Companies pick up digital like Brits pick up languages - badly

How the Principles of Language Immersion can accelerate Digital Transformations and close the digital skills gap

Companies are as good at data transformations as Brits are at foreign languages.

Brits aren’t just famously bad at learning foreign languages, they are embarrassingly bad at them.  I know, I am a Brit, and I used to suck at languages.

By the time I was 16, I’d had way more than 500 hours of French lessons, and when it came to French conversation, I could just about order food in a French restaurant.  That’s it.

Now, you may be wondering about the connection between language learning and digital transformations. 

Well, most companies are at least four years into digital and data transformations and still complain about skills gaps and poor data literacy. They're making as much progress on developing digital and data fluency in their workforce as British schools do on second language fluency.

In both cases, poor progress is not a case of lack of investment or effort. The US Foreign Service Institute claim that 480 hours of language lessons are sufficient to be understood in and to understand most of what is said in another language. Similarly, in my experience, six months into a data skill programme, most students will have automated a dashboard, data flow and part of their workload.  They free up time for more valuable work and get the confidence to take charge of their learning journey. Four-plus years of data transformation is plenty of time for any company to address its skills gap. 

So what's going wrong?

Let's start with my own experience of languages. After a poor start at languages, September 11 made me want to learn more about the world and to learn languages. After university, I qualified to teach English as a foreign language and used that to fund three years of living abroad and learning languages.  

In my teacher training, I came across the concept of language immersion. In a demo, the teacher gave a Greek lesson without speaking anything other than Greek. It was deeply frustrating at first. But in one lesson, I learned some simple vocab and played around with a sentence structure.

It was more than an interesting experiment. Multiple studies have shown the effectiveness of this approach and that students in immersion programs reach conversational fluency faster and, in most cases, do better on tests than students in more conventional courses. I reflected on my French lessons as a kid. Everything other than the exercises and an occasional asseyez-vous (sit down) had been in English. We learned French without practising it. In truth we studied French, we didn’t learn it.

Keen to learn from this when I moved to China, I chose to force my immersion by living in Harbin, a city with a low ex-pat population. After a year, I extended my stay to switch from full-time teacher and part-time student in Harbin to full-time Chinese language student at a Beijing university. The university placed me in a class where most of my classmates had studied Chinese for over four years compared to my one. It was a stretch, but whilst I scored bottom in many class tests, I discovered on our first night out that most of them struggled with essential communication, like giving instructions to a taxi driver. Meanwhile, I nattered away with the driver about preparations for the Beijing Olympics. Immersion had worked!

Immersion delivers fluency at warp speed. Whilst it leaves gaps in technical points like grammar, those are mostly irrelevant if you aim to use your new skills rather than study them academically.

Exactly the same is true for data and digital fluency. If you want your colleagues to become technical experts in data structures and coding, then send them on courses that start with descriptions of structured and unstructured data and diagrams of the data lifecycle. These courses do deliver value, just not much and very slowly.

If you want your colleagues to be able to DO things with data, like contribute to your organisation's objectives, then you need to provide training that immerses them in data projects from hour one.

The graduate programme I helped design at Jaguar Land Rover took this approach. Every week of a six-week programme was based on a mock project with a business goal and a new technical topic. For example, one goal was to identify sales patterns in the highest-performing retailers whilst learning Tableau. This meant that when they joined a live project, they had six mini-projects worth of experience, had worked in agile six times, and had six in-depth retrospective discussions to reflect on ways of working. In short, they were already fluent in some of the basics of working in a data team.  

There is precedent for running digital transformations at scale in this way. Microsoft was a declining tech company when Satya took charge. It was on the Oracle and IBM trajectory, still a powerhouse but no longer cutting edge and likely to lead or disrupt the market. This is no longer true. Satya's turnaround is one of the best case studies for digital transformation, and learning was at the core of the turnaround.  

In 2014, when he became CEO, he kickstarted a learning culture by mandating that all employees complete a set number of learning hours yearly. As one Microsoft employee told me, it didn't matter what your role was, you had to complete a digital learning course each year. The person I spoke to had just completed a course on cloud architecture. It wasn’t immediately obvious how it would benefit their role. But that wasn’t and isn’t the point. An organisation where everyone is continually learning about technical areas will be much more innovative, agile and dynamic.

In 2021, after seven years, Microsoft removed the mandate and made training voluntary. However, by that point, there was an embedded learning culture, and from a business perspective, Microsoft's valuation had increased 21 times since 2014.  

Of course, there was much more to Microsofts turnaround than this. However, if I could offer one piece of advice to every CEO, it would be to have a five-plus year period where you immerse your organisation in digital and data skills. Mandate annual digital and data training for everyone and encourage everyone to look for opportunities to apply their new skills and, with the right governance, kick-off transformation projects. Empower your employees with these new skills and be prepared to be overwhelmed with the innovation that follows. 

In short, run an enterprise digital and data immersion programme. 

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I’m writing to build a community around data transformation (see about page) and would love to know what you think so please comment, ask questions, share etc.