"Digitalize" isn't the Goal
Imagine calling into an all-hands meeting and seeing one word on the shared screen: “ACCELERATE”
“This is our new motto,” the CEO says. “We will now be laser-focused on speed”. They call it an “Acceleration Transformation” and say they expect everyone to play their part. Everyone should be accelerating their work. There will be gamified trainings on acceleration. Everyone will be expected to join in. Going into the next quarter, everyone should have at least one OKR pertaining to acceleration.
Any questions?
Inevitably, one employee raises their virtual hand, unmutes themselves and asks, “why the sudden focus on accelerating?”
“The world in which we operate is accelerating around us,” the CEO correctly observes. “To keep up, we need to speed up.”
No one can argue with that. Everyone sees the rate of change increasing, even in their daily lives. The all-hands ends without further questions. The CEO knows this change will be painful at times—after all, people have been comfortably coasting by until now. But he is confident that he conveyed the underlying urgency.
In the coffee corner, discontent can be made out through the murmurs. “What do they think we were doing up to now? Intentionally trying to be slow? Of course we’re always looking for ways to accelerate,” says one voice. “When does it end? Are we just supposed to speed up endlessly, to the speed of light?” asks another. “Some things don’t need to be accelerated, but rather slowed down, done more intentionally” observes one astute employee.
Replace the word “ACCELERATE” with “DIGITALIZE”, and you have the true story of digital transformation at many companies today. Employees are told that the company must “digitalize” to remain relevant in a digital world, and that they must do their part. In my experience, this leads to frustration and confusion from employees who feel they’re already “digitalizing”: perhaps they made a PowerBI dashboard to analyze their team’s data or experimented with their first AI agent. Yet the company is now diving into a “digital transformation,” which they say will take years. Employees are not told what success looks like: when is the transformation complete? When is the company “digitalized”? If every document is signed digitally, is the company then digitalized? Is using Excel enough to qualify as digitalized? One could ask the same of the example goal of “accelerating”: when is the company “accelerated,” i.e., when is the process of “acceleration transformation” complete? What counts as “fast enough”?
No one would argue with our fictional CEO’s assertion that acceleration is important in today’s accelerating world, nor would one argue that digitalization is unnecessary in 2025. Yet as we’ve seen, these goals lead to frustration and confusion for employees and managers alike.
What’s the problem with these goals? Why do digital transformations often fail to deliver tangible value?
A verb is not a goal
The words “accelerate” and “digitalize” are both verbs. They are actions that are continuously done. This is the problem: A verb is not a goal.
We’ve all heard about the importance of setting SMART goals, goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Most people have become even more familiar with this framework since working with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), the “Key Results” portion of which specifically requires concrete, measurable goals. Let’s see how the goal of digitalization stacks up against the SMART criteria:
Specific: Nope, fails. It’s not specific, it’s vague. The degree to which one should be “doing digitalization” is not clear. Taking the acceleration example again, one can accelerate their car by .1 kilometer per hour and be accelerating, or “achieving acceleration”. Or they can get a new car that accelerates faster, or has a higher maximum speed, so they can accelerate faster or longer. All of these can count as meeting the goal of acceleration. The goal is not clear. Same for digitalizaiton: one employee can move one paper-based process online, while keeping the rest of their work static, and be “digitalizing.” Or, one can devote 80% of their time to systematically analyzing their processes, deciding which can simply be removed and which can be improved and automated using AI agents. This is clearly also “digitalization.” These verb-goals are not specific.
Measurable: No. There is no clear milestone to reach for a verb. If the goal is a verb, then “doing it” = success. Think of it like having the goal “walking”: you’re only succeeding at your goal when you are actively moving your feet on the pavement. Compare this with the goal of walking 5 kilometers per day, 5 days a week. That goal is measurable. The verb “walking” is not.
Achievable: No. A verb cannot be achieved, it can’t be finished. Refer to the goal of “walking” above: to meet this goal, one must be in the act of walking. As soon as one stops walking, they fail to meet the goal. There is no end state to achieve. One must be walking forever to keep achieving the goal.
