Controlled Catastrophic Thinking led us to Our Digital Transformation

It was 2013 and a wave of digital forwarders were born. I was early on in my career at CargoTrans and logistics. I had about six years of real-world work experience. I was worried. No – I was scared to death. I read articles where writers compared our industry to the travel industry and said that freight forwarders would become extinct. They were partially right.

I knew we had to innovate to survive. I knew we had to open our minds to change and think through our digital transformation. The truth is that I didn’t know that the journey we were about to embark on was a digital transformation. All I knew was that we needed to get better and smarter to improve work for our people and our product for our customers.

‘Old school’ is typically positive. I love an old-school restaurant – a transportive experience frozen in time – they’ve remained true to their values and quality. However, even old-school establishments accept credit cards. In logistics old school typically meant lots of paper, very little change or tech, and a core value of ‘that’s the way we always did it’ with the eye-roll.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’ve made the mistake of changing things up for the sake of change which I don’t recommend. But the truth is that the logistics and transportation industries were/are clunky, fragmented, and way behind other industries. It was stuck like the Ever Given in the Suez Canal – those six days felt like an eternity! The resistance movement to keep the status quo was an industry-wide epidemic. The struggle was real. An uphill battle to say the least.

Controlled catastrophic thinking (CCT) involves imagining the worst possible scenarios and experiencing what those outcomes may feel like. In this way you prepare yourself for the worst -if the shit hits the fan – you can figure it out. Catastrophic thinking without control is dangerous and can create lots of anxiety and for some decision-making paralysis.

So, to survive I knew I had to consider worst-case scenarios, but then quickly move on to resolution and brainstorming:

• How might we avoid the utterly devastating outcomes I just imagined?
• What if we choose the wrong tech stack?
• Who not how?
• What if our tech partners aren’t the right ones?
• Why do we exist today? Why do we need to exist in the future?
• How might we add more value for our clients?
• How might we do more with less?
• How might we work smarter, not harder?
• How might we continue to inject humanity into what we do and deepen our relationships with all stakeholders?
• How can we improve the quality of work and life of our employees? How might we improve customer experience?
• How might we win?

We were lucky, our founder, my father, had primed the organization as well as me and my brother to be open to new technology and making work more efficient. Whether it was software, faster hardware, faster internet, faster printers (different times), or hiring the best, we were primed to consider the future. We had a head start.

At the time we imagined the industry changing overnight – we were young. Now we recognize that disruption and adoption typically take longer than predicted, especially in a complex industry like ours.

From technology leader to operations, we looked to evolve and transform our company. We went paperless and cloud-based way before most in our industry. We wanted to save trees, reduce clutter, and reduce downtime and risk.

We knew that to deliver the ideal customer experience we needed to prepare our crew for transformation first because technology without humans is impossible. Also, happier employees first will create raving fans out of your clients.

We adopted the leading ERP in our industry early on, but implementation and learning took more time and resources like most powerful tools. Robust tech isn’t ‘set it and forget it,’ but more continuous implementation, improvement, and refinement.

We often describe the work that CargoTrans and our ‘crew members’ do as making miracles happen #mmh. I’m serious. Our ‘Logisticians’ (as I like to call them) – part logistic experts, part magicians – must anticipate many factors to execute a shipment – geopolitics (Red Sea), climate change (Panama Canal), labor union strikes – you name it we’ve dealt with it.

Most international shipments physically change hands at a minimum of SIX times. That means a minimum of six different vendors, carriers, and tech platforms. Our job is to coordinate, collaborate, and simultaneously provide real-time visibility to our customers.

So, to digitize most of this process we’ve had to implement, learn, and integrate with an endless list of tech platforms – from optical character recognition, transportation management systems, tracking/tracing platforms, messaging, AI tools, CRMs, etc. We’ve demoed, driven, and tried 100s of different tools to get it right. At times to find out we had to scrap a solution and start over.

Love it or hate it most books, bottles of wine, or Airbnb are judged by their ‘cover/label/cover photo.’ After nearly a decade of working internally on our workflows, tech stack, and process – we knew we had to provide clients with something pretty – with what they deserved. We needed to provide a top-notch customer visibility dashboard for our one-stop shopping logistics model – international, customs, domestic freight, fulfillment/warehousing – end-to-end, but with a look, feel, and visibility that puts the customer in the driver’s seat – or should I say Captain’s seat. Captain is the cover to our tech transformation – it’s what most people see when interacting with us. It was a hell of a ride and I assure you it’s still not over.

Remember – to overcome challenges and achieve big hairy audacious goals – you may need to live the worst-case scenario for a moment – and then create a plan, ask for help and get to work. Enjoy the journey and you may be surprised by the positive outcome.

Questions? All you have to do is contact us.

#makingtheworldsmaller