Why Culture Shapes Digital Change
It’s easy to assume that better tools will automatically lead to better results. It’s an understandable default since technology investments offer measurable ROI, vendors promise seamless integration, and boards expect quantifiable outcomes from digital spending.
But technology doesn’t transform organisations. People do.
Rolling out new platforms without addressing beliefs and behaviours is like buying a state-of-the-art treadmill and leaving it in the corner of the basement. The tool exists, but the transformation never happens.
The Myth of Tech-First Transformation
Businesses make substantial investments in technology to automate or augment processes and ensure successful adoption. Despite these efforts, the adoption failure rate for technologies like AI is estimated at 80%.
You can pour billions into new digital tools and platforms, modernise infrastructure, and automate processes, but still fail to achieve the results you expect. Once you strip away the buzzwords, digital transformation comes down to one core truth: people and culture drive outcomes, not code or platforms.
Only people with the right behaviours, beliefs, and skills can unlock the value of digital transformation. If your employees don’t believe in the purpose, don’t adapt their behaviours, or don’t feel reinforced for new ways of working, the technology never delivers its full potential.
Think of it as installing new apps on a phone with an outdated operating system. They crash, underperform, or don’t even open. The real work is upgrading the underlying system.
Culture and Strategy as the Engines of Digital Transformation
Organisations use strategy to define where they’re headed, but only culture determines whether those strategies become reality. Findings from the digital transformation journeys of major businesses show that 87% of C-suite-level executives agree that culture can create greater barriers to digital transformation than technology.
Strategies that champion a digital-first direction cannot survive in cultures that reward ‘business-as-usual’ or risk-aversion. The best strategies can become wall art with slogans like “We will be data-driven” when they’re misaligned with culture. Transformation can only become the way people in your organisation work when culture and strategy are aligned.
Research calls for a more holistic view of digital transformation to maximise its value. This includes incorporating digital technologies with elements like organisational culture, strategy, skills, and talent development.
How Culture Enables Digital Transformation
The most important question leaders should be asking themselves isn’t “What’s our next digital investment?” but rather “How do we upgrade our employees to make transformation real and sustainable?”
Beliefs and Behaviours
Transformation will not occur because you’ve launched an event or a training course. It only succeeds when people shift their underlying beliefs and align their daily behaviours with the new strategy.
What does this look like in practice? A “data-driven belief” may mean a marketing manager starts every campaign review by asking “What does the data tell us?” rather than defaulting to intuition.
A “digital-first belief” can mean a sales leader prioritising CRM insights over hallway conversations when forecasting quarterly performance. These aren’t just mindset shifts, they’re behavioural changes that will compound over time.
Reinforcement Loops
Humans don’t adopt change simply because it’s logical. They need reinforcement. New habits form only when leaders recognise, reward, and continually model them. It’s the difference between going to the gym once and building a workout routine with accountability and coaching.
For data initiatives specifically, this means celebrating the analyst who surfaces an unexpected insight, not just the executive who hits revenue targets. It means measuring and rewarding how often teams reference data in decision-making, not just the outcomes of those decisions.
Unlearning and Sensemaking
In a digital environment, competitive advantage isn’t about learning the fastest but unlearning the fastest. Your organisation must be able to let go of outdated assumptions and create space for new capabilities.
Sensemaking involves the ability to interpret complexity and ambiguity. Think of it as a compass in shifting terrain that helps you navigate when the map is out of date. The organisations that thrive will be those that unlearn as fast as they learn.
Culture Change for Sustaining Digital Transformation
A successful digital transformation progresses from awareness of outdated patterns to building of adaptive capacities for continuous change. Instead of thinking of it as a one-time, predictable project with clear end states, think of digital transformation as more like fitness.
You don’t plan, operate, recover, and declare success. Instead, digital transformation doesn’t have a finish line. You maintain it, build habits, reinforce behaviours, and adapt constantly as your environment changes.
Novo Perspective
If you invest in culture first, your technology investment delivers more. You build teams that stay ahead and turn transformation from a one-off event into a habit of improvement.
At Novo Executive Search, we believe organisations that thrive are the ones that treat culture as a living system that grows, adapts, and guides behaviour through change.
