RUMBLINGS
Some conversations matter too much to avoid.
Rumblings is where we take on the questions shaping transformation, AI, leadership, human agency and the changing relationship between organizations and professionals. These are consequential issues with real tradeoffs, competing interests and no simple answers.
We are interested in what happens when ambitious transformation meets organizational reality, when AI creates genuinely new possibilities while exposing old weaknesses, when experienced people leave and take critical context with them, and when professionals have less agency over where and how they contribute.
Some of these conversations challenge prevailing assumptions. Others force us to confront tensions we would rather work around. All of them deserve a harder look.
That is what Rumblings is for.
FEATURED RUMBLING
Transformation Myopia: Why visible progress can obscure what transformation requires
Transformation often starts with a compelling and ambitious objective: create a fundamentally better customer experience, change how the business operates, build a new capability, enter a new market, use AI to rethink how value is created, or reposition the organization for a changing competitive environment.
The distance between that future state and day-to-day execution is enormous. Along the way, leaders make hundreds of decisions about funding, priorities, technology, people, operating model, governance, incentives and tradeoffs. They also have to keep an organization moving, maintain the confidence of executives and boards, and demonstrate that years of investment are producing progress.
That progress matters. No organization can fund a multi-year transformation and wait until the end to find out whether it worked.
The challenge is distinguishing between evidence that implementation is advancing and evidence that the transformation is creating the conditions for the intended business result. Sometimes those signals move together. Sometimes they do not.
Transformation Myopia shows up when leaders give disproportionate attention to visible indicators of progress while underinvesting in the capabilities and organizational conditions required to create durable business value.
The discipline of transformation leadership is not choosing between progress and long-term value. It is staying grounded in the intended future state while continuously demonstrating meaningful progress toward it.
IN THE CONVERSATION
Rumblings also includes conversations happening beyond our own pages: interviews, articles, podcasts and other places where relevant ideas are being challenged, extended or put into a broader context.
FORMIDABLE
Companies are using AI more than ever, but they’re missing the technology’s biggest opportunities
Formidable spoke with Amanda Rankin about why the biggest opportunity with AI is not simply to automate existing processes, but to rethink how work and organizations are designed. The conversation also explores the value of experienced people, the organizational conditions AI inherits, and the difference between widespread technology adoption and meaningful business value.
Questions we keep coming back to
Some questions stay with us because the answer keeps changing, because the tradeoffs are real, or because the conventional answer leaves too much out.
- How do leaders demonstrate progress without mistaking implementation milestones for evidence that the transformation is on track to deliver its intended business result?
- If AI inherits the organization it lands in, what should leaders understand before they automate?
- What does an organization lose when experienced people leave, beyond the roles they held?
- What changes when integration is treated as a transformation capability rather than a coordination problem?
- What should remain intentionally human, even when technology could do it?
- What does professional agency look like when organizations, technology and careers are all changing at once?
- How do we build transformation capability that gets stronger with experience rather than starting over each time?
KEEP THE RUMBL GOING
What are we not talking about enough?
If there is a question, tension or assumption shaping transformation, AI, leadership, human agency or professional agency that deserves more attention, we want to hear it.
Start a conversation →