The dark side of humanity

Remembering the Bataan Death March

By Divina Paredes 

 By the fourth day of the march, the old National Road was lined with fresh corpses. Hundreds of dead, sprawled on the shoulders, strewn in the drainage ditches.

First Lieutenant Ed Thomas of Grand Rapids, Michigan, caught sight of his captain and company commander lying in a ditch, dead from a bayonet wound… Bernard FitzPatrick kept passing corpses clad in faded blue hospital pajamas. Filipinos mostly, the cripples and amputees who had left their beds in the field hospital after the Japanese had assured them they were free to walk home.

In the heat the bodies began to rot and it wasn’t long before great swarms of flies were feasting on them. During the day dogs and pigs joined the flies and at night the smell of death lured large carnivorous lizards down from the hills, but it was the crows that commanded the carrion, crows standing wing to wing on the bloated bodies, tearing at the flesh, crows roosting patiently on the wire fences along the road or, as Private Wince ‘Tennessee’” Solsbee noticed, always circling overhead, waiting for their next meal to drop.—

From Tears in the Darkness by Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (June 2009)

ELIZABETH M. Norman, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, remembers her husband Michael’s remark after she finished her book, We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Women Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese.

“Half of the story had not been told,” said Michael, a former New York Times reporter and now journalism professor at NYU, who had edited the book published in 1999. “We should write about the men.”

And that is how Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath came about. The book describes the incidents of the three-month battle for the Bataan Peninsula, then moves on to April 9, 1942, when more than 76,000 Americans and Filipinos under the American command surrendered to the Japanese in what is now described as the single largest defeat in American military history. The sick and starving Filipino and American soldiers were ordered to walk 66 miles (approximately 106 kilometers) to their prisons.

It is estimated that up to 10,000 Filipinos and Americans died from torture, starvation, and disease during the trek, and that more perished during the 41 months in prison. The book also covers the trial and execution of Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, former commander of the Imperial Army, and the impact of the war on the soldiers from all sides after the war.

The book took 10 years to finish. “We wanted to do something different from what has been done already,” explains Elizabeth in a phone interview from their home in Montclair, New Jersey. “We wanted to write the story about the battle and the aftermath from the American, Filipino, and the Japanese viewpoint, which had never been done before.”

Adds Michael: “We wanted to create a good strong nonfiction story. We wanted to understand the Japanese, and also the Filipino, point of view. To do that, we had to do a lot of reading [on] Japanese psychology and history and Filipino social psychology and history, so we can present three different sides equally.”

“Why do men behave so bestially towards one another?’ This went way beyond the bonds of warfare.”

The Normans interviewed more than 400 people, both combatants and civilians. One of the central characters is Ben Steele, a cowboy from Montana, who became an art professor after the war. The Normans interviewed more than 200 American veterans but Steele had experienced almost every aspect of the battle—99 days in the battle and the surrender, and 1,244 days as a prisoner of war. He is turning 92 this year, and still sketches and paints every day. His black and white drawings portraying the various events throughout the march and in prison are featured in the book. (Sadly, his drawings as a prisoner of war were lost during the war.)

The Normans traveled back and forth across the United States, the Philippines, and Japan to interview the soldiers, their families, and civilians who had witnessed the march. They collected 2,800 books, documents, and other sources which they are donating to the MacArthur Memorial Library and Archives in Norfolk, Virginia.

In one of their trips to the Philippines, Michael and Elizabeth walked the 66-mile (106-kilometer) route of the Bataan Death March. Elizabeth says that these days, the distance walked by the prisoners of war would not seem far, as people drive that distance all the time. But when she and Michael started their trek, she adds, “We were so struck by how far that was to walk when you are defeated, when you are sick, when you are hungry.”

The Normans captured this feeling of desperation in the book:

It rained almost every day, not all day, but every day, monsoon rain… The rain turned the jungle dark, and in the perpetual gloom some began to believe that they had been forgotten.

