Transformation Begins with People: Nick Hodder on Humanising Digital Change

Welcome to DTX Unplugged, the podcast that gets to the heart of Business Evolution. I'm Sabrina Burkhoe, Head of Content at Clarion Events, to organisers behind DTX. And I'm Oli Picker, an award-winning technology and business storyteller. Each episode we sit down with leaders, innovators and change makers who are reshaping how organisations think about transformation. Whether you're leading, implementing or building transformation strategy, this is your monthly dose of insights on the people making it happen. This is all about the critical intersection of people, process and technology and the real stories behind successful evolution. What are we waiting for? Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to the first episode of DTX Unplugged and what a way to kick things off with an incredible opening guest. We're delighted to be joined by Nick Hodder. Nick is Director of Digital Transformation and Engagement at Imperial War Museums and that's Britain's National Museum dedicated to understanding modern war and wartime experience with five branches across England. Nick joined IWM in May 2020 and has built a digital audience of hundreds of millions globally. Nick's also a TEDx speaker and one of Computing IT's leaders 100, which recognises the most influential figures in British technology leadership and IWM he's doing something incredibly fascinating, using AI to unlock insights from 11 million historical images. While championing the idea that real transformation goes far beyond technology, cost reduction or revenue generation. A warm welcome to you, Nick. How are you doing today? Great, Oliver. Yeah, brilliant. Fantastic. Well, you've had quite the unconventional career journey. You left school at 16 and I love this. You'll link to an education section simply and unapologetically reads none everything, which perhaps gives us all a hint about your approach. You spent two decades working with major brands like Microsoft, Google, British Airways and Panasonic before deliberately shifting focus to apply your transformation expertise in the nonprofit sector. In this opening episode, we're exploring why digital transformation or business evolution often involves winning hearts and minds and we're also going to discuss Nick's radical candor approach to building change ready teams and what heritage institutions can teach modern businesses about staying adaptable. Nick, we always start by asking our guests three core questions to begin with and then we have one final one that will come back to the end of the interview. So question one, what's the most significant transformation challenge hitting business leaders right now? You might think the arrival of AI is an amazing opportunity and I think it genuinely is but one of the real challenges is how broad that technology is it can and probably will affect almost everything. So figuring out where to start and there's a little bit of a current member who came up with the phrase the tyranny of the possible but there's quite a lot of that going on here. There's so much you could do so actually bring it down to some sort of realistic idea of some proof of concept that you could test. It's actually a real challenge. There's a couple of things I think as a technology leader. One is dealing with the leaders around you and their expectations around kind of AI and technology. Then there's also your own approach and your teams approach like how do you stop yourself from spreading ourselves too thin or being paralyzed by the possibilities. So I think really that the answer to that, I don't fully know the answer to that and no one does but I think for me it comes down to starting with why which is a bit of a Simon Sinek thing if you've read that book. So I think understanding what's your purpose as an organization, that North Star Vision and what does the AI mean in that context. I think there are some serious games to be made through AI and productivity potentially and I think you should have one eye on that but another I certainly needs to be on what's the kind of vision and purpose of your organization. How do you filter AI through that lens to come up with? Actually something more meaningful for your organization because potentially this changes your job. It makes a technology leader actually more core, more central to delivering that vision and purpose. So part of this is actually bringing technology leaders up to a more senior level within organizations to benefit from their insight and expertise into how to leverage AI to change your business or your organization. You touched upon many different pain points there considering all of that. Can you share a transformation example that genuinely impressed you and why? This is going to sound like a crazy one but maybe the UK government, I don't know how often the people say that one. In all seriousness, actually that gov.uk transformation has been really significant and I think the way they've approached that, it's not finished, it probably never will be but there was a point where there were probably still hundreds, maybe even thousands of different websites that you have to go to as a citizen of Great Britain to do your admin and it was a nightmare and it is slightly better now thanks to the work that they've done. It's more than slightly about it, it's considerably better and I think that is down to not any sort of technology choice, necessarily although I'm sure they've made some good technology choices, but primary down to the approach, they've been really human-centered, they've been really focused on accessibility and just simplifying things. Often that is taking things away. As a result I think they've got something that's really accessible for people with accessibility needs but also everyone, it's much clearer, it's so much nicer for everyone, much better experience and it means you kind of put off stuff less because you know it's going to be slightly less painful. I hear that. I think you really hit the nail on the head there focusing on looking at the people, the process which leads really nicely into my next question. Where do most leaders go wrong when trying to find that balance between people, process and technology? To a certain extent there is a kind of a technology first trap. There's maybe a difference between IT and digital transformation, etc. Often when people first move into these roles they view their job as a technology job. Luckily there are lots of people that have been around a long time, go to conferences like the one Sabrina runs and go to things conferences and you'll meet loads of people who can give you great advice which is amazing and often that advice centres around not technology