Relevant: Yes. These verb-goals, and the driving forces behind them, are relevant to the business for the reasons the fictional CEOs mentioned like external forces and changing markets.
Time-boxed: Nope. Verbs in the present tense have no time limit. When one is walking, they are walking indefinitely, until they stop walking (stop doing the verb) and start doing something else.
Verbs are means
These verb-goals only meet one of the five SMART criteria, relevance. These verbs are still relevant, but they are not goals or key results to achieve. Rather, they are ways we can achieve goals. For example, a goal of “process 50 more customer inquiries per month” is SMART. It’s specific, focusing on customer inquiries. It’s measurable: the number of customer inquiries processed per month can be measured. It’s actionable: the team processes customer inquiries now, they have control over their process for this. It’s relevant, as it influences customer satisfaction and thus business success. It’s time-boxed to one month. The verbs we looked at before can clearly help achieve this goal. Acceleration is an inherent attribute of this SMART goal: assuming the number of employees is fixed, meeting this goal involves processing more inquiries in the same amount of time, so the time per inquiry processed must decrease. Digitalization is also likely one of the ways to meet this goal, for example by automating some parts of the process with automated inquiry-sorting scripts or with a chatbot to answer some of the easier inquiries automatically. But these verbs are not the goal. Employees, given this SMART goal, will do multiple different things, engage in multiple actions, do various verbs, to achieve the goal.
You might argue that the goal in this example of responding to customer inquiries is more short-term and easy to measure, whereas digitalizing, or digital transformation, is about long-term change.
True. That doesn’t mean you can’t set SMART goals over long time horizons. For example: “be the leading toothbrush sales company by 2030”. “Double our market cap by 2050”. These goals don’t focus on the means. They also leave open other options, other verbs, like acquiring, growing, increasing (sales), etc. They don’t limit the “how” to just one verb. The fact is, digitalization alone will not reach these big strategic goals. They will involve creating new products and revenue streams, entering new markets and finding new customers. Digitalization can help with some aspects of this, but it will not be sufficient to reach these goals. Digitalization is mainly used to streamline existing processes, lower costs and improve the bottom line. If the company’s CEO tells their reports to “digitalize”, this limits their option space. They will be more focused on this one action, digitalization, which is better suited to cost-savings, than on other actions like new product development, M&A, and expanding into new geographies that could support increasing revenue. By setting verb-goals like “digitalize” and “accelerate”, leaders inadvertently sabotage their other goals.
Today’s new verb-goal: “Do AI”
Here at the top of the AI-hype cycle, managers are understandably concerned about the potential disruptive power of AI. How exactly AI will impact each business and industry, and to what extent, is uncertain. This leads to fear, which often translates into verb-goals that dictate how employees and middle managers innovate. In one company, I saw a senior manager mandate that his direct reports have at least one GenAI-related OKR. This directive of course got pushed down to the next rung in the ladder, where middle-managers were told to implement GenAI, to “do AI”. What will happen here? Especially in hierarchical organizations, people will spend time implementing GenAI tools to meet this arbitrary goal. What does this achieve? Obviously, the purpose of a company is not to be a user of GenAI or any other tool or technology. Even if the manager had good intentions and intended to encourage his teams to try out new technology, this intention should not have been formulated as a goal. The time spent working on this verb-goal (“do GenAI”) is time taken away from reaching the real goals of the company, goals all companies have: deliver value to customers, proactively solve customer problems, and delight them with innovative solutions.
Leaders should focus on setting and communicating around ambitious goals that support their core business, and leave their teams to figure out which verbs and actions will help reach them. When is a company “digitalized”? When is the digital transformation “achieved”? When the real business goals are met. What is the right level of “doing AI”? Whatever level is needed to achieve real business outcomes.
Think about it…
What other verb-goals have you seen in your organization?
What are some examples of good goals you’ve seen?
How can managers encourage their teams to try new technologies and improve their processes in a sustainable way?
