Vol. 2 #4
One will have to exude confidence if success is to be achieved on high-stakes projects, including a core banking transformation. There comes the fine line between confidence and overconfidence, the overshooting of which can lead to serious issues. Overconfidence may mean bad planning and overlooking risks that finally turn into costly mistakes within the banking sector, where precision and compliance are very important.
Anecdote: In one of the national banks, a core banking project team was overconfident, thinking that they knew everything. The leader, with years of experience, strongly rebuffed any kind of danger or risk associated as he thought experience was enough to deal with any problem. However, as the projects started, unknown regulatory changes and integration problems with the legacy systems started to creep up. Their overconfidence had lulled them into not considering contingency planning, which would prove to be very expensive in delays alone and a loss of stakeholder trust.
Antidote: Balancing Confidence with
Careful Planning
It means that teams should foster a culture of humility and continuous improvement. There should be rewards for being honest about one’s limitations, not for acting in ways that suggest infallibility. If members feel safe disclosing what they don’t know, they are more likely to request the information and resources that can guarantee success.
Another critical tool is regular risk assessment sessions. A space should be provided for members to identify and discuss any potential pitfalls, however improbable. Encouraging critical thinking about the pitfalls that might lie ahead and developing contingency plans against those can offset the risks of overconfidence.
The same can be guaranteed through independent reviews of plans and strategies by external experts. Experts can add a reality check element into the process. They bring in fresh eyes to look at your plan and identify blind spots that your internal team may not recognize.
In every successful core banking project, there exists a balance between confidence and careful planning, put forward with a healthy dose of humility. This is about remaining optimistic without compromising judgment. Teams that approach every challenge with a mindset of continuous learning and improvement are better put to face all sorts of complexities core banking transformations come with.
Found this article interesting? Check out these three related reads for more.
- Corporate candor: Overcoming silence in meetings to address underlying disagreements (A new series)
- Corporate candor: Risks of optimistic timelines in project execution (A new series)
- Corporate Candor: The importance of diverse perspectives (A New Series)
#CoreBankingTransformation #Overconfidence