at all but actually people and so I think it's that technology first trap that is often the biggest problem. We obviously run museums and they will give anyone to have sort of been to kind of our sort of world or one experience and come out thinking, oh what this need is more blockchain. No one ever talks about blockchain is very good, it has lots of excellent applications but you don't start with blockchain, you start with problems and then you think about what possible solutions there are to those problems and maybe one of those solutions is blockchain but most problems are people related either your customers, in our case our visitors often or your internal customers, your internal stakeholders but most of the time you're solving a people problem even if you're a B2B organisation you're actually ultimately solving people problems and they're just working for another business and so what I always used to think about is people process and technology and in that order so start with the people then look at the process then look at the technology that supports the people in the process. I've started to add adaptability into that now so actually what we're looking for is certainly inside your organisation and adaptable culture, adaptable people, adaptable processes and then implementing adaptable technology. Why? Well because the world is changing really rapidly and when we talk about people in our roles often we talk about the people inside our organisation but the rapid arrival of AI and lots of other different technologies has resulted in changing consumer behaviour which changes the business landscape within which you operate so when we say people it's not just people inside your organisation it's people outside your organisation and understanding how they behave, they're changing behaviours how they're operating. Often technology departments in organisation actually have access to most of the data, have the expertise around data so they're actually in a really good position to talk to your other business stakeholders about what the data is telling us about consumer behaviour and things. Thank you so much for those answers. Adaptability is definitely important as the father of two reasonably young kids I'm trying to encourage them to be adaptable. You mentioned there the tyranny of the possible I really like that phrase. I heard one the other day it was regarding which AI to to follow to invest in and the quote was the wolf that you feed will be the wolf that wins so something for us to think about there but you joined I MW in 2020 right at the start of the pandemic. What attracted you and how do you go about transforming a centuries old national museum when the world is being transformed around you? It was interesting I kind of wasn't necessarily keen to change roles but this came up and I was kind of interviewed in January 2020 what attracted me is I think sometimes when you think about Imperial War Museums perhaps it's the name you think about okay this is a place where there are lots of tanks and planes and kind of missiles and a big room so that's kind of what I have in my mind but once you start to learn a bit more about IWM you realise that actually this is an organisation about helping people to understand war and conflict and the stories behind war and conflict and they're very human stories and so they're kind of there are tanks and planes and missiles and things but actually that's a root into talking about what happened what the experience of like being in the aircraft was like what the experience of being near where that missile landed might have been like you know so actually there's a really good kind of corals here in mission in terms of helping people to understand war and conflict and there are some there are some cool things and there are heroic stories and there are sad stories but it all comes together to create a really impactful experience I think that's what really attracted me and then and then when I arrived I had got a long no experience when I really lived in May 2020 we were in lockdown all of the museums were permanently closed and I had to sort of ask do I still have a job but luckily they they said that digital is now more important than ever which I completely agreed with so so that was that was a relief and also there was a slight silver lining not that I'm glad the pandemic happened I definitely am not but for people like us in digital transformation it actually gave us the impetus we needed internally in law of organisations to actually prioritise sort of the big transformation work that that we wanted to do tell us about this AI project with 11 million historical images that there are actually a couple of projects that are as well talking about so one of the and this is really again people first human first a lot of people talk about AI as human in the loop I'm not sure about human in the loop because it sounds like if I Oliver if I kept you in the loop maybe Sabrina and I were having discussion I was like oh Oliver I'll keep you in the loop does me sort of just like ping you an email saying oh we've discussed this if you're in the loop it doesn't mean that you're necessarily deeply involved and so we've stopped using human in the loop and now we talk about human centered AI and that really works for us I think we have over the years done a lot of kind of I guess you could consider the crowdsourcing projects where we did a project called Lives of the First World War where thousands of volunteers helped us to identify the names of people and to describe their involvement in the First World War we're responsible for the nation's register of war morals and that meant that we had to go and discover them because there was no one with a list of war memorials and so we got lots of volunteers across the country to help us to find and discover war morals take photos of war morals and send them to us and then we have people in the office of volunteers who were like writing down the names of the photos and uploading the photos and the names to the website we've used crowdsourcing to collect kind of the millions of names and other information about war and the history of war to help people to better connect with conflict and AI provides us with another fantastic opportunity here so we have over 11 million images relating to war when they arrived often they literally are back a truck up and it's got boxes of photos in and often these boxes are not well labeled which have loads of photos that don't have any useful information attached to them so we've been experimenting with computer vision for probably eight or nine years now can you just explain what computer vision is computer vision is a form of AI that can essentially look at an image