I have very little patience for people… saying ‘oh this is too technical for me’ It's a little bit like a Formula 1 driver who says well i know nothing about my car’ and of course, they do. They know exactly what the tires are. They know the impact of the wing settings and the downforce and they have to. Even though their job is driving, not building the cars The larger the company is, the more different speeds you see… between different parts of an organization and that's something, especially people in digital can struggle with – because you want to be really fast. You want to keep moving. You want to keep running. And then it becomes a struggle because another part of the organization is being slow or they have different deadlines or they have different goals than you have. So rather than struggling with this or being annoyed with it or being upset with it, it's something to really just embrace. It's a natural thing. Different parts of the company will be on completely different tracks and you need to parallelize this and that's really difficult. Especially because you need to integrate this within the same projects and programs in order to get anywhere. But it's crucial because it's difficult but faster and it's much less of a struggle than trying to just run without thinking. Speed is mostly important if you're talking about time to market. So if you roll out a new campaign, you need to be done in an instant. You want to be able to react to changing market circumstances. I think there's a lot of focus in the past 10 years on the agility that we've come to expect from big tech. So if you look at a Google or Facebook, everybody thinks ‘well these guys are moving really really fast’ Something like Uber or Netflix seemingly came into existence overnight. and therefore we're at risk of our market being disrupted. there's competitors popping up left and right and we might not even know about them so we have to be super fast and being able to react to that the risk with that is it means you forget that line of thought of ‘why are we doing this what's actually the the link between our goals and and what we're doing in digital experience.‘ The risk is that you start ignoring important factors and that actually then actively slows you down. A lot of the day-to-day speed is in being able to launch campaigns, launch new products, and add things across multiple channels. In order to be able to do that you probably have to spend a lot of time thinking through what you want to achieve first. So sometimes you need to take a pause to achieve the speed. You need to think through where you need that speed. How fast is fast this is a very relative thing: It really depends on the industry you're in. Fast can be slow. Or a slow a moment can create a lot of speed and agility. Fast is also a very relative concept within the various departments if you look at the the CFO, that's usually year-to-year kind of thing or quarter-to-quarter. In digital, the big debate of course in technology is, okay, so we have sprints that are two weeks. Sometimes that's too slow because a change comes up in the middle of a sprint and it can be very hard to adapt. Not necessarily within a tech or marketing team but because you then have to re-involve the rest of the organization in those changes. So speed lives on very different levels and at different speeds. It's not a synchronous thing. I've always been convinced that if you want to work in digital, you don't have to be an ace developer in order to be able to discuss architectures. But you have to have the curiosity to understand what goes on in tech, how that works, and what the the day-to-day of tech people is like in order to be able to work successfully with them So i have very little patience for people saying ‘oh this is too technical for me‘ It's a little bit like a Formula 1 driver who says ‘well i know nothing about my car‘ and of course they do. They know exactly what the tires are going to be like, they know the impact of the wing settings and the downforce And they have to, even though their job is driving, not building the cars. The other thing is again if you're talking about speed sometimes if the tech guys tell you √this is going to take a long time but we have to get this right‘. You have to make sure that they're talking about something that will give you agility going forward. Some of the companies that struggle the most are the ones that never took the time to get things right. To set it up right, in order to have that agility in daily operations. So you have to be able to strike that balance and understand what a balance is between tech people just wanting to do the best possible technical solution and forgetting completely about business interest behind it. But also the other way around when they are trying to convince you of things that are going to maintain your agility for years to come. So… For that you have to understand what you're talking about you have to understand the questions you need to ask and you have to understand the answers, even if it's only on a high level. You have an aversion against agile it seems – what do you hate most about it? I wouldn't say i hate agile. I don't hate agile at all but i tend to go back to the actual agile manifesto. And if you look at that and then look at what is currently considered to be agile, it's mostly methodologies. It is scrum it's kanban it's six sigma and so on – and people become very religious about their uh their method. They've taken the course, they've done the certifications, they've learned the books inside out and then there you get these arcane discussions about what a stand-up should look like. I've actually seen one team debate the fact that they weren't standing up during the stand-up – which is irrelevant to the whole practice. So agile is fantastic. I have a problem with people who don't have the flexibility to diverge from the standard methods. If you look at what big tech is doing, in most cases, they allow teams to do what they think is the most efficient way of self-organizing this. Usually, in non-tech companies you don't have that luxury and something like scrum becomes a great way to actually shield the team from outside influences and and enforce an agile process. But when I say enforcing an agile process, that already, to me sounds like things going wrong. If you enforce agile that isn't true agility. So people should be much more flexible in their methodology. Who are most often in control of digital experience platforms and who ought to be in control of digital experience platforms? I'm very tempted to say that nobody is in control of digital experience platforms in general. Digital experience should be something that is owned by the entire company. And links very deeply into the goals of the organization as a whole. But it rarely is. Quite often, it's one department taking the lead and that's where things start going in the wrong direction because that will make it very difficult for everybody to follow this particular department's sense of speed and timelines and goals. So it's tricky one. It's one of the questions that companies have been trying to solve with having Chief Digital Officers. The only problem with it, of course is that if you really want to be a digital organization, you shouldn't actually need a Chief Digital Officer. Because everybody should be thinking about digital – so that's a great paradox of where we are at right now. But it's also the fun part of uh what's been happening in the digital in the past 20 years it's constantly changing and we don't really know where it's going to go. There is no planning for five or ten years in the future – because everything could be completely different. When I was in school and taking my physics classes, the one thing that really fascinated me was relativity and then some of the practical upshots of this. Being able to actually do the math on the shift in light color, the doppler effect, being able to calculate the speed objects are moving at which of course is relative to the observer, was one of those really fascinating topics. I couldn't do the math nowadays of course because i haven't used it since school but it sort of stuck in my mind as in what some people call fast, is ‘quick and dirty‘. What other people call fast is deep and thorough. And trying to strike a balance between those is important but difficult so i can deeply criticize people from moving too fast. If it means they're ignoring problems along the way. I can also understand if people get annoyed saying well ‘you're trying to be too prepared for this‘. So finding the middle row between that is where you get the actual true speed.