Why would you not want a digital swat team? These are some of the benefits. And they are quantifiable. (2.0 min read).

From years of working with the internet and advising companies how to manage digital adaptation (noticed did not use the word transformation), one best practice that consistently works is the creation of a “digital swat team” designed and tasked with pursuing emerging digital trends, synthesizing their impacts on the business and recommending courses of action including new products and services.

Now, before all my innovation colleagues jump on the “it does not work” bandwagon. They do, if designed, staffed and properly aligned with all stakeholders. Like everything else in life, if a process or product is not designed properly, it will suffer. (Just ask Boeing and the Super Max. Had they used design-thinking technics to consult with the pilots in a deeper basis, perhaps they would not be where they are.)

It is the same with digital swat teams. As a service to the organization, it must be designed properly at the outset. These teams can themselves be disruptive to enterprises. (We should want this, actually.) Conflicts of interests will always arise. We are human and we are protective of our respective turfs. The benefits of these teams, however, far outweigh the negatives when aligned incentives, education and support are introduced.

Here are some of the benefits that I have experienced directly and from those that I have advised:

1)   Increased engagement when employees’ creative souls are awakened. Magical things happened when one and all are invited to participate in the process of solving a problem using design thinking, for example. In one project that I was working with a client, I requested that we have team members representing the entire supply chain of a product be present. Order processors that were previously buried behind screens and never asked to contribute to company-wide problems, were some of the greatest contributors, coming up with previously not thought of ideas that revolutionized the product. Extroverts are not the only providers of ideas, it turns out. Introverts may even be better according to the latest neuroscience research.

2)   Increased collaboration. How? Simple. By encouraging play. Managed play that is. Participating in purposely-designed multifunctional projects has immense lasting impact across functions. But again, they must be engineered and managed correctly.

Ok, one more before I lose you, the reader. Increasing ability to sense the future via increased empathy. It turns out – again via neuroscience research – that empathy is a skill that can be learned and mentored. And increase in empathy has the effect of increasing situational awareness, which in turn can help us develop fore-vision or the achievement of Metis (/ˈmiːtɪs/; Greek: Μῆτις - "wisdom," "skill," or "craft"). In ancient Greek religion, Metis was a mythical Titaness belonging to the second generation of Titans. Metis as the embodiment of "prudence", "wisdom" or "wise counsel.” Author and New Your Times columnist, David Brooks, discusses this in his book: The Social Animal. A fantastic read on how social we are and how we respond to external inputs in ways that we are not aware of.