The Middle Management, who has the required knowledge for successful Digital Transformations, is not appropriately engaged and won as change agents.

This interactive session walks the audience through seven steps of an implementation path. Each step is heavily interwoven with leadership challenges, skills, and practices. Most often, those are tacit.
The right path helps move from tacit transactional management to explicit transformational leadership, a prerequisite for successful Digital Transformations.

Target Audience: Manager, Decision Makers, Change Agents, Enterprise Transformation Implementers
Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of current digitization topics on management and frameworks
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
Leadership is vital for successful Digital Transformations.
However, the leadership or managers, the "System Masters" of the "Frozen Middle Layer" having the required knowledge, are often not appropriately engaged and won as change agents. They continue to do what they successfully have done in the past —applying "tacit" personal knowledge and "managing," not "leading." Tacit knowledge was first defined by Michael Polanyi in the Tacit Dimension and later on used by Nonaka and Takeuchi in the SECI model.

Blindly applying highly standardized implementation roadmaps and so-called playbooks force leadership into orthodox paradigms and mental management models.
This interactive session walks the audience through seven steps of an implementation path — a good practice based on personal experience and linked to the theoretical foundation from various sources. It is about the early phase when the transformation initiatives are outlined. We stop at critical junctions and typical roadblocks. Each step is the foundation for further progress.

We look at a viable path through the roadmap of implementing Digital Transformation on the Enterprise level with an unleashed leadership team.
The path is not "train the teams and pray for help" but about winning the system masters as change agents right from the start.

After the introduction ( 5 / >0 / 5>), we stop at:

• Red Pill or Blue Pill - the (pretended) commitment and wrong junction to Agile Theater or Cargo Cult ( 5 / >5 / 10>)
• VUCA - we, the agile folks, know what we mean, but we altogether do not share a truly common language - the second disconnect ( 5 / >10 / 15>)
• Perspectives, paradigms, again language, and culture ( 15 / >15 / 30>)
• Leadership - away from transactional to transformational management for people, processes, managers, leaders, and teams ( 15 / >30 / 45>)
• Leaders vs. managers as "System Masters" in the "Frozen Middle Layer" and their crucial contribution ( 5 / >45 / 50>)
• "Knowledge and Know-How," tacit and explicit or what is it and how to unlock this for future success. The SECI model and Mindfulness as tools to tap hidden gems in ourselves and the organization ( 15 / >65 / 80>)
• Postcard from the Future - how to fill the Backlogs of managers to unleash them as leaders ( 10 / >80 / 90>)

At every stop, there is an overview of what is so special about it

• What we should avoid
• What we should try
• An interactive hybrid exchange and a game (not at every stop and depending on the votes of the audience)
• deas on how to dig deeper into the rabbit hole - the gimmicks

This session links personal experience and anecdotes with the already available methods, practices, and theories. The "Red Pills for Leadership" session does not claim to introduce a new silver bullet. It is not another snake oil potion. It is a set of good practices that have been around for some decades, and many of us most probably at least partially already know. The audience will get a fully packed travel bag filled with the gimmicks and the takeaways from the interactive discussion at the various stops and junction points.

Depending on the personal experience level, the audience will get an idea for a potential good path or optimize their own path through the exchange with others on this leadership topic.
This is the way ;-)