[Lynne Titley]

Ooh! I relate! – but part of my frustration is also the difficulty in getting my communities to engage with the tools that *are* available to us!

[Chris Argent]

When you say ‘community’, would that include the board? Adoption and understanding of the opportunity (and investment) all boils down to people’s awareness and understanding of the subject. From my experience that’s been mixed at best, uninterested at worst.

[Lynne Titley]

Hi Chris, sorry for delayed reply! I absolutely would include Board level stakeholders, yes – I’ve seen a definite lack of appetite (or sometimes ability, maybe) at that level to move with the times and embrace new ways of working, without a doubt. The problem is, it only takes a few laggers to screw up a promising new ‘system’. With something like a task management platform, for example, if you can’t get everyone involved in the activities to engage effectively with it, then the whole process is undermined and there’s a drift back to the ‘lowest common denominator’ – in this example, email.

[Chris Argent]

What impact would more Orange people make? (GENCFOs version of Purple People!)

I feel these ‘translators’ are becoming more and more critical.

[Lynne Titley]

Ah, because of the logo? – I see what you did there ????

Yes, without a doubt, more orange people would help generally, but I would really love to see more orange people in positions of leadership & authority. That would be much easier than orange people having to influence upwards all the time. I’m going to put it out there – I don’t think, necessarily, that influencing skills are at the top of the list of chartered accountant competencies – it’s probably not something any of us thought we would need to major in when we thought about a career in finance.

I would love to see/collect some data on that, actually – surveying the finance community to find out the average level of tech appetite/understanding/capability vs level of seniority, in some way. I once made a quick visualisation for a client who shall remain nameless, based on HR data, that showed a very clear, very linear, trend where the percentage of females reduced as seniority in the business increased. This is something that’s well understood, of course (that females are underrepresented in the senior leadership community), and being targeted for change. I think, similarly, technological literacy reduces overall as seniority increases – generally speaking this isn’t surprising, as senior leaders are often older & didn’t grow up with tech. Of course there are many exceptions, as with everything. Maybe we need to start selecting senior leaders on some new criteria…? There you go, there are some controversial opinions! – I welcome others’ perspectives!