The government had forgotten them, of this they were sure, and it seemed that God had forgotten them. He had sent them into a wilderness, into the heart of darkness…

Now the jungle was their enemy too and it showed them even less pity than the Japanese. Their captors were merely indifferent to their fate. They could live or not; the guards didn’t care. Nature, however, seemed bent on destroying them—the heat, the wet, the rot and disease. And they were alone, alone and utterly exposed in a world that hissed and snapped and stirred in the dark, shadows of men sleeping on rocks by a bend in a river on a ragged peninsula at the end of the world.

“The interesting thing about Tears in the Darkness is that it is made up of 10,000 stories woven together and forming one coherent whole,” says Michael. “I like the fact that it is something different, a blend of many styles of nonfiction narrative [and] journalism. I think there is also a little bit of poetry.”

There were also stories of humanity, as the POWs related stories of Filipinos risking their lives to help them as they passed through the villages. “From the side of the road children would dash into the columns, shove something into a soldier’s hand—a banana leaf full of rice, a small melon, a sugar cookie—and dash off before the guards could kick or club them,” they wrote. A Japanese soldier would quietly drop a package wrapped in banana leaves for the prisoners. Inside was a rice ball and tiny quinine pills for malaria, a disease which had debilitated a number of the prisoners.”

Elizabeth says including the civilian point of view is one of the things she is most proud of in the book. When they started working on the book, they were focused on the military side of the story. But it was Michael who suggested they talk to the civilians too. “People don’t write about what the civilians go through in the war and ‘Tears in the Darkness’ does that,” she says. “You appreciate these farmers, fishermen, and the other Filipinos in Bataan, what they suffered and endured during the battle.”

The title Tears in the Darkness comes from a literal translation of the ideograph, or kanji, for the Japanese word anrui. It was the term a former Imperial Japanese officer the Normans spoke to used to describe the reaction of General Homma (who was executed in 1946) when he read page after page of the Japanese casualties in the war. But the term, says Elizabeth, “is really what the book is about because whether it is the Filipinos, the Americans, or the Japanese soldiers, the suffering that all these people had in the battle were perfectly captured in that statement.”

For Michael and Elizabeth, one of the most “haunting” stories was about the massacre of around 400 Filipino soldiers by the Japanese in Pantingan River.

They wrote:

“As the prisoners waited in the holding compounds to entrain, they began to exchange stories, lurid catalogs of what they had seen on their long, brutal march north. 

Here, for example, was a Filipino soldier talking about a massacre he had witnessed while hiding in the jungle. Hundreds of men, he said, prisoners with their hands tied behind their backs, had been bayoneted to death in a secluded spot near the Pantingan River. Impossible, thought doctor Alvin Poweleit, and yet there was something “sincere” in the man’s voice, something authentic.

A week or so later, Captain Pedro Felix, fleeing from bayonet wounds and shaking with malaria, appeared at his family’s house in Manila. Felix, a staff officer with the 91st Division, Philippine Army, said he’d been in hiding and on the run since April 12, the day the Japanese massacred hundreds of his comrades at the Pantingan River.”

The Normans had interviewed three Japanese soldiers who admitted to have taken part in the massacre of the Filipino POWs. One of them said he did not want to kill the prisoners but his sergeant ordered, “Bayonet the Filipinos or we are going to kill you.”

Michael was a Marine during the Vietnam War, and he believes it had helped that he spoke with the veterans from all three sides. “Whenever I would sit down with a soldier—Japanese, Filipino, or American—the very first words out of my mouth were, ‘I don’t know what you went through in captivity but I know what you went through in the battlefield because I was there. So let us talk, soldier to soldier.’”

Elizabeth says there was another reason why the Filipino, Japanese, and American soldiers were forthright about their experiences. “These men are old now. If they didn’t tell their story, it was going to die with them.”

Says Michael: “This was their last chance to set the record straight, the last chance to tell us exactly what happened and why it happened, on the record.”

