Most digital transformation programmes have a dashboard. Most of those dashboards are green. And yet the people inside the organisation, asked privately, will tell you the transformation is not really happening. Both things can be true. The dashboard is measuring activity. The people are measuring change.
There are three diagnostics we use to cut through this. First: has the work moved? Not the org chart, not the slide deck — the actual work. If the same people are doing the same things in the same way, with new tools, no transformation has occurred.
Second: can a new joiner tell? Someone arriving today, with no memory of how things used to be, should be able to point to specific practices and say “that’s clearly the new way.” If the artefacts of transformation are only visible to people who remember the before, you’ve done a project, not a transformation.
Third: are the difficult conversations happening earlier? Real transformation surfaces conflicts that the previous operating model buried. If your meetings are calmer than they used to be, that’s usually a bad sign, not a good one.
Alex
