It has been around ten years since businesses began engaging in what is known as digital transformation, yet beyond the rhetoric, its implementation faces numerous obstacles.
The fact that we confuse digital transformation with technology-driven transformation is not the least of these (The limits of technology-driven transformation), but contrary to popular belief, it is not solely the fault of operational teams, budget constraints, or technology itself.
In fact, the main obstacle sometimes, and often, lies with the executives themselves, who are confronted with questions that make them uncomfortable.
It is worth revisiting this issue even ten years later, because this is exactly what is happening and will happen with artificial intelligence, regardless of whether we consider it a subject in its own right or yet another stage in the so-called digital transformation.
In short:
- Digital transformation requires a change in attitude from leaders, going beyond simple technology.
- It requires leaders to acquire new skills and embrace uncertainty.
- The results are long-term and require experimentation and adjustments.
- Organizational models and power balances are being challenged.
- Managerial control is evolving toward greater autonomy and collective governance.
Having to learn again
The first difficulty is that digital transformation requires learning new skills. It involves concepts, technologies, ways of working and even ways of thinking that are not part of the traditional expertise of managers. This may explain why they are sometimes so poor at assessing the potential and impact of a technology (Why do leaders and experts make big mistakes when it comes to anticipating the future?).
Contrary to their usual position as experts and decision-makers, they must integrate new knowledge, often brought by younger people or those from different professional backgrounds.
This is a reversal of the relationship with competence, which requires curiosity and a certain ability to embrace intellectual discomfort.
Take time
Digital transformation is also a long-term process, which contrasts with the short-term thinking that prevails at the top of organizations. This is why its immediate benefits are systematically overestimated (we always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten).
The cycles of learning, experimentation, and successive adjustments make any promise of fast results difficult to keep, at least on a large scale. Added to this is the fact that return on investment assumptions, which are more predictions than forecasts, will require empiricism, and therefore more time, to be validated or refined, as we are currently seeing with AI (AGI, employment, productivity: the great bluff of AI predictions).
But when the context is such that there is strong pressure to deliver results, agreeing to invest in uncertain assumptions and a subject that is difficult to understand can be a delicate gamble from both a managerial and political point of view.
Accepting that you don’t know
When you have established your authority by appearing to know everything throughout your career, or at least by demonstrating your ability to make the right decisions on any subject, admitting that you don’t know something is seen as a weakness that undermines your position as a leader.
But today, no one, regardless of their experience, can claim to have mastered all the issues related to data, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, SaaS models, or new customer experience approaches.
Let’s not forget that less than 20 years ago, most businesses were saying, “The cloud? Not in my house“, and I even heard someone say, “If your thing works in the cloud, you can install it on my servers, right?” It wasn’t that they had a clear doctrine on the subject, but rather that they were afraid of the unknown.
We have to admit that today, especially for managers, competence no longer lies in mastering every subject, but in the ability to organize dialogue between diverse and complementary areas of expertise, to arbitrate despite uncertainty, and to promote collective governance of these eminently structuring choices (Augmented governance: AI as a lever for collective lucidity).
Questioning established models
Beyond purely technological aspects, digital transformation calls into question the organization of work and the functioning of businesses, which is why I have always found the notion of “digital transformation” to be a misleading misnomer (The limits of technology-driven transformation).
It calls into question functional boundaries, decision-making methods, ways of understanding performance, and internal power balances that have often contributed to building the careers and legitimacy of current leaders.
Agreeing to revisit these issues means changing not only structures but also the way everyone sees their job and their role in the business.
Exposing managerial vulnerability
This dynamic of transformation therefore confronts leaders with a form of managerial and political vulnerability to which they are unaccustomed, in a system and governance structure that were designed to protect them from it.
Making decisions in unstable environments, acknowledging mistakes, adjusting course along the way, and exposing oneself to criticism are becoming essential skills, even though we have always tried to demonstrate the opposite with attributes usually associated with leadership, such as the ability to make decisions, provide security, and embody stability.
Losing apparent control
Finally, the shift to more distributed, adaptive, and agile modes of organization requires us to rethink the very notion of control.
Where managers could previously validate all critical decisions, they now need to set a clear framework, delegate operational leeway, and establish regulatory mechanisms that allow teams to make decisions as close to the ground as possible (How to love control and not be a burden to yourself and your teams?).
This shift in the center of gravity of decision-making does not mean abandoning control, but rather redefining how it is exercised and its purpose. If you can’t control people, you have to learn to control only the system. It’s more effective and scalable, but it requires some self-improvement.
Bottom line
Ultimately, digital transformation is above all an exercise in managerial maturity, requiring discernment, listening skills, self-questioning and collective orchestration.
It is not technology that makes the difference, but the ability of leaders to create the conditions for the collective intelligence of the organization to fully express itself and adapt to the challenges of the moment. This requires leaders to change one thing above all else: their own internal software.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
