture roadmap recognises that architecture needs to track ahead of build. Our architects should be looking at what is emerging in Horizons 2 and 3 and considering what that means when they are architecting products and platforms today. When I mentioned this to a client's Head of Architecture recently, his response was basically, “OMG, that sounds amazing. I'd love to see it.”
More importantly, every person at Alphero should now be able to see where their role fits, how it supports their practice, how that supports our clients and why particular things are being prioritised. They can also look ahead at what our clients are likely to need next and what that means for their own capability and development.
For me, that is the difference between a roadmap as a planning artifact and one that actually helps people understand their role and impact, navigate change and know what we need them to do.
Give people something to navigate by
A strong long-term customer vision is essential. It gets you beyond what is possible today and gives you something worth heading towards. The trick is building the bridge back to now. One of the bits of feedback we get about many of our strategies and roadmaps is that they feel tangible and achievable because we also know how to deliver this stuff. We can bring Horizons 1 and 2 down to earth and connect the big future vision to actual products, programmes, experiences and architecture. And we get very creative about how to visualise these things. At the end of the day we tend to look at what our clients are trying to communicate, and their audiences. Then work out the most effective way to create clarity.
Usually this means some creative visualisations and great storytelling to bring it all to life and people have a much clearer view of where they are going, the ‘why’, and how the work they are doing now fits. This isn't floofy stuff. When people are already dealing with an extraordinary amount of change, it gives them a clearer line of sight to the bit you can control.