WHY RUMBL
Transformation requires a willingness to Rumbl.
A Rumbl is what happens when people are willing to challenge assumptions, surface what is not working, and stay with a difficult problem long enough to understand what the outcome requires of the organization end-to-end.
That takes curiosity, candor and enough psychological safety for people to say what they see, especially when those observations cross organizational boundaries or challenge a decision already in motion.
You cannot transform without some degree of conflict. Real transformation asks organizations to make hard decisions, question long-held assumptions, challenge power dynamics, and reconsider “the way we do things.” Done well, that friction can create enormous growth.
But most organizations are wired to protect against it. They protect existing structures, ownership, incentives, decisions already made, and the comfort of what is familiar. The harder questions get worked around, pushed into another function, deferred until later, or obscured by the pressure to demonstrate progress.
That is the Rumbl. The willingness to stay in the tension long enough to make a better decision, build a stronger path forward, and create the conditions for real transformation.
THE PATTERN
We call it Transformation Myopia.
Transformation Myopia is the tendency to give disproportionate attention to visible indicators of progress while underinvesting in the capabilities and organizational conditions required to create durable business value.
Transformation rarely starts with a narrow ambition. It narrows as the work moves into execution. What has a clear owner, budget, milestone and measurable deliverable gets attention. What crosses functions, requires shared accountability, or depends on changes to how the organization operates is much easier to push outside the boundary of the initiative.
As execution takes over, success can gradually become defined by the milestones the initiative was set up to measure. Technology is implemented, deadlines are met, status reports stay green, and leaders deliver against the commitments tied to their incentives. Those things matter, but they are only part of the transformation story.
The danger is that short-term progress begins to take precedence over the harder questions about whether the organization is creating the capabilities, conditions and integration required for durable business value. Issues that complicate the near-term story can be worked around, pushed aside or intentionally swept under the rug, especially when the people making those tradeoffs do not have to live with the day-to-day consequences. The initiative stays on track, the milestone is met, and the visible win is rewarded even when the unresolved issue simply moves downstream.
The problem is not that organizations do not know transformation is complex. It is that complexity gets edited out as ambition becomes execution.
THE SYSTEM
The desired business outcome is bigger than the initiative.
Organizations are built in functions, business units and reporting lines. Business outcomes are not. They cut across technology, data, finance, operations, people, governance, leadership and the decisions that connect them.
A transformation can be well run inside the boundaries of the initiative and still miss what the business needs. The program may own the technology change, while the operating model, incentives, decision rights, data quality, skills, funding or adoption sit somewhere else. Those dependencies do not become less important because they fall outside the program boundary.
The same is true of integration. Strong individual capabilities do not automatically produce a strong transformation. Value is created in how those capabilities work together, where ownership crosses organizational lines, and whether the handoffs, decisions and dependencies between them are designed intentionally.
An initiative can be a critical vehicle for advancing transformation, but it is still only one part of a much larger change. When delivering the initiative becomes synonymous with transformation, organizations risk mistaking progress on one part for completion of the whole.
AI RAISES THE STAKES
AI inherits the organization it lands in.
The biggest opportunity with AI is not simply to automate what already exists. It is to rethink the systems, processes and decisions underneath the work so the organization can operate differently.
That is also where the risk begins. In many companies, experienced people have spent years compensating for broken handoffs, unclear ownership, poor data, fragmented processes and decisions that only work because someone knows how to navigate around the gaps. Much of this effort is invisible because those workarounds have become part of how the organization functions.
When AI is introduced without first understanding those hidden dependencies, it can create the illusion of an easy button: automate the process, reduce the human role, and assume the technology will absorb the judgment and context that had been holding things together.
If the process is flawed, the data incomplete, or experienced people are compensating for weaknesses in how the organization operates, automation does not resolve the underlying problem. It can make those weaknesses move faster and at greater scale.
Capturing value from AI requires more than inserting technology into the current model. It requires a willingness to redesign the underlying operating environment, understand what human judgment and context have been compensating for, and make deliberate choices about what should change rather than assuming everything that can be automated should be.
AI can accelerate transformation. It can also accelerate the consequences of everything the transformation failed to address.
HUMAN AGENCY BY DESIGN
What technology can do is not the same as what it should do.
As AI becomes more capable, organizations will have more choices about where technology replaces human effort, where it augments human capability, and where people should remain central to the experience. Those choices should be made intentionally, not simply by asking how much can be automated.
Efficiency matters, but it is not the only measure of a better system. People bring judgment, creativity, context, empathy and accountability. We are also fallible, social and shaped by experience. We learn from one another, change our minds, challenge ideas, make mistakes and create through the collision of different perspectives. That messiness is not a design flaw to eliminate; it is part of what makes human invention, connection and progress possible.
That is what we mean by Human Agency by Design: being as intentional about the role people will play in the future state as we are about the role of technology, rather than automating first and deciding afterward what remains for humans.
This does not mean preserving every role or process as it exists today. Transformation should change how work gets done. But the goal should be to create something better, not simply something with fewer people in it.
We do not have to automate every human interaction simply because we can. Preserving the parts of work that make us human can be a design choice in its own right.
EXPERIENCE MATTERS
Experience changes what you can see.
Experience is not valuable simply because someone has been doing something for a long time. Its value comes from the context, judgment and pattern recognition built through seeing enough complexity, failure, recovery and unintended consequence to recognize when something that looks reasonable on paper is likely to create a problem in practice. That accumulated experience becomes a form of wisdom: not certainty, but a better ability to recognize patterns, anticipate consequences and know which questions need to be asked.
In complex transformation, that judgment matters. The people closest to the day-to-day reality often know where the workarounds are, which dependencies are fragile, when a process only functions because someone is bridging the gap, and which decisions are likely to create second- and third-order effects later.
Organizations can lose more than capacity when experienced people leave. They can lose context, institutional knowledge and the people who understood how decisions, processes and functions connected in practice, including where the formal organization depended on relationships and workarounds to keep things moving.
Seeing around corners is not intuition in the abstract. It is the wisdom that develops when experience, context, judgment and pattern recognition come together.
A DIFFERENT MODEL
Transformation should create more value, not less agency.
Companies are being asked to transform faster, with more uncertainty and more pressure to prove value. At the same time, many of the people with the experience to navigate that complexity are losing agency, being pushed to the margins, or treated as costs to remove. AI intensifies both sides of that tension.
Rumbl is built on the belief that we should not have to choose between creating more business value and preserving human agency. The same transformation that creates new capability, efficiency and growth can also be designed to preserve judgment, experience, connection and a meaningful role for people in shaping the organization being created.
The desired business outcome comes first, and the transformation should be designed around what it will take for the organization to create it. Technology should expand what the organization is capable of, while experienced people have a meaningful role in shaping and delivering the change. What is learned along the way should strengthen the company, the people who created the value, and the transformations that follow.
Companies gain access to experience, judgment and a more complete way of approaching transformation. Professionals get consequential problems to solve, people they want to build with, and the opportunity to build evidence and reputation around the value they help create. The customer outcome and the human experience do not have to compete with one another; done well, they reinforce each other.
The old model is already being rewritten. We have an opportunity to be intentional about what replaces it. That is the Rumbl.
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