sometimes that image is a frame of film or multiple frames of film and essentially tell you what's in it what you would get is a kind of a label it would just say there's a 98% chance this is an aircraft or something like that post-transform you've got large language models working in unison with computer vision so now you can show computer vision an image and it will tell you what's in the image but using natural language so it used to say oh there's a 98% chance this is an aircraft now we'll say oh this is a mark 9 spitfire it's got this tail number which means it's specifically this one that's here and it was restored in this that they literally give you everything that it knows about that particular mark 9 spitfire and this is a real example like we're kind of shocked at how good it can be it's very good at spitfires right it's like all AI today sometimes it's startling how amazingly correct it can be and sometimes it's jockingly bad you know it's getting better and better all the time and we're finding the less and less we're getting these hallucinations and things however the bar in terms of accuracy is very high for a museum it's very high for imperial war museums so what we're always trying to do is ensure that whatever we do meets that kind of quality standard so we are using computer vision and LLM to give us a kind of first pass description of what's in these images and then we're using our volunteers often many of whom have actually got quite a lot of deep subject matter specialism to tell us oh yes that's absolutely right that that is a helicopter it's this particular helicopter and oh in fact that's not landing in Scotland it's landing in the Falklands it's the people plus AI but the critical aspect is the human and it's not human in the loop it's human centered it's like grounded in what our humans are volunteers think is the correct description thanks for explaining that Nick and some great examples there I want to talk about this LinkedIn section for education none everything which suggests you've learnt by doing and that goes back to your point about adaptability I suppose so how does this inform your radical candor approach could you tell us a little bit about that it's not right I didn't know at the time because I was very young and stupid I I subsequently think that I probably have ADHD I really struggled at school in terms of concentration so I wasn't doing very well academically but I was really interested in TV and film when I left school I went to the Princess Trust who had something called the Young Enterprise scheme and I applied for a grant to start my own video production company and they gave me a grant but they also gave me a mentor who helped me write a business plan and started teaching me about business and then I was able to using that business plan applied to and that west and got a small business loan bought lots of equipment and stuck my own video production company that I ran for several years actually that was all about yeah we talked about adaptability it didn't know at the time but that probably taught me some really important foundational skills you know when you're all of a sudden you're running a business it's only you you have to work out how to do everything you have to work out how to do your accountancy your tax how to keep on top of your costs and learn about pricing so there's all these things that kind of you learn as you go through business and life and you're kind of if you force yourself in the position where you're just on your own it's desk down to you it's sink or swim I think I probably needed that and I think it helped me an awful lot and I think it also it teaches you to be honest with yourself because you don't have a choice and you mentioned medical calendar which is a book and I think that is something that's really important especially now which is about how to challenge people challenge yourself to a certain challenge other people as well but from a good place if you've got doubts about what you're doing and you're not sharing those doubts that's a problem so we have to be really honest with each other especially with stuff like AI we actually don't know often what exactly the right thing to do is exactly what the right thing to build is so assuming that everything's going to be brilliant and not challenging anything is probably not a great idea in the context of today and this kind of AI revolution so today more than ever I think challenging yourself questioning yourself and others is important to get to a point where you do move forward so it's not about paralysis by analysis but it's about challenging and but finding a way forward and that's why that kind of vision and purpose and your why is really important and that being shared across yourself and your colleagues in your business about what you're trying to achieve and being willing to kill your darlings are on the way and be willing to let it go we figure out that it's not going to work so that Gianni has taught me a lot but I haven't finished learning and I still make any of mistakes I was listening recently to a professor at heart I think she's at Harvard Amy Edmondson she talks a lot about psychological safety and how so few people actually stand up and shout I think it's such an important point that you make there Nick what advice would you give to business leaders who are going through transformations in terms of creating that space for honest dialogue during a major change. Leave the book Radical Gang at the Canada that's probably a good idea I think there's something else around autonomy and trust as well what we're doing with AI is lots of proofs of concept several of them and it means that I can't run all of them and I probably shouldn't what you need to do is enable trust and autonomy within those teams and allow them to discover so the interesting is like you know I've never done a major AI digital transformation before because nobody has so it's not like I can embed myself with these teams and give them the benefit of my knowledge on this subject I don't have any right so actually in some ways I might be in the way so like stepping away and allowing the teams to develop these proofs of concept to test and learn and figure out how they might like come back to me and say here here's what we've learned that autonomy bit is probably more important now than the ever has been before fantastic what you've worked everywhere from some micro systems to guide dogs to imperial war museums now how does your approach to transformation change when you're dealing with this heritage institution versus I know a starter or a corporate and what can commercial organizations learn from your approach there are some significantly higher risks we're an organization that