The answer is in the mail. Australia Post is over 204 years old, but that hasn’t stopped it making the most of the digitised world. At a presentation to business leaders at the AGSM Leading The Digital Enterprise event yesterday, I found Tracey Gosling, a director of Australia Post, the biggest surprise. While the usual suspects, like the Head of Policy at Facebook and an author on Innovation helped open the eyes of the bank managers and bureaucrats in the room to the way generation X and Y want to be treated at work, it was the true stories of change at Australia Post I found most useful.

What's the future for AusPost in a digitised world?

Tracey shared real examples of the often simple ways ordinary people in their business have made changes that have worked. They show us what can actually be achieved when the starting point is very grim. Which gives real hope for small and medium sized businesses that aren't as tied down by the inertia of a monopoly like AusPost.

Tracey painted a picture of a vast post office workforce laboring under the emotional burden of the fear of change. Imagine you were a postie, one of my schoolmates from 30 years ago still is. Imagine over the last decade the postie doing the daily rounds would feel the bag of mail on their back was lighter than the week before. And next week it will be lighter still as people stop posting letters. They'd be worrying when will the day come there is no mail to deliver and they're out of a job?

To survive Australia Post has to manage a bigger change to the way customers exchange information than past revolutions like telegraph to telephone, horse borne deliveries to airmail, phone to fax. The Internet has changed everything more significantly than any of those innovations. Manage the change they have.

To quote the Australia Post annual report: “For the 13th consecutive year, we met or exceeded all of the performance standards that relate to our community service obligations. We delivered 95.5 per cent of domestic letters on time or early (against our 94 per cent target) and we increased the number of postal outlets to 4,429 nationwide. Total revenue grew to $5.9 billion and our after-tax profit increased by 10.9 per cent to $311.9 million. This means net profit has grown 21 per cent per annum since we enacted our Future Ready transformation program."

What has AusPost changed to keep up? Nearly everything, they had to. Last year they lost $189 million on mail delivery. AusPost now makes more from servicing e-commerce businesses and other activities that didn’t exist just a decade ago. There are secure 24/7 Parcel Lockers within minutes drive of most homes for out of hours parcel deliveries, digital self serve kiosks in post shops and soon digital I.D. recognition software that will mean documents like banking applications and contracts won’t need signatures by hand.

If a bureaucracy can go digital, so can your business

These changes to a huge and diverse business are making sure it can remain competitive as digitisation changes the world. As with most things in business, change management is being enabled at Auspost from the top. CEO Ahmed Fahour is a case study in the new style of management required for the digital age – leadership by openness, not power. This infographic sums it up nicely.

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Here are some examples of how Ahmed Fahour has let go of control:

1. Let staff fail

Individuals in offices can change their methods behind the counter to see if it works better than current processes without asking prior permission from senior management. If it doesn’t work, no great loss. If it does make an improvement, it’s shared across the organisation.

2. Social media is for everyone

While most government departments still don’t allow social media or even Google to be used in the office, Fahour has let employees at every level of share an opinion on Facebook. Just a few years before only 2 people were officially given the role to manage social media, yet even then there were 15,000 conversations happening on social media each year amongst staff.

Businesses need to recognise they can’t control what staff want, or constantly roadblock how they want to do it. Indeed today, in the words of former Cisco Senior Director Martin Stewart-Weeks, "a network routes around an obstacle." It's the same with staff, they will go around you, or leave.

3. What does the customer want that they’re not getting?

To improve the way they can fulfill for e-commerce customers, staff who had never shopped online were encouraged to do so in work hours. This led to an understanding at many levels of post  employee of what online businesses do well and not so well, and discover what shoppers want from the whole order to delivery process. One consequent innovation is the 24/7 Parcel Locker, which means you don’t have to be at home to receive a valuable e-purchase.

4. What can you do that’s new?

Things are changing fast, so what you’ve always sold in the past is less likely to be as attractive to new customers tomorrow. Again, take inspiration from the top postie:

“We capitalised on the boom in online shopping with the Parcel & Express Services segment earning profit of $354.8 million, on the back of 9.3 per cent growth in domestic parcel volumes. And, despite difficult retailing conditions, Retail Services profit again grew to $200.6 million, mainly through adding new financial and identity services.”

“Initiatives are all focused on capturing our immediate customer growth opportunities in the digital economy – especially in e-commerce, digital communications and trusted services.”

We are constantly exploring the new possibilities with our clients, it's how we help to keep them growing as successful challenger brands.