Have you ever been in serious gridlock? When I was working in California, I would often have to drive from Pasadena to Yorba Linda. The 40-mile trip often took me three to four hours. Many days I would find myself on a freeway at a dead stop, sometimes for hours. It's a helpless feeling to sit there in your car, not moving. You are stuck and have no idea when it will clear up. Perhaps most unnerving is that you don't always know what is causing the gridlock.

While you settle in for the long wait, you start to look around. You get familiar with the people in other cars. Sometimes there is a weird moment where you catch them looking at you, and then you quickly look away (after all, it's not good gridlock etiquette to stare). The smell of the exhaust forces you to recirculate the air in your car. As you inch along the route, you suddenly find yourself reading every street sign and examining all of the details of the freeway that you wouldn't normally notice. Every now and then, you get just a glimpse of hope because the brake lights in front of you disappear and you move forward 10 or 15 feet and you think, “This is it! We are moving again!” Sometimes you even get up to 15 or 20 miles an hour and you begin to celebrate with your gridlock mates, remote high-fiving and smiling, mouthing the words, “We're moving!”—only to have the brake lights ahead glow red. You're stuck again. The small celebration you were just having with the guy in the BMW two lanes away is suddenly over. Meanwhile, someone somewhere is waiting for you to arrive, and there is nothing you can do to get there any faster.

To me, that's the same feeling as working in an environment where you can't seem to move forward. Every time you get enough steam to move ahead, something or someone thwarts it and you are back to being stuck in traffic.

What Is Digital Gridlock?

Digital gridlock is made up of several different kinds of paralysis that, when combined, cause a slowdown or a dead stop in your organization. There are six organizational areas where paralysis can emerge:

1. Processes: Systems and workflows must keep up with technological advances to prevent digital gridlock.
2. Technology: As technology advances, it does more than affect processes; it also fundamentally changes the way people do business.
3. Security: A lack of preparation for security breaches can leave an organization vulnerable to attacks. This can not only put customers at risk but also lead to legal and financial liability and a damaged reputation.
4. People: The right people must be in the right positions for an organization to succeed.
5. Culture: Poor communication and lack of trust are two major symptoms of cultural paralysis. This prevents organizations from making the changes they need to.
6. Strategy: Governance, planning, and execution are at the heart of strategy. They will keep your organization moving forward.

This book is broken into six parts, each one corresponding to a particular area where organizational troubles can arise.

Riskphobia

Riskphobic leaders have a default response to every new idea put on the table: No! This is interesting because measuring and deducing risk is a key competency for those of us working at financial institutions. It's how we make loans and investments and even determine the advice we give our customers. Yet, when it comes to technology, the financial sector is so afraid of regulations or creating waves that many have stopped progressing. Ironically, their fear of risk poses its own risk.

I believe riskphobia stems from a lack of data analysis. We have all of the data we need to make smart decisions, but we are afraid to implement it. We know more about our customers than any online retailer, search engine, or blog. We know what our customers buy, we know when they buy it, we know when they go on vacation or travel. The kind of data financial institutions possess is most valuable; Google, Amazon, or Apple would pay for it. Despite this, we're afraid to use it, even when it is in service of making our customers' lives better. Our customers will feel violated and that the institution will lose their trust. We live in fear that we will be called Big Brother or that we will unknowingly violate some obscure regulation and be fined by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). No one wants to be on the 10 o'clock news. This paralysis of riskphobic leadership teaches your organization to be very skeptical of new technologies and to avoid new features, products, services, or business paradigms until they have been thoroughly worked out by someone else. While this may seem like a logical plan, this leads gridlocked businesses to stay on the stagnant highway instead of getting off at a promising exit to take a chance and circumvent the blockage. The belief is that it's less risky to stay on the road you are on than to try a new way to get there.

You can think of your customers as the people waiting on you to get to your destination. Your customers are waiting on you to roll out new features and their expectations of digital services are influenced based on their experiences with companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Netflix, and Apple. They expect a seamless experience and continuous improvement. They will be patient as long as they see progress, but if they sense that you are gridlocked they will look elsewhere for these services.

The next paralysis that causes gridlock is cultural paralysis. It happens like this: You've got a lot of folks working in your bank or your credit union, and some of the best employees are at the lower levels in the organization. They're the people who are interacting with the members every day. Coincidentally, they are also the lowest-paid people on your staff. Frontline employees have tremendous opportunities to assess what customers want and what they don't like about your business offerings, especially the digital services because chances are if they are having to do a transaction manually its because the transaction wasn't available in your digital banking platform. These employees don't need a survey to find out how customers feel and react to your services; they can see it and sense it when they interact with customers. Unfortunately, most of the time we don't give these employees a platform to share their firsthand knowledge. As a result, there is no way for organizations to use data from direct customer interactions and synthesize it to improve business, products, and services. In most organizations, lower-level employees are not empowered to fix issues and, as a result, they, too, are stuck in paralysis.

I once did a presentation and I asked how many people had some sort of innovation suggestion box. To my surprise, there were even fewer than I thought. When I dug deeper, I found out that one of them had an anonymous suggestion box. When I asked why it was anonymous, the person couldn't answer. The only reason I can think for a suggestion box to be anonymous is because people are afraid to share their ideas. That says something serious about an organization's culture. I asked someone with a normal suggestion box how they used the suggestions. They said they vet them and then talk to the people who submitted the ideas that were deemed good. I asked what they did with the suggestions they didn't use and they stated they just set them aside, I asked if they reached out to the employee to thank them for their submission and found that they did not. This was fascinating to me, because I think every suggestion should be followed up on. How would it feel to be an employee who takes the risk of putting an idea on paper and submitting to leadership only to never be acknowledged? Certainly demoralizing. If you were this employee, would you be willing to submit another idea? The paralysis of culture goes hand in hand with the paralysis of communication.

Digital gridlock occurs when all of these elements come together and prevent an organization from moving forward. It is what makes us feel helpless, stuck in a meeting for a project that is six months behind schedule with no end in sight. We don't know if there is an accident up ahead or if the road is permanently closed. The only way out is to get a higher perspective to see how all of these elements are interacting and identify the sticking points.

This book is a manual on how to break that gridlock. I will share with you how my teams and I have gotten things done and how other great organizations have been able to overcome stagnation. This book will help you defeat paralysis with proven management methods and technological approaches. These tools will help to align your organization in a way that promotes candid communication, rewards risk (when approached in the right way), and fosters innovation. Your financial institution will learn how to become data driven and how to drive results from that data. How to try and fail and still be okay and fail again and fail again after that, and do all of this without being on the 10 o'clock news. This book will help you get up to 80 miles an hour on that highway and feel the wind in your hair.