Leda Writes for Fintech Futures: getting to the future

Every Thursday, Leda Glyptis, 11:FS Chief of Staff creates #LedaWrites. This week she ponders the difficulties of learning to unlearn.

Learning is hard.

Unlearning is harder.

Because not only do you need to go through the painful process of learning. You need to do all that at the same time as telling yourself that the warm, well-lit familiarity just within reach has to be abandoned. You have to grapple in the dark instead. You have to move away from the answer you have and seek a new one. You have to make your own life difficult.

When put that way, it doesn’t even sound like good sense let alone a newly essential part of corporate life.

But unlearning is the only path to survival. Even if you can’t learn to like that, you learn to value it.

Because our industry is changing faster than our humans and what we taught our teams about how we do things and most importantly why we do them has changed so fundamentally that new things have to be learned, old things unlearned and habits broken.

And that is the hardest ask of all.

Habits are comfort.

They deliver results while your brain is blissfully on auto pilot.

And now we have to unlearn those. Because new truths have emerged. Regulation has changed, the market has changed, the art of the possible has changed.

And the small habits of good people are not changing fast enough, habits that were informed by grand narratives that accepted hidden charges, delays and faceless corporate stonewalling. Narratives that increasingly hold no water, truth or value.

Don’t protest.

You know I am right.

Your bank is not implementing Swift gpi until the deadline even though it is better for customers.

Your SME accounts are retail accounts with a fee.

Some of your clients stop paying fees as funds reach maturity because they were pushy one year during negotiations and then you forgot to revise prices.

None of this information is digitally available. None of those interactions are digitally enabled.

We are learning. We are even learning to like learning.

What was an easy leap from the old way to the new is fast becoming an abyss of different ways of working and disparate moral codes, tools and baseline assumptions about what fair is. About what right is. About what our duty of care is. About what good business is.

Actually. About what good is, full stop.

Now is later. And before “later” becomes “too late”, we need to start stopping as well as starting. So the function of transformation, innovation and digital delivery needs to stop being about what new shiny thing we will add to the arsenal of marketable, sellable goods and storylines. It needs to become a conversation of “what do I need to do in order to live to fight another day, in this changing world”.

Read the whole story at Fintech Futures.