Inject start-up culture to change mindset

In this video, Frederik Bisbjerg, Chief Digital Acceleration Officer at Noor Takaful Insurance and Head of MENA & Digital Transformation Specialist at The Digital Insurer, explains how companies can facilitate organizational change by incorporating start-up culture.

Bisjberg asserts that organizations transforming digitally for better operations and faster innovation and developments cycles must “accept and appreciate that one of the biggest barriers to change is the corporate culture, and corporate culture doesn’t change overnight.”

Indeed, TM Forum’s 2019 Digital Transformation Tracker survey found that 63% of communications service provider (CSP) respondents identified cultural and organizational issues as a serious barrier to digital transformation.

Acquiring culture

There are many avenues to organization-wide cultural change; one of Bisbjerg's suggestions is that large incumbent firms acquire small technology startups to infuse into their organization. This is not just for the sake of taking on their products and technologies, but also to inject a fresh new mindset, one that will help the entire organization drive agility and innovation.

“If you do it the right way, [it will] cascade out into the rest of your organization,” says Bisbjerg, adding that execution is key. Simply placing the new team within the organization and hoping for the best is not enough. He explains that startups bring an agile, ‘one-team-one-unit’ vision into an incumbent organization with silos and kingdoms and a ‘this is the way we’ve always done it, why change’ approach.

“If you don't manage this the right way, you will have a cultural hole, and your new unit will be expelled at some point,” he says. “So, you have to anticipate this; you have to communicate the changes; you have to set expectations amongst the existing organization, but also with the startup. They need to know what they’re getting into.”

In Bisjberg’s experience, one way of mitigating this is by creating joint key performance indicators/targets, thereby forcing the startup or technology partner and the incumbent to work together towards a shared goal.

“This works because all of a sudden, it’s their money – it’s their bonus affected – and they come together and start working.”