And the stories came out one after another. Elizabeth recalls how one of the soldiers described in detail how he bayoneted enemy soldiers to death. “The story was told in such horrific detail that I felt the hair at the back of my neck standing up,” says Elizabeth. When asked why he told the story to them, he replied, “It is time for the world to know.”

Says Elizabeth: “One of the challenges of doing ‘Tears in the Darkness’ was listening to these stories about the prisoners of war. You really peered into the darkness of the human soul. It is not an easy thing to do. Every man, woman, and civilian we talked to, these people are haunted by what they saw and what they did and they saw the dark side of humanity.”

The Normans worked with experts to ensure the accuracy of their research and translations. Among them were Dr Ricardo Jose of the University of the Philippines department of history and his wife Lydia-Yu Jose of the Ateneo de Manila University, who shared their extensive research on World War II in the Philippines. Rico supervised the translations of the interviews with the Filipinos and joined them in their field trips to Bataan.

In Japan, the Normans worked with Kyoko Onoki, formerly of the London Times. Wendy Matsumura, a doctoral candidate and instructor of Japanese at NYU, had vetted every page of the Japanese translations.

Michael says there was no easy explanation for what took place between December 1941 in the Philippines until the Liberation from the Japanese forces in 1945. “The purpose of the book was to ask the question, ‘Why do men behave so bestially towards one another?’ This went way beyond the bonds of warfare,” he says.

“We really wanted to show that there is really nothing good about war; and the way to do that was to interview the men on both sides to find out why they did the things they did.”

Elizabeth says it was interesting that every soldier they spoke to in the three countries said people have to learn to live in peace. “There shouldn’t be any more war, we should learn to live together,” she quotes the soldiers as saying.

So is this the major lesson from Tears in the Darkness?

“As a former combat Marine, here is the first lesson I learned,” says Michael. “As soon as the first shot is fired, in any way, everybody loses… You can call it a victory. You can call it a defeat. It doesn’t make a difference. Everybody loses something.”

Elizabeth, for her part, was particularly struck by the comment of a Japanese soldier, then 92, after he narrated his experience in Bataan. “He was quiet for a minute, looked at us and said, ‘There are no lessons from the war.’”

That was a profound statement, says Elizabeth. “There is nothing to be learned from what happened.”

Michael concurs, “Particularly if you repeat it in the next war, then you have never learned a d**n thing.” •

This article was originally published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer (June 2009)

The author, Divina Paredes, is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap  

 

The one-day sabbatical

My sister, Dulce Paredes-Tadena, a food scientist in New York, met Donna Sturgess in a conference and told me she would be a good person to interview. I spoke to Donna in 2011, but her message – of doing something unfamiliar, even unplugging from our usual technology tools, to get a fresh eye perspective about work and life – resonates more than ever.  

Today’s executives are busier than ever, but business strategist Donna Sturgess says a day off from the office for an “immersion” will refresh their view of the organisation, and generate new ideas for innovation.

The key is to go to a place or do an activity they are “very unfamiliar with”, says Sturgess, president of Buyology and former global head of innovation for GlaxoSmithKline. “Go out together as a team and watch people,” says Sturgess. And it does not have to cost a lot of money.

“Somewhere in New Zealand there is an annual fair, a festival or event. You can take them out for the day.

“Because it is a physical as well as a mental experience, you stimulate productive thinking,” says Sturgess, who espouses the concept in her book Eyeballs Out.

You are not going to find new ideas on your computer or your spreadsheet or your meetings. You really have to step away and step out of your context to discover something new. 

She says technology companies do these immersion experiences. “It stimulates a different kind of conversation in terms of what is meaningful to people.”

“In this busy life, we are bombarded by email, meetings and all these things we think we have to do,” she says.

But these activities will not generate fresh ideas. “You are not going to find them on your computer or your spreadsheet or your meetings. You really have to step away and step out of your context to discover something new.”

