Field notes from the rituals, roles, and collapse patterns of Phase 1 delivery.
Published May 8, 2025
Introduction
What you are about to read is a story of a familiar industry term: Digital Transformation.
Sounds great. It’s been the arc companies have pushed for over the last decade.
Manual business processes get automated in real time.
Hand-offs are smooth.
Decisions are metric-based.
Observability drives decision-making.
What actually unfolds is a cliché: an under-architected, under-scoped implementation that quietly fails everyone involved.
1. False Confidence
Automation looks clean.
The dashboard loads.
The integrations connect.
The Slack alerts fire.
Everyone agrees: it works.
But what’s been built isn’t a system.
It’s a fragile stack of assumptions — held together by the idea that because it’s running, it must be real.
This is hope.
And hope doesn’t hold under pressure.
Tools, tools, tools. Look at them run. The agreed stack is there.
But why does everything seem harder than it “used to be”?
When things go wrong, you used to go down the hall.
Now when things go wrong, you open a ticket and wait days for a response.
What happened to the promise of efficiency?
What once required coordination now demands escalation. Speed was replaced with tooling. Human context became backlog.
2. Where It Starts
Most of these systems are born inside digital transformation efforts — but the word “transformation” itself is misleading.
What actually happens is tooling.
A platform is selected before the system is understood.
Process is redesigned to fit the tool.
Everything that doesn’t fit gets labeled “Phase 2.”
Tradeoffs are discovered mid-build.
Deadlines replace models.
The implementation becomes the design.
There is no system.
There’s motion. And the belief that motion equals progress.
During these build cycles, the optimism is undeniable.
The promise of optimization becomes the fuel. Metrics, automation, efficiency — all assumed, none tested.
3. Rituals of Completion
As delivery nears, the theater begins.
“First of all, the team really killed it this sprint.”
— a PM not on the team
“It looks broken now, but that’s just a config thing.”
— a workaround that won’t get touched
“Let’s take that offline, we’ve got a lot to get through.”
— a deflection from real structural concern
“Are we good to skip retro?”
— emotional fatigue disguised as team pragmatism
Architect is rolling off. Handoff scheduled.
Usability testing next month.
Promotion next Friday.
We should be good.
Each line is a signal.
Not of failure.
Of false completion.
The optimism peaks.
Rituals are valued over reflection.
Context is lost, clouded by ticket progression.
The end user is left aside, despite their “stories” on the board.
Upward narrative is vague, but usually summarized as “things are tracking” — because that’s the only real option.
Decisions are made in real time, not reflected on.
Budget constraints squeeze.
Continuing isn’t a decision. It’s a default. Momentum replaces evaluation.
4. Why This Happens
PMs are rewarded for hitting dates.
Developers are rewarded for solving stories.
Consultants are rewarded for delivering something on time.
Clarity is not billable.
Resilience is not visible.
Ownership is not enforced.
So the rituals become the system.
And once