Failing to Adapt to Technological Tools

They were hemorrhaging money on digital tools their managers refused to use. The situation: A retail giant in the diamond industry with post-COVID digital sales tools sitting unused. Store managers resisting change. Market volatility crushing performance. Here's what every other company does: More training on features. Explaining benefits harder. Pushing adoption metrics. Here's what my client did instead: They ignored the technology completely. Instead, they trained 200+ managers on something nobody else was teaching; how to fall in love with change itself. For 8 months, we didn't focus on the digital tools once. We taught them Change Enthusiasm®, how to see disruption as opportunity, resistance as data, and overwhelm as information. We certified managers in emotional processing, not technical skills. The results were staggering: → 30% increase in digital adoption (without a single tech training session) →  2X ROI boost for those who embraced the mindset →  25% sales uplift in stores with certified managers →  96% of participants improved business outcomes Here's the breakthrough insight: People don't resist technology. They resist change. Fix the relationship with change, and adoption becomes automatic. While competitors were fighting symptoms, this company cured the disease. The secret wasn't better technology training, it was better humans. When managers learned to thrive through change, they stopped seeing digital tools as threats and started seeing them as allies. Most companies are solving the wrong problem. They're trying to make people adopt technology. We help people embrace transformation. The results speak for themselves. What would happen if you stopped training on tools and started training on change? ♻️ Share if you believe the future belongs to change-ready organizations 🔔 Follow for insights on making transformation inevitable, not optional

Your team is struggling to adopt a new product management tool. Training isn’t the problem—yet your team still reverts to meetings and Slack threads or abandons the software. Ever wonder why your team keeps falling back on old tools—even after training? What’s missing from your adoption strategy? Alignment between workflows and tool functionality. Training is important—but it’s not enough if the tool itself doesn’t align with how your team works day-to-day. As a product consultant, I’ve seen this firsthand when teams rush into configuration without auditing their processes first. Want higher adoption rates? Start here: 1️⃣ Map current workflows and identify the places where things are currently falling apart. 2️⃣ Connect the workflows your team is already doing to places where they should be using the tool. 3️⃣ Configure based on these insights—not just default settings. Adoption thrives when tools fit your workflows—not when they force teams to change overnight. Seen this happen on your team? What did you do to turn it around?

I've watched organizations spend months perfecting their Teams setup, only to find employees still emailing attachments and saving files locally. The real reason Teams adoption fails isn't technical. It's behavioral. Most IT rollouts focus on features and training. They completely miss the deeper resistance to changing ingrained habits. The gap isn't just knowledge. It's psychological comfort with shared control. When someone shares a document through Teams, they're making three psychological leaps... → Trusting the platform won't lose their work → Believing permissions will actually work as intended → Accepting that their edits are visible to others in real-time Email attachments feel safer because they create a personal copy. Cloud sharing feels risky because it requires faith in systems and other people's digital behavior. Address the emotional resistance before you worry about features and training. I see this every time. Perfect technical rollout, comprehensive training sessions, then confusion when people keep emailing attachments. Yep, it still happens...

Most of my time is currently spent helping clients increase AI adoption. They have bought the licenses, made the models available to their employees, but employees aren't using AI! Here's a #limitingbelief worth examining - "If people just learned how to use AI tools better, adoption would skyrocket." The data from a Section study tells a different story. While 61% of workers can navigate AI interfaces confidently, a staggering 80% remain clueless about how these tools actually fit into their daily work. This isn't a training problem—it's a #translationproblem. We've been approaching AI adoption backwards. Instead of starting with the technology and pushing it toward people, successful implementations start with people and pull the right technology toward their existing pain points. The most transformative AI applications aren't the ones that promise to revolutionize everything; they're the ones that eliminate the small, repetitive frustrations that eat away at productivity every single day. Consider this. The limiting belief isn't that AI is too complicated to learn. It's that AI adoption requires dramatic change. In reality, the most sustainable AI transformations happen when people barely notice them—when the technology seamlessly amplifies what they're already good at rather than forcing them to become something entirely new. The companies winning at AI aren't those with the most sophisticated models or the biggest budgets. They're the ones that recognize a fundamental truth - lasting change happens through trust and incremental improvement, not through technological shock and awe. What if the question isn't "How do we get people to adapt to AI?" but rather "How do we get AI to adapt to people?"

Every time I support organizations in their digital transformation path, I see the same pattern repeating. The problem is rarely about the tools. It is more often about the strategy—or the lack of it. The biggest challenges are not technological. “Lack of change management strategy,” “driving adoption,” and “culture mindset” are at the top of the list. Even “complex software” or “IT skills gaps” only become real obstacles when there is no clear vision guiding the transition. It confirms something I have been thinking for years: transformation starts from people, not from platforms. The success of digital initiatives depends on aligning leadership, mindset, and long-term planning. Without that alignment, even the best tools won't deliver impact. Let’s stop treating digital transformation like a tech upgrade and start treating it like the cultural shift it really is. #DigitalTransformation #Leadership #ChangeManagement #BusinessStrategy #Innovation #Culture #Mindset