The team can be composed of executives and staff across business units. In an immersion, they do not have to be good at the activity. This, she says, “levels the playing field” for all team members.

Sturgess, who has no military background, cites her experience while visiting an aircraft carrier. “I couldn’t get over how many thoughts I had about my own business by being on that carrier,” she says. “You take on the mind of a beginner and what happens in that instance is that your brain actually slows down and absorbs information differently.”

Like an epiphany? “Sort of like that,” she says, with a laugh. “It is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. You have a bunch of different pieces and I have to figure out where this fits.

“It is going to open your eyes up to the business,” she says. “I tell people don’t do this so linearly. If you work in the food business, going on an immersion tour in a restaurant is not going to teach you anything.”

She says a company that is doing work on green technology, for instance, can visit an organic farm, and ‘dimensionalise’ what they mean when they say they are making their product green.

Similarly, an immersion in the winery will be for a business “that might be involved in fabric or clothing or things where you have a more sensory experience, how does wine do that?”

A caveat: If you do organise that big day out, it is best to leave your “technology tools” behind. Otherwise, says Sturgess, “You have not stepped into a new world. You are still back in the office.”

People are calling you, or you are playing with your smartphone, she says.

“The ‘partial attention world’ is not getting you anything on a day-to-day basis. If you go on an immersion and give it your partial attention, you should just stay home.” 

About the author: Divina Paredes is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap  

The challenge of writing the war right

Michael and Elizabeth Norman are attempting to write a cross-cultural history of the Japanese occupation by dredging the painful memories of combatants and survivors. By Divina Paredes

This is an excerpt from an article that was published on 30 January 2000 in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. 

Journalism, one writer observed, is history in a hurry.  And history another noted, is often dull journalism – awash with fact, bereft of characters, lacking in soul.

Two authors of war books, Michael Norman, former reporter of the New York Times, and his wife Elizabeth Norman, a nursing professor at New York University, are attempting to bridge this gap between journalism and history.

They are writing, as Michael put it, about “the great wrenching event we call World War II”. The book will delve on one of the most sordid chapters of the war – the Bataan Death March, the guerrilla warfare in the mountains, and the prisoners of wars.

What will set it apart from other works of the same genre is that it will be written from three points of view – American, Philippines and Japanese.

It will be the first, or among the first, “cross cultural” look at the Pacific War, said Michael, professor of journalism at NYU, and author of These Good Men: Friendships Forged in War, a memoir about his experience in the Marine Corps in Vietnam.

Elizabeth,  who is the director of the doctoral program in the Division of Nursing, School of Education at NYU, also tackled the war in her two books, Women at War: The Untold Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam, which was also her doctoral thesis, and We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese, published by Random House.

“War is the ultimate story, but challenging to write… There are always opposing sides with one claiming the high moral ground. And it is this fundamental opposition that results in the extraordinary challenge of of writing it right.” Elizabeth Norman

Death March

“We hope to produce a work of both history and literature, a work that examines how war shapes the lives and the cultures of those who fight it,” said Michael, who together with Elizabeth, spoke of the challenges of writing about World War II at the Ateneo de Manila University.

The Normans have interviewed survivors and witnesses of the Death March in 1942, when the Japanese forced some 70,000 exhausted Filipino and American soldiers to march in five days from various points in Bataan to San Fernando in Pampanga. The Normans also trekked the 106 km route taken by the Filipino and American soldiers.

Michael estimated that they must have driven 1,200 miles and visited seven provinces in the Philippines as well as dozens of war sites.

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They have also pored over thousands of documents in libraries and private collections in the Philippines and the United States.

They have interviewed, so far, more than 200 Americans, and more than 100 Filipinos. In March, they will go to Japan and speak with more than 20 Japanese veterans.

At the Ateneo forum, the Normans recalled their various experiences as they chronicled events that happened more than 50 years ago It was Elizabeth who explained their interest in the subject.

