In October 2020, the B2B team was at the tail end of several attempts to upskill in data, Martech and Agile. In their quest to reach the Promised Land of an omnichannel, customer-centric marketing ecosystem, the organisation culture wasn't evolving in line with the future ambition: the team were effectively slowing themselves down while attempting to speed up.

One after another, new tools, databases, software and systems were added to the stack.But people’s behaviours weren’t changing at the same rate.

Because digital transformation isn’t a challenge for technology: it’s a challenge for people. Like so many of their peers, the team had fallen into the trap of mistaking ‘personalization’. with personal service. While they drowned in a sea of tools and data sets that promised the former, they fell back into traditional marketing practices to deliver the latter.

Providing improved service and opportunities to their 1.3 million business customers across the world needed not just smarter technology and richer data, its needed a team that understood joined up systems and approached the job with a different mindset.

Under pressure to master these new tools, the team felt unequipped to connect the dots between their newfound capabilities and delivering new value.

We used our Transformation Maturity Methodology to identify the skills, capabilities and behaviours that determined the marketing teams' ability to transform, covering Agility, Skills & Knowledge, and Data & Technology.

We started with one fundamental insight: if you want to get personal with your customers, first you have to get personal with your people. And that starts with listening. We listened to our stakeholders and their teams. We watched the way they worked together, what influenced their behaviour, where they felt comfortable. We identified a series of cultural artefacts which sign-posted behaviour. How might certain behaviour be handed in the outside world? Would people respond differently?

Then we got creative. With story-telling, designers and imagination, we transposed behaviours and events to parallel worlds: a 24-hour news room, an Accident and Emergency Department, a zoo…. Working through different scenarios and nudges, we identified places where altered behaviour would be more aligned to the future vision, without the fanfare of “programme” or label of “Change”.

We tested our thinking by applying Agile software development techniques to behaviour, an innovation in itself.

The Evolution Engine is an iterative, experimental platform for transformation that bridges the gap between technology and marketers.