people trust to give them I think authentic answers is probably the best way to describe it the reason I say that is because war and conflict is complicated and often there are many sides people think oh there might be there's two sides we set a high bar saying that high bar doesn't mean that we don't use or we don't trust AI it means actually actually it's like it's a more in some ways it's more fun it's a better problem statement it's like how can we make this notoriously sometimes incorrect bit of technology how can we make that work when the bar is so high and rather than not bothering we've set about trying to make it work and it's not perfect all the time we're not right all the time but it's actually significantly better than I thought it would be like a year or two ago it's so exciting your approach of kind of not being afraid to fail and going for it even though the bar's so high you're like you know let's just give it a go it's okay if we make mistakes we'll learn along the way and then you can share that with other businesses so having that stance like what piece of advice would you give to business leaders starting their transformation journey it's that kind of why you know I've sort of I think described where I don't know like what we're trying to do we're trying to help people understand war and conflict so whatever we do needs to help with that and if that comes from our kind of our vision and purpose even if you're a commercial organisation you need a bigger why ideally it's just an AI thing and they're kind of obvious examples but they are worth bringing up time and time again that's things like blockbuster and codec blockbuster are actually relatively advanced in terms of their understanding that broadband would lead to streaming which would likely be the future of kind of movie rental and they even took quite a few steps luck towards that unfortunately they partnered with a company called Enron turns out they weren't the best people to partner with it around sort of building out a kind of a fiber network in the US to help them do the streaming so that obviously all fell apart when it turned out Enron lied quite a lot and did a lot of duties accounting but at that point Netflix is still sending DVDs out in the post right so blockbuster they knew what was going to happen with technology blockbuster's problem was that they were leasing like 9000 physical stalls and it's really hard to immediately terminate the leaks on 9000 stores you've got massive massive overhead so for an organisation size of blockbuster it's really hard to pivot with codec codec invented the digital camera they've got the patents for the digital camera and actually there were some of the leaders in digital camera sales but then that they were very protective over all of their profit margin most of which was around film sales of film processing and so it wasn't in their interest to really go all in on digital cameras where if you're like Nikon or Canon or Sony or Panasonic you don't have any film sales to to protect you know you can go all in on digital cameras and that happened very quickly and so within a sort of five to ten year period codec we're kind of wiped out things can change really quickly if your why is I want people to access movies in the simplest way and I felt like there's an opportunity for us to generate a revenue from making that customer experience so simple that's what blockbuster did for years it worked brilliantly it was really simple there was a blockbuster really close to everyone and you could go and you could rent a DVD or a video for codec if there why was those this concept of the codec moment they used all the time about capturing memories if the idea is capturing memories then build your business around that the problem is they followed they kind of the immediate profit the short term profit rather than that kind of why and whilst that works for them and their shareholders for a few years in the long term actually completely sunk the business so this is where as technologists in your organization you can be saying well look if this is our why what does our why look like in the world of AI how does consumer behavior change in the world of AI and how do we start testing proofs of the concept for that new world because it might be it might there's a very high chance it fundamentally changes your whole business model the most important thing is that is that holding that why that vision and purpose that like central to what you're doing doesn't matter whether you're a commercial organization or a nonprofit like us if you put that out of the heart of it and allow yourself to change everything around that that means you will to a certain extent mitigate some disruption whereas if you don't do that if you just if you're just going how can we use AI to generate a bit more revenue or save a bit of money the problem is you're making yourself much more open to disruption I think that's such great advice thanks so much for sharing those insights but where the tech first trap honest discussions how to create that safe space for you know that psychological safety so people can speak up what does why look like in the age of AI I think these are really fantastic insights Nick so thank you so much for your time any key messages you want to get across and how should people connect with you I'm a LinkedIn so for free to follow me and connect with me on on LinkedIn I think it's that message around adaptability really you know the why is important and you adapt around that I think building communities of like my new professionals is really important today as well so I think take the opportunity especially now to go and kind of network with your peers and hear what they're doing doesn't mean that you're going to do exactly the same as them I think you just need to understand the kind of range of possibilities and figure out what you want to do what you don't want to do and now is the time to start talking with your peers networking hearing what everyone else is doing yeah I would definitely encourage you getting out there right now and creating some space for yourself to to think and hear about what the people are doing it always comes back to people it loves thanks so much Nick thanks Oliver thanks Sabrina it's been a pleasure you can find all the links and resources from today's conversation in our show notes DTX Unplugged is brought to you by Clarine Events the team behind the DTX shows where business transformation leaders gather to share ideas and drive change if you're leading transformation in your organization visit dtxevents.io to join the community and don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts thanks for listening and until next time keep transforming