“War as a story, whether fiction or nonfiction, captivates readers and it has been the number one cultural story around the world, probably since humans spoke around camp fires and drew symbols on caves and walls,” she said.

War is also the ultimate story, but challenging to write. It is, she said, “about struggle, with something significant – lands, people – at stake. There are always opposing sides with one claiming the high moral ground. And it is this fundamental opposition that results in the extraordinary challenge of of writing it right.”

The Normans were joined by University of the Philippines history professor Dr Rico Jose; author and Ramon Magsaysay Award winner F. Sionil Jose; Fr. James Reuter, who was imprisoned by the Japanese; and Fr. Jaime Bulatao, author and clinical psychologist who had experienced the war.

Dr Jose, who had accompanied the Normans in the various war sites in Luzon, said World War II is a period “which we should never be allowed to forget”.

“I have never met a man who has been in combat that was not a pacifist in his heart after the war was over.” Michael Norman

Cross-cultural phenomenon

The war, he said, “is a cross cultural phenomenon. The only way to fully understand it is to try to cross the barriers in the different cultural lines,” said Jose.

He said that the Japanese, Americans and Filipinos tend to extol their respective roles in the war.

“What should be written is a composite history that transcends all these different borders which should produce the experience that is war.”

The two-hour forum became a recollection of the horrors suffered by both sides during the war.

“It is too painful to talk about,” said Fr Bulatao.

He said that one night, he and some priests at the Ateneo saw Japanese soldiers tie a Filipino to a banana tree and bayonet him to death. The tree, he said, turned red two days later.

During the bombing of Manila, some 200 people, mostly women, sought refuge at the Ateneo. Late that night, as they were aiding those hit by the shrapnel, some of the women wept and recalled their abuses at the hands of the Japanese soldiers who had herded them into a hotel for two nights.

The panellists noted that among those in the audience was Ambassador Miguel Perez-Rubio, who lost his parents, his two brothers, a sister and two aunts, during the Battle of Manila.

“I was the only one who survived,” said Perez Rubio, who served as chief of protocol to Presidents Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos.

He said he harbours no bitterness now, only anger, especially when he learned how the Japanese officials were honoured after the war.

He would like to see, he said, the Prime Minister of Japan coming out and expressing a real remorse and a big apology.

Heinous crimes

Last year, he said, a Japanese journalist had interviewed him and asked whether he would have wanted the Japanese officials executed after the war. He said he does not believe in the death penalty, but they should have served a life sentence.

“Their crimes were really heinous and they should have served the rest of their lives in Philippine prisons,” he said.

The audience fell silent when Michael Norman related the stories told by the American prisoners of war who were forced to work on the Tayabas Road, now the Pan Philippine Highway in Camarines Norte.

The road was vital because it linked Manila to Southern Luzon, where the Japanese had set up stations. The emaciated men were beaten when they fell, sometimes with the shovels they were digging the earth with. They also were asked to dig the graves of their comrades.

At night, he said, the men with malaria “would scream out and the jungle with echo with their ghostly cries. The suffering was so pervasive that an American army doctor who had been sent to the river by the Japanese who were hoping to get more work out of the men, actually administered lethal doses of morphine to the critically ill…He killed his comrades rather than watch them suffer in death.”

Some of the men he spoke with said that the “utter brutality and wantonness” of the Japanese in Tayabas was worse than the sufferings they endured during the forced march, and thought none of them would ever see home again.

Michael said that one of the characters in their book would be Ben Steele, a young cowboy from Montana. Steel was with the Tayabas group, and thought he would never survive the ordeal as he lay shivering with malaria near the riverbed.

One night, he said, he heard footsteps and knew that from the hobnails on the rocks that it was a Japanese guard. The guard stood beside him for a moment. It was a folded banana leaf stuffed with boiled rice. Inside was a quinine pill for his malaria. The guard did the same thing for several days.

