Leading - The Millennial Way

April 26, 2019 authise authise

Enjoy an excerpt and photos of the book launch from Simon Barrington's and Rachel Luetchford's new book Leading - The Millennial Way! Get your copy now!

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Excerpt from Leading - Millennial Way

Gut Instinct and Experimentation

Rachel: As millennials, we can’t quite imagine a world where instant feedback isn’t the norm and we are used to getting it direct from the source. One interviewee expressed this as ‘we want that engagement straight away’.

Digital technology has brought us closer to colleagues and customers wherever they are in the world and our ability to adapt and experiment has increased dramatically as a result.

Therefore, we are wrestling with the benefits of applying ‘test and learn’ and ‘agile’ technologies, and the challenges of the organizational and cultural change that is required as a result.

The speed we expect something to work at and the approach we take to solving a problem is really quite different from that of previous generations and there is a strong desire for greater use of technology in experimentation and problem solving.

Simon: One millennial leader I know, who is Head of Digital in a major corporate, has made it her life mission to enable the senior leadership team to understand how millennials use technology and how they experiment, and to help them change the organizational culture to reflect that. It’s a source of constant tension in most organizations I know.

Over the past decade, ‘digital transformation’ programmes have enabled organizations to increase the level of experimentation involved in marketing and communications programmes, due to the availability of instant feedback.

It is therefore now quite normal for companies to run multiple Facebook advertising campaigns at one time, gauging within minutes the relative success of a particular variant of an advert, measured by engagements, likes, comments and shares, and then to maximize their reach through spending their advertising budget on the winning ads. Similarly, with email marketing campaigns, it’s not unusual to have multiple variants of an email with instant feedback available on the number of ‘opens’, ‘reads’, ‘shares’ and ‘click-throughs’ and on the conversion rate to purchases.

The application of formalized ‘test and learn’ is growing in popularity outside the digital domain, with new format retail stores being set up as experiments in determining the right formats to drive footfall and revenue growth. 

Therefore, the need to pre-determine the exact messaging and make choices has become data-driven and enabled wide experimentation in order to determine the best course of action.

Leaders and managers find themselves creating environments over which they have less control, and in which they can empower their teams to make great choices based on the availability of data and information.

Teams that succeed are collaborative, creative, willing to take risks and to adapt in real time to new information and the changing habits of consumers, and the creation of these agile teams becomes vital to business success.

This requires massive cultural change to be led by millennial leaders. There are some existing, but rare, good models that can help in the process.