Hi, everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening to all across the globe. I'm Aaron Bonello and I'm here hosting this session with you today. It's an honor to be here and to be kicking, helping kick off the events this week.So just before we get started, if you have any questions throughout, we got 20 minutes, but you have any questions throughout, please feel free to put them in the chat and I'll try to hit them at some point during the presentation. So I'm sure all of us have had to embrace uncertainty and change at some point in our careers, personal lives and in and in business as well. And I know that embracing this and being open to opportunities has helped me evolve in new and better ways, although it may have been scary at times. So when we think about a transformation is like a metamorphosis of this crumpled paper into this Origami butterfly, right? It helps us emerge stronger and more capable than before. And businesses are undergoing significant changes to embrace digital transformation. This is a big focus um across multiple different industries, what's real, what's really driving this need to evolve and change. First is a few things, right?

Consumer behaviors and expectations are changing, engagement has become more dynamic and technologically enabled and we a wider range of services to be provided quickly and seamlessly and integrated across a variety of different channels. User experience matters more to us than ever before.

When you have companies succeeding in creating amazing user experiences, you have the same expectation that you're gonna have similar impressive interactions from other companies across all different industries. Second, the impact from market forces is really adding pressure on talent and skills and there's a work for talent more than ever before and pressure to upskill and train the next generation of the workforce. And this is all happening against a backdrop of continuous technological disruption.

We have deployment of technologies like hybrid cloud automation A I and connected devices that are ushering in new opportunities, but they're also adding new risks to businesses as well as regu regulatory changes that are transforming industries and reshaping business models.

Lastly, there's a growing demand for a greater focus on sustainability and social impact of today's business operations and it's really forcing companies to be more introspective and transparent about their impact on the world from their products and services in the technology sector.

This changes omnipresent, omnipresent companies are investing in technology to help automate their business processes, introduce new ways of working that are faster and more cost effective. They're looking to improve the client and employee experience and all focusing on maintaining their competitive advantage and driving profitability.

The same companies that are working with these companies to transform are driving their own internal transformations. So at this point, really transformation is not an option. It's a necessity to future proof business. So why am I here and why am I talking about this? So I'm a technologist, a mother, a wife. I've been in the tech industry industry for about 20 years where I spent my time developing new products, scaling internal practices and evolving mature software businesses. I now lead a design organization for IBM, sustainability software portfolio and looking to help IBM and other companies turn their ESG goals and ambitions into action. My career has been spent at IBM this whole time. So during this time, I've worked under three different CEO S health roles in four different business units and across multiple different areas related to software uh from engineering to product management and now design. So you can say that I basically grew up here and I saw a lot of things, I've experienced organizational restructuring. I've been involved with transformation initiatives at large scale and involved with acquisitions and also sell off of some acquisitions within our company. I've been a team member and an organizational leader through some of these experiences.

I've also been on the battlefield trying to drive some transformation, but also watching from the sidelines and I wanted to come here to share with you some lessons that I've learned in one of the key success factors that I, I think it's often missing, but it's critical to driving innovative change and transformation successfully.

As a current or future technical leader, you may find yourself involved or leading transformation yourself. So my hope is that you walk away with ideas of how you can be a positive agent of change because it's really clear that you, you, you know, every single one of you play a crucial role in ensuring that your organizations and the companies that you work for in the broader community that you interact with are able to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation and change.

But do so in a way that is very human centric. So we've established that transformation is critical. It's a business necessity. If that's the case, then why do 70% of transformations fail when you think about that? That's a really sobering statistic transformation is more than just adopting new technology or change in the way that you do things. It requires you to rethink old structures, old processes. It also requires a change in mindset. And this is the key point that I wanted to make here.

One of the biggest obstacles to successful transformation is really helping humans overcome their fear and resistance to change when you think about humans. Um We're amazing creatures, right? But we were dominated by emotion. And that means that emotions drive our decisions are in our behaviors.

So we need to be mindful. That change is really gonna be judged emotionally and everyone reacts to it slightly differently. There's gonna be fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of rejection, failure, fear of being replaced. And we need to think about fear of change as like a debt that we need to pay. It's gonna have to be paid upfront before you can make genuine progress on these initiatives. If the organization that you're involved in doesn't manage resistance effectively, it's gonna be difficult to achieve, buy in and have sustained support for any initiative or transformation that you're trying to drive forward with in organizations that focus too heavily on just looking at it from the technology side and ne neglect, some of these aspects of change are gonna struggle to achieve their goals.