F . Sionil Jose said that his greater objective in writing novels with historical settings is to give Filipinos memory. “If we have that kind of memory…then people like Imelda Marcos would never have been able to return, and to power at that.”

Good Samaritan

Michael said two of the men who had laboured on the Tayabas toad told the same thing.

“No one knows who this Good Samaritan, this kind angel was,” said Norman.

He said it was possible there was more than one guard who exhibited the same act of kindness to the American soldiers.

These are the kinds of stories, he said, that they will put in the book. He said the story of the prisoners of war that were forced to work on the Tayabas road was by conventional historical standards, not even worthy of a footnote, but it will be one chapter in their book.

“When this miniscule historical moment is treated as something other than history, we learn a lot about the human heart,” he said.

Farther Reuter took note of his as he thanked the Normans for putting a different perspective in writing about the war.

“What you are doing is beautiful,” he said. “You’re trying to write history with a heart.”

Elizabeth, however, admonished that those who wish to write about history should prepare as much as they can and do listen very carefully.

Speaking to war veterans is difficult work, she said. “You should take this seriously, so the veterans and their survivors will get their tales told, as they should be told.”

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Onion and memory

There are certain patterns, she said, that will emerge from the tales of the veterans. At first, she said, the veteran will sit down and tell jokes, and watch very carefully at your response and when they see that you are really interested, they open up.

“It is like the peeling of an onion,” she said. The painful stories will come out, and you sit back on your tears, and [if] it’s draining for you, you can imagine what it’s like for the veterans.”

Sionil Jose said that his greater objective in writing novels with historical settings – although the main one, he quipped, is to write bestsellers that will make lots of money – is to give Filipinos memory.

“If we have that kind of memory,” he said, “then people like Imelda Marcos would never have been able to return, and to power at that.”

Michael Norman concurred, and said that one of his aims in writing about the war is to foster this kind of “memory” to the public.

If you think about it, he said, every war represents a failure of memory and a failure of history to teach the generation that came after it.

“I have never met a man who has been in combat that was not a pacifist in his heart after the war was over,” said Michael, who himself saw combat in the jungles of Vietnam.

“It breaks the heart of all men in combat to see the next war come along.”

He said he aims to present history “in such a way that perhaps it will not be forgotten and we won’t have to be writing these kinds of books.”

The author, Divina Paredes @divinap , joined Michael and Elizabeth Norman during one of their trips to Bataan. Their book was published in 2009 and is entitled ‘Tears in the Darkness’.

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Westpac CDO Melissa Macfarlane: Mastering – and driving – digital transformation

Westpac chief digital officer Melissa Macfarlane talks about how the bank is acting like a startup, working with the CIO, and preparing for the workplace of the future.

By Divina Paredes

Melissa Macfarlane pauses briefly when asked whether she works in business, marketing or technology.

“I would say, I work in customer experience,” says Macfarlane, who stepped up to the chief digital officer role at Westpac New Zealand nearly a year ago.

“Westpac has a vision to be the greatest service company and you can only do that if you focus on customer experience,” she says.

Startups are a model for this, she says.

Startups do some things really well, she says. “They have great agility into the organisation, are moving at a great pace, and are getting that customer feedback loop, acting on that really quickly.

“They are not constrained by their past and they have that relentless focus on customer experience.”

Thus, she says, Westpac is thinking and acting like a 200-year-old startup.

”We have invested in building that agility into our organisation,” she says.

“The CPO (chief product officer), the CIO and myself are really focused on getting that clarity of the customer vision and the value we want to drive out and empower teams closest to the work to actually do the right things, at the right cadence and to deliver value to the customer really quickly,” she states.

“Gone are the days when we have really long project governance meetings and all very formal. Now it is how we are inspiring these teams to deliver the value to customers really quickly.

“It is a refreshing change.”

Macfarlane works closely with CIO Dawie Olivier.

“We both have the same passion for cultural change and transformation.”

