A few weeks ago, I was standing in Glen Esk with my camera, shooting at a slow shutter speed. The water blurs, the clouds drift across the frame, and you can’t rush it. You set up, you wait, and you let the picture come to you.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot since joining Dax Group, because it’s close to how I think good business works.
It’s all about the people
I’m not a technical person, and I’m comfortable saying so. You don’t need to be technical to see that a lot of the conversation in business right now is about AI, and that’s before we even get to digital transformation.
That conversation matters, but it often skips a step. Before anyone can talk about which tools to use, someone has to understand the problem. Before you can understand the problem, you need people who are willing to tell you about it honestly.
That takes trust and understanding, and neither of those comes from a demo or a PowerPoint presentation. They come from sitting down with someone, usually over a coffee, and properly listening.
Not to sound corny, but if we’re bringing AI into businesses, we have to bring the human touch with it.
Not every problem is a technology problem
A lot of the challenges businesses face aren’t really about technology. They’re about people: teams who’ve always done it a certain way, leaders who can see something needs to change but can’t quite picture what it looks like, and good ideas that never get past the “we should really look at that” stage.
Technology can help with all of those. It just usually isn’t where the conversation should start.
Curiosity comes first
Technology is moving incredibly fast. It’s easy to feel left behind, or to decide it’s not for you and carry on as you are. I understand that, because change is uncomfortable.
But the businesses I’ve seen do well aren’t always the ones with the biggest budgets or the cleverest systems. They’re the ones that stay curious. They ask questions, they’re willing to try something different, and they accept that the way things have always been done might not be the way they need to be done next.
As a big Stranger Things fan, I can’t help thinking of Dustin Henderson here:
“You always say we should never stop being curious, to always open any curiosity door we find. Why are you keeping the curiosity door locked?”
I think a lot of organisations have a curiosity door they haven’t opened yet. It’s not because they don’t want to. Usually nobody has had the time, the tools or the right conversation to show them what’s on the other side.
Helping leaders see the value
That’s where I want to help. Plenty of leaders already know where their business is creaking. What they often don’t have is a clear picture of what’s possible, or someone they trust to help them see it without being sold to.
I think our job is to give people that vision: to show them in plain, human terms what the value could look like for their business, their teams and their customers. Once people can see it, they can decide for themselves whether to take the next step.
They must want to take it, though, and that starts with a conversation.
Good things take time
That brings me back to Glen Esk. A slow shutter speed slows everything down and shows you things you’d miss otherwise. I think we could all do with that from time to time.
Relationships work the same way. You can’t rush trust or fake understanding. When you take the time, the rest follows: the right problems come to the surface, the right solutions follow, and the technology fits around the people rather than the other way round.
So, I’m starting the old-school way, with a coffee and a chat.
If there’s a curiosity door in your business you’ve been meaning to open, I’d love to hear about it.