Mckenzie actually did a study that said that there was a few ingredients for successful transformation. One is leadership. You have to have committed digital savvy leaders in place to champion the initiative and I, when I say committed, I mean, they need to have some skin in the game.

The second uh area is really around investment in building the capabilities for the workforce of the future, really investing in training and education and helping build the skills in your organization to be successful. The third is around sustained behavioral, behavioral and cultural shifts, really fostering a culture that's gonna empower people to work in new ways. You need to think about giving your employees a voice in how these changes could and should be adopted or encouraging and recognizing the right behaviors.

And then lastly, this may seem um a simple thing but clear and frequent communication of the change story to help those impacted understand where the organization is headed. Why it's changing, why the change is important. They need to. Humans need to understand how this is gonna impact them on a day to day basis. So what's the common pattern here? The there's a critical human factor at play that is really resonating and it's important that your employees and your leaders um are recognized as having a critical um impact on the success of whether a transformation is going to be successful or not. But it's often underemphasized.

Humans need to be the agents of transformation, not just the casualties of it. So I'm here to say that it's time to lead transformation with a more human centered approach. When you have empathy as a key guiding principle, you're better able to drive both innovation and change forward in uncertain environments by listening, understanding and appealing to the hearts, minds and souls of the people, rather than simply ordering a quick jump from the way of the old to the ways of the new for the past 4.5 years in the organization that I've been involved in.

We've been undergoing a significant transformation ourselves. We have very mature software products that are market leading products. But we needed to really take a step back and think about how we needed to modernize our technical architecture as well as our user experience to maintain that competitive advantage.

We also needed to look to accelerate our output and productivity and eradicate some of the inertia that has been plaguing our teams and hindering our progress. It required a more solid and balanced approach to looking at problems, a set of principles and practices that drive our team's everyday actions and then results needed to result in tangible outcomes to build momentum. So we can scale this new way of working and this new uh modernized software forward for um both our clients and our business partners. So I'm gonna kind of walk you through the approach that we took. That was our journey of becoming more human centered. So first we started with a more balanced approach when tackling business problems and opportunities, transformation really should advance the human experience. It's about reimagining how we interact with technology and the world around us. When we tackle a problem, there's a few key elements that many times come into play. One, you gotta think about it from the people perspective. Are you creating a solution or a service that humans desire and need? You need to look at it from the business perspective. Is it gonna be a viable, profitable solution that's going to be aligned to your business goals? You also need to look at it through the technological lens, in terms of feasibility, are able to technically implement what you're trying to um develop as a solution or bring to market.

And then lastly, and this is gonna have a growing area, is your impact element. And essentially this is your integrity question. Are you making a positive impact to the world you live in through your product or service that you're gonna bring to market and where you focus is really important. The sweet spot for innovation is the intersection of all four of these many times, we were leaning too far in solving problems with just technology and a financial lens without fully understanding the human desire or need that we were trying to address. So we needed to reconsider questions like how our employees were going to react to this change. How is it going to impact our customers, our business partners, our ecosystem, as well as how some emerging technology was gonna help us keep up with the evolving expectations of our clients and the industry. When we took a step back and we had, we were placing the end user at the center of solving the problem or looking at the opportunity, we were able to have a much more balanced approach and it enabled us not to over index on any one element.

So the second thing we did is we adopted a set of human centered principles and practices and this really shaped the way that we solve problems as a team and our everyday actions. So our, our main focus was really putting people first and focusing on the human problems rather than just the techni technical solution. And this was incredibly important. But we also knew that we needed to invest in the talent of our teams to adopt more human set of practices and understand what those mean, what that meant. So we rapidly increased our investment in design and development talent and upscale them on practices like design thinking.

We also brought a new leadership that understood the importance of a more human design led approach to innovation that really made a significant impact on the focus and investment in the initiative itself. The second area was around creating more diverse and empowered teams and that was the fuel that was gonna help kind of make the magic happen on a day to day basis. So we took a step back and said, you know, we need to create more small nimble tiger teams. That's what we call them to accelerate our progress. And these teams needed to move quickly, they needed to be able to share insights through ideas but also quickly reject or commit to them. And they needed to be empowered to make decisions and act, which was somewhat of a different approach to how teams were operating within our own organization and removing sort of bureaucracy and um levels of uh approval to get to make decisions. The other thing we focus on is making sure that our teams are really made up of diverse perspectives because it enabled us to have a better understanding of any given situation, generate more ideas, look at um problems from different angles and just be more effective problem solvers.

And then the third element was really creating um an environment that encouraged Restless reinvention. So we leverage IB M's design thinking framework to help us reframe problems from the end user's perspective. But also it's a more experimental iterative approach that enabled us to move beyond the way.

We've always done things. And we had this mentality within our teams that everything was a prototype. So we were continuously rapidly prototyping our new ideas, getting them in front of SME S and stakeholders, getting feedback, getting them in front of um clients as well in order for us to ensure whether we were moving in the right direction. And the last thing we did is we ran time box projects for about 6 to 8 weeks. And this really enabled us to shift towards a more flexible and collaborative, fast changing environment and delivering progress in smaller increments. So we had a set of principles and a framework that we use. But the principles alone aren't the drivers of change and innovation doesn't just happen, which is great ideas. So for any transformation to win legitimacy, it needed to quickly prove its ability to deliver tangible outcomes.

And you can't do that without really focusing on flawless execution. And part of flawless execution is building momentum. We needed to get some quick wins to inspire and motivate the organization. So going back to the human element of transformation, we wanted to win over the hearts and minds of our organization to improve our success and be able to scale. And that went beyond just the people that were in the midst of the work day to day. So the key was making sure everyone understood and collectively owned the change agenda from the leaders down to the individual contributors. So we wanted to take our employee, um our employees and our clients along on the journey because it brought more importance and tangibility to the work.

So we did a few things. We visualized our North Star. Our North Star was the vision of a future from the standpoint of the humans impacted by the transformation, both the employees and the clients. So we did had a series of working sessions and we crafted a narrative and a video and we share that across the organization to be a rallying force for the teams. We also wanted to make sure that it was clear why we were embarking on this journey, how and how we should be measuring success. And that measuring stick was really important because it enabled us to course correct over time. So we worked uh as stake with our stakeholders to really define both our business and our human outcomes that we were driving towards. And we did this collectively together to ensure alignment from the onset. And then lastly, we needed to motivate through progress, change movements need to prove concrete value quickly. So we focus our efforts on high impact pilots that address specific problems and enabled us to focus on a few critical areas without boiling the ocean. The big um element here though is that we made sure that as we were making progress, we shared equipped wins and our lessons learned repeatedly to the organization, we recognized the right behaviors called out folks that were um taking risks or bringing up new ideas um adopting new ways of working.

And we also welcomed feedback from the broader organization throughout the process. So it's really focused on motivating and inspiring with storytelling. I would say, the one thing that I would want to emphasize is that we did this over and over and over again over communication is critical in order to making sure people are really fully grasping what is going on and how we're making progress. So just to wrap it up, transformation is never done. It's an ongoing experience. It's exhausting yet, but it's accelerating. I had to keep reminding my team that it's a marathon that we're running. It's not a sprint. We're 4.5 years in and we still have a lot of work to do, but we're moving in the right direction. But we needed to do a few things to, to really develop that change muscle and create a stain sustainable culture within our team. So I just to leave you with three kind of key takeaways. One you need to start with people. We often start with the technology first, but we need to make tech driven experiences more aligned between our business objectives and the human outcomes. We're trying to drive and really optimize for make what makes those experiences meaningful and relevant to the humans and how we're advancing our human experience and then use technology where and when it makes sense to amplify and deepen that experience.

Second, you gotta think big but start small, know what your not North Star is, but focus on small pilots that's gonna promote these new ways of working and address specific business problems and get some quick wins in scale. And then lastly incorporate a human centered mindset into your company's DNA. You have to have some skin in the game. You need to lead and empower your teams to incubate, innovate and propagate change. But you need to expect resistance to be able to normalize that the experience your goal it needs to be with, to dance with this resistance, right? Find out what's underneath it, discuss it so that you can work with that energy to move forward, but also continue to learn it just as needed. I will say that success in this new age really requires a new level of resilience and agility that's rooted in responsible purpose driven, human led business practices that are gonna drive innovation and competitive differentiation and really help us move forward. Claiming to be human centric is as a person or an organization is easy, but you have to really be able to turn those ambitions into actions and that's the harder part. So I challenge you to ask some tough, tough questions. How human centric is your business? Really? Does.

Your company's Cultural DNA empower you to drive successful transformation efforts. What is the one thing that you can do today to become a future agent of transformation? And how can you make sure that humans are always put first to drive success? Thank you for your time today.

And if anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to take them. You're welcome.