She says Olivier is a “fantastic advocate” on the goal to shift the culture at Westpac.

“You can’t do this alone at a bank,” she says.”You have got to have a team of people who really believe we can change that mindset.”

She says in the traditional sense of the world, she has a team of around 30.

But if you add all of the delivery team and the CX support team it is much bigger, she says. “Ultimately we have got the whole bank behind in the digital transformation.

“Digital is not just a channel,” she adds. “It is a team that is driving transformation at the bank.

“We are really embedding digital in the bank so it is less about us, as just a team owning online banking.

“It is more about us really helping the rest of the organisation understand what digital transformation means for them and how that can create great customer experiences.

“We want to empower the teams closest to the work to actually do the right things at the right cadence, to deliver value to the customer really quickly.

“One of the biggest catalysts of the mindset shift for us has been the use of true design thinking,” she says.

“It means you are really fixated on watching your customers, empathising with them and putting yourself in their shoes before you understand the solution to the problem.”

“I like the concept of starting with a blank sheet of paper,” she says.

“Rather than taking old application forms and digitising them, we actually start with a blank sheet of paper and say, ‘what does a great customer experience look like? How do we map that out under no constraints?”

“That gives us a sense of what can be possible.”

Becoming a CDO

Macfarlane became chief digital officer from head of global transactional services at Westpac NZ.

She has always worked in the finance sector, starting with Citi in London.

”I started my career in London, and spent some time in New York,” she says.

Ten years ago, Macfarlane moved to New Zealand and joined Westpac. “I am an adopted Kiwi now.”

She explains while she has held several portfolios in the banking sector, it was always “customer facing roles” and usually in the business space.

“It makes me a lot more aware of the whole ecosystem connecting business with consumers,” she says.

“That background really helped, because a lot of what we are doing is how to make payments as frictionless as possible.

”It is important to hear first-hand what customers are looking for,” she says.

“Sometimes you can talk [about] technology. But if you do not have the customer lens, angles on how to solve their pain points, what is the value that you get to deliver at the end of it?

“And that is what my role really is, being a customer advocate across the digital landscape,” she says.

“Consumers are engaging with businesses all the time. It is all about having really seamless great customer experiences in the services element. And then, how do you then create great conversations?”

She says Westpac has a two-pronged approach to a business model, which is: “How do you have really simple seamless customer experiences and how do you use digital to create great quality conversations with customers?

“All businesses are facing that and ultimately that is the new model that everyone is going to be embracing,” she states.

When Macfarlane moved to Westpac, the role of chief digital officer did not exist.

But she says she was drawn to how digital has enabled great customer experiences and interactions with their customers.

She says a survey early this year done by Westpac Australia, stated how eight out of 10 customers indicated that their preference was to engage with the bank digitally.

As well, she says customers are asking for simple and seamless ways to engage with the bank.

“Customers are telling us they are engaging more and more with the digital channel,” she says. “We have got to respond to this…it is a customer driven need.”

‘Disruptive prototyping’

She says Westpac has a digital ventures team that looks at trends across the globe.

“They are part of my team and they are very focused on what is next in banking. When I talk about innovation, we take the 60-30-10 approach.”

Sixty per cent is around solving customer pain points and making sure you are delivering value with day to day stuff, Macfarlane says.

“We spend 30 per cent architecting what is next in banking,” she says “We are thinking of all of the various buildings blocks like data, AI and virtual reality.”

The 10 per cent is on experimentation, she says. “For instance, what are the implications of biometrics and other trends that are happening?

“We may not know the answer to them now, but we are constantly playing with [these technologies],” she says.

“We are learning, we are figuring out user cases to make sure we are on the cutting edge of what is next. It is about keeping that forward looking vision.”

As part of this vision, Westpac will soon be launching a prototype branch near its headquarters on Takutai Square, in the Auckland CBD.

