Quibi the mobile streaming service announced this week that it was shutting down. If your reaction to this is ‘Qui-what?’ don’t worry, you’re not alone. The mobile streaming service never really became a household name within the US, and even less so in other countries.
So, what exactly was it? You’re familiar with TikTok, right? Well, Quibi was the anti-TikTok, although not by intent. Quibi (a mash up of the term Quick Bites) was started with great fanfare by Hollywood in April 2020. In true Hollywood style, investors poured in $2 billion. The idea was to provide Netflix type programming, except in bite sized episodes of 6-10 minutes, to be viewed in an app. It was going to feature original TV content from A-list celebrities like Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro and Antoine Fuqua, and featured popular actors like Chrissy Teigen, Dwayne Johnson and Reese Witherspoon. Naturally, its founder was a Hollywood insider, Jeffrey Katzenberg, previously CEO of Disney and Dreamworks. And, its CEO was Meg Whitman former CEO of eBay and Hewlett-Packard.
To be fair, while Quibi did blow through a couple of billion dollars within six months, there were factors like COVID-19 that worked against it. However, at this point, I’m trying really hard to cut it some slack, but I can’t seem to gin up the sympathy. A big expensive experiment that valued advertising spending over content (i.e. programming), didn’t really understand the latest social trends (i.e. it excluded viral social media) and relied on hype over execution makes it tough to empathize with.
That last point regarding the hype is the reason I bring up the Quibi story. In many ways, it was a classic case of premature celebration. Its founding was announced with great fanfare. The concept was hailed as breakthrough. This would be the next Netflix or Amazon. It was introduced with a bang and went out with a whimper.
Premature Celebration
There’s something about premature celebration that unfailingly turns off our human empathy genes. Admit it, the videos of athletes who celebrate too early, only to have the fates suddenly turn against them are kinda funny. The soccer goalie, who celebrates after saving a goal, while being totally oblivious to the fact that the ball has trickled back over the goal line, is always short-changed on our sympathy. But, it’s a tough world out there and results ultimately matter.
Which is why digital transformation efforts that are very successful in pilot test efforts and then collapse when faced with a roll-out, get little sympathy. For some reason, the issue of scaling change seems to be more acute for digital transformation. Perhaps because the frequency of digital change is higher, or because it is just more of a current issue. A full 90% of digital transformations fail at the scaling stage.
In digital transformation, there’s a bigger lesson related to timing that’s involved here, rather than the need to avoid premature celebration. And that is regarding the latency involved in organization change.
Latency in Organization Change
I recently came across a neat little blog titled ‘Untamed’ which talked about the concept of latency in organization change. Latency, in this context, is defined as the time lag between when the leadership of an organization initiates a change, and when it is actioned by the front line. The blog does a great job of applying the metaphor of latency in transmission of data, from source to destination e.g. the various delays between when I hit ‘send’ on an email on my PC, and the time it is read by the receiver. There’s Propagation delay (i.e. time between me hitting send and the PC pushing data on the network). Then comes the Transmission delay (which is the time taken by the network itself). At every stage of that journey there is also Processing delay as each switch and server acts on instructions. And finally, there’s Queuing delay as the message waits for the recipient to read it in the inbox.
This applies to organization change too. There is Propagation delay between the intent to digitally transform and the effective communication to the organization. There’s Transmission delay, as every layer in the hierarchy passes it on. At every layer there’s also Processing delay, as the strategy is understood, digested and then recommunicated. And then there is the Queuing delay, as the new change needs to be queued behind other daily operational priorities.
How to Address Latency in Organizational Change
The metaphor of data transmission latency also helps us to create countermeasures against organizational change.
- Reduce traffic: Cut the amount of low-value communications which take time, energy, attention and goodwill from the organization. Focus on the big stuff.
- Simplify instructions: When you do communicate, make it simple and actionable.
- Create a distributed network: Eliminate bottlenecks in communication. Where possible empower the right managers to make decisions and speed execution.
- Improve routing: Not every communication or change has to follow the same route. Identify most efficient paths to drive each and every significant change.
- Use caching: Caching is the storage of some data on local hardware to avoid sending the same instructions over and over again. The equivalent in organizational change is to build on what’s gone before, as opposed to sending a series of disconnected change instructions each time.
I find this an elegant metaphor for reducing latency in organizational change. Of course, change management failure has other causes too, like the fit of the new systems for use, or organizational reward systems, which do go beyond latency. But hey, when it comes to organizational change, I’ll take all the help I can get!
