The Problem With Your Digital Transformation Is That You're Trying to Digitize a Broken Ritual

Your company doesn't need a digital transformation. Your company needs to figure out why it hired you in the first place.

I recently talked to Nevo Hadas, who runs DYDX, a digital transformation practice that works with companies across Europe and Africa. And in the first few minutes of our conversation, he said something that completely reframed how I think about this whole mess: "The reason a lot of changes don't stick is because people approach it from a technology perspective, not a human change perspective. And the really difficult part is actually the human change perspective."

Most consultants will tell you that digital transformation is a technology problem. You need better software. Faster systems. Cloud infrastructure. Automation that eliminates manual work. Robots to replace people. It's seductive—this idea that technology is the lever and if you just pull hard enough, everything gets better.

But here's the uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to admit: The technology part is actually the easy part now. It's so easy that it's almost boring. Technology has become a commodity. You can buy transformation in a box.

What's hard—what's actually fucking hard—is the human part. The part where you have to convince people to work differently. To let go of rituals they've been performing for twenty years. To trust that something new will be better even though it feels weird and wrong and dangerous. That's the part that kills most transformation projects.

When Digital Becomes Ritual Destruction

Nevo had a great example that stuck with me. He compared Amazon in 1996 to a traditional bookshop. Everyone said Amazon was a terrible bookshop. You couldn't browse books. You couldn't sit down with a coffee and see what caught your eye. You couldn't ask someone behind the counter for a recommendation. It was transactional and cold and removed all the pleasure from the experience.

And on the surface, those people were right. As a bookshop experience, Amazon was objectively worse.

But here's what nobody talks about: Amazon wasn't trying to be a better bookshop. Amazon was trying to solve a different problem. The bookshop ritual wasn't sacred—it was just the current way of doing something that could be done differently. And the fact that you could order anything in existence and have it delivered transformed how books reached people, how reading culture spread, how many books got sold. The experience was worse. The outcome was infinitely better.

This is what most companies get wrong about transformation. They think they have to preserve the ritual while changing the technology. The office. The meeting. The approval chain. The way decisions get made. They're so focused on what felt comfortable before that they can't see that the ritual itself was the bottleneck.

Nevo calls this the "emotional and cultural" part of transformation. And it's not something you can PowerPoint into existence. You have to actually sit with what was comforting about the old way and ask: "Was this process designed to make us more productive? Or was it designed to make us feel safe?"

Most of the time, it was the second one. And nobody's honest about that.

The Research Is Not the Process. The Process Is the Problem.

One thing I really appreciated about Nevo's approach is that he doesn't believe in bringing in the designer or the consultant to tell you how to transform. Instead, he uses what's called design thinking—which is not about sticky notes and brainstorming sessions, despite what most agencies will tell you. It's about understanding what's actually happening on the ground before you decide what to change.

He describes a project his team did with an FMCG company trying to reach informal retailers in South Africa and developing countries. They didn't start by designing a solution. They started by interviewing hundreds of people. They went to churches. Hairdressers. Street food vendors. Nursery schools. Community groups. They just asked: "How do people actually get products? What's really happening here?"

And you know what? The insights they found weren't what the company expected. They discovered that distribution wasn't happening through formal retail channels at all. It was happening through completely different networks. And that changed everything about how they thought about the problem.

But here's the key insight that most transformation efforts miss: Research isn't the solution. Research is just the first step of getting your ego out of the way so you can see the actual problem. Nevo runs these research cycles on eight-week sprints, with weekly deliverables, so people can see progress and feel momentum. And because everyone's involved in the research, everyone's bought in to what you discover together.

That's incredibly different from hiring a consultant to tell you what's wrong and then trying to convince people to care.

Why Your People Won't Use the New System (Even When It's Better)

There's a moment in most transformation projects where the new system goes live and almost nobody uses it. They go around it. They find workarounds. They do things the old way on paper and then manually enter it into the new system. It's infuriating to the people who designed it, because the new way is objectively more efficient.

But Nevo's point is simple: You didn't account for the ritual.

Human beings need ritual. We need continuity. We need to know what to expect and how things work. When you remove the ritual without replacing it with something meaningful, you're not offering people freedom. You're offering them chaos. And people will choose the familiar over the efficient almost every time if they feel like you've violated something sacred.

The question isn't "How do we automate this away?" The question is "What function was this ritual serving?" And then you build something new that serves that function while also being more efficient.

Maybe people gathered in a conference room to make decisions because it created a sense of shared responsibility. The new process is faster, but it's also more isolating. So you need rituals to replace what was lost. You need to create new moments where people feel seen and heard, even if the mechanics of the decision-making have changed.

If you skip that part—if you just roll out the technology and expect people to adapt—you'll get compliance. You won't get commitment. And transformation that runs on compliance eventually grinds to a halt.

The Cost of Letting Technology Drive the Story

I asked Nevo about Amazon buying bookstores back (they have a few physical locations despite crushing the retail industry). He wasn't sure why. But what's interesting is that it hasn't become a major business strategy—which tells you something. The ritual of buying books in a bookstore appealed to a small subset of people. Most people preferred the Amazon way, even though it felt colder.

But here's what that tells me: The ritual didn't go away. It just changed audiences. The people who still wanted the bookshop experience got their ritual from online reviews, personalized recommendations, the satisfaction of discovering something unexpected in their recommendations. Different ritual. Same human need.

This is why most transformations fail. We assume that because we've made the technology better, the ritual should change. But rituals are how people make meaning. And if you take away meaning without offering something in its place, you haven't transformed anything. You've just created resentment.

The companies that successfully transform are the ones that do this work intentionally. They ask their people: "What was important about how we worked before?" They listen for the rituals, not the stated preferences. And then they consciously build new rituals that serve the same emotional purpose while also achieving the new efficiency goals.

That's not something you can buy from a consultant. That's something you have to figure out yourself by actually talking to the people doing the work.

Why This Matters

You're probably not running a company through a massive digital transformation right now. But you've probably been on the receiving end of one. And you've probably noticed that the new system was supposed to make things better, but it mostly just made things different and annoying.

The insight from Nevo isn't technical. It's about understanding that people aren't broken machines who just need better programming. People are meaning-making creatures who need to understand why things are changing and what they're losing in the bargain.

If you're leading any kind of change—personal, organizational, technological—the question isn't "What's the faster or more efficient way to do this?" The question is "What are we giving people and what are we taking away?"

Because transformation isn't really about the technology at all. It's about whether people feel like they're building something together or whether they're just being reorganized by someone else.

One creates momentum. The other creates exhaustion disguised as productivity.

---

Want the Full Story?

Listen to Yaniv Corem's full conversation with Nevo Hadas on The School of Innovation podcast. He goes much deeper into how design thinking actually works, why most companies misunderstand it, and how to run a real transformation that doesn't just change the system—it changes how people actually want to work.

Because here's the thing: Every transformation that's ever succeeded has one thing in common. It didn't happen because the technology was better. It happened because someone took the time to understand what mattered to the people doing the work.