“It is based on the premise that more and more we want to test and learn with customers. We want to observe them interacting with channels and we want their regular feedback.

She says the customer experience team will ensure customers who participate in the focus group are diverse. “We want to learn from a whole subsection of customers, including our staff as well.”

“They will help us figure out how to design the space,” she says.

“It will all be modular so we can move things around quickly and we can watch how they interact with a piece of technology, or some signage. And then, we can change it and say, ‘right, how does this feel?’ Does this generate a better result?” she states.

“It is, again, about disruptive prototyping.”

She says her team will integrate the feedback and constantly refine whatever they are testing.

“So we will constantly be iterating.”

The human dimension is important, as they work on the digital space, Macfarlane says.

“You can develop the most amazing piece of technology. But unless people are actually drawn to using it and are advocates for it, the technology is never going to be as effective as you want it to be.

“To me the best piece of technology is one that really helps people in their day to day life; solving real staff and customer pain points.”

She says this view is also espoused by Westpac CIO Dawie Olivier.

In an earlier interview with CIO New Zealand, Olivier said the killer app for today’s CIOs and their teams, “is the ability to build a culture and for the team to learn to experiment and iterate forward…When this happens, ‘Any technology can be your oyster’.”

“So it is not just one thing,” Macfarlane says, “it is a combination of a couple of different technologies.”

For instance, among the technologies that excite her are the combination of algorithms and new communication technologies to have “proactive and helpful conversations with customers”.

“We can have great proactive conversations with them,” she says.

“You can have an experience that says what we can tell that you are likely to go overdrawn,” Macfarlane says, as an example.

So their message with the customer would be, “At this point let us help you by clicking here to transfer your savings, so it does not create a bad experience and you are not get caught at the end of the month.”

How they deliver this will be depend on each customer’s needs.

“Be passionate about the customer,” she concludes. “Always have them front of mind and the rest generally follows.”

Inside the workplace of the future

Melissa Macfarlane reveals she has another role at the bank – as mentor to the employee action group on flexible working.

This is a formal group that is raising awareness and confidence levels across the bank, to be able to embrace flexible working, she explains.

Flexible working is “often a female conversation”, but not at Westpac.

A number of male staff also utilise flexible working, as some of them have family responsibilities or are involved in external interests such as sports refereeing.

She says Westpac is incredibly supportive of flexible working. “It is a real strength of the company.”

As well, this is also one way of preparing the organisation for the workplace of the future, she says. “More and more, the new workforce is going to demand it.”

Macfarlane is a prime example of how to go about it. “I work flexibly in the truest sense of the world.”

She works three days of the week in Auckland, with the rest of the week spent in the Kaikoura Coast in the South Island.

She helps her husband in their cafe and restaurant in Kekerengu. “It is in the middle of nowhere,” she says.

“I am not a barista, I often get stuck in the sink washing dishes,” says Macfarlane, who also lends a hand with accounts.

“Different people work flexibly in different ways. Sometimes Monday needs to be my day off, so I will move it around.

“The beauty of that is I experience on a regular basis what it is like to be an SMB (small business) in New Zealand, with a lot of the challenges that brings.

“The trick is how to make it work for you,” she says. “Technology is an enabler of flexible working, so long as you put boundaries around it.

“You’ll always need the right people on your team, delivering great results. But they don’t have to be sitting at a desk 9 am to 5 pm, five days a week to create excellent outcomes.”

She shares with CIO New Zealand her five-point approach for building a more flexible work schedule:

● Stay in the loop: “A remote location can’t be a barrier to collaboration and conversations.”

● Put parameters around how often you use technology to connect to work: “You still need a life.”

● Be honest and realistic – with both yourself and your team – about what can be done working flexibly.

● Support people leaders to understand how to get the most out of their flexible team.

● Be flexible about flexible working: “Keep assessing the arrangement and be open to changes in terms.”

This article was originally published on CIO New Zealand. 

The author, Divina Paredes, is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap