Real Change Starts After Go-Live

There was a time when saying “digital transformation” sounded bold. Now it’s just the minimum required to stay in the game. Most teams aren’t struggling with whether to adopt digital tools, they’re figuring out how to make them actually useful. Having lived through years of digital change across my career, I’m no longer wondering about the tools but about what happens around them.

Since I recently wrote about the discipline gap, it only seems fair I try to close mine. So here’s the start of a (hopefully) weekly habit: sharing a few reads that made me think. This week I came across a few articles this week that drew me back to how we build, lead, and make progress in today’s overloaded, digital-first reality.

The first one is an article that looks at how leaders emerge in open-source software communities. What stood out was the finding that leadership has less to do with technical brilliance and more with communication, collaboration, and showing up consistently. That felt surprisingly relevant outside software. Whether you’re building a fintech app or running a growing team, influence often starts with being the one who helps things move forward.

Another perspective on leadership came from a piece about mentorship. It challenged the idea that mentorship is just for junior people or formal programs. Instead, it suggested that real mentorship happens every day, in how we unblock, listen, and coach in real time. I found myself nodding along especially in cross-functional teams, where clarity and encouragement can have more impact than a sprint board ever could.

In the Human-Tech & Ethics space, I revisited an article on agentic AI — systems designed to act with goals and autonomy. The piece made a clear case: these systems are powerful, but fragile. Without the right design and oversight, they can behave unpredictably. This reminded me how easy it is to get swept up in what AI can do without thinking through how it might be misunderstood or misused.

It made me think that part of our job as builders and decision-makers is to keep asking: what’s the intent behind what we’re making? Not in a theoretical way, but practically: who benefits, who might get excluded, and what does success really look like?

Related to that, a deeper dive on digital ethics in design argued for ethics as a daily habit, not a policy deck. For product teams, this could mean building in real feedback loops, not just to improve UX, but to listen for unintended consequences. It could mean making the impact of a feature visible, not only in metrics, but in how it affects different users. And sometimes, it means pausing before defaulting to what’s fastest to ship, because ‘fast’ isn’t always fair, and ‘done’ isn’t always right. Ethics in product work isn’t abstract, it’s in the everyday decisions that shape who benefits, who struggles, and who gets left out.

One theme I keep coming back to is the gap between how quickly digital tools evolve and how gradually people are expected to adapt. Many organizations are moving forward with digital tools faster than their people are ready for. The systems change, but the skills don’t keep up. Teams are expected to adopt new tools, workflows, and ways of thinking, often without the time, support, or clarity they need. This article from DEX HUB discusses this issue, noting that while companies may have the necessary technologies, they often lack a workforce skilled enough to use them effectively, leading to underutilization and inefficiencies. When that’s missing, you get unclear decisions, shallow adoption, or duplicated work. It’s a quiet problem that compounds over time.

Digital transformation doesn’t simplify things by default. If anything, it can introduce more complexity, more friction, and more confusion when people aren’t brought along in the process. Tools may scale fast, but people don’t. And many teams are now operating in environments where the systems have evolved, but the skills, culture, and leadership needed to work in those systems haven’t caught up. A lot of the real challenges seem to live in that space between digital ambition and what people are actually equipped to handle. Not in the software, not in the stack, but in how well-equipped teams are to make use of what’s been built.

The idea of aligning people, processes, and technology has been around for decades. It traces back to Harold Leavitt’s “Diamond” model from 1965, which emphasized that organizational change always involves interdependent shifts in people, tasks, structure, and technology. Over time, this thinking evolved into the People–Process–Technology framework, a practical lens now widely used in IT, operations, and transformation work. While it didn’t originate in a single paper, it became a cornerstone of how businesses think about change: not as a tool rollout, but as a coordinated effort across human behavior, workflows, and systems. A summary and discussion of Leavitt’s Diamond model can be found here.

The bottom line is this: we can’t automate our way around misalignment. We can’t scale without people who are skilled, supported, and connected to the work. That’s what actually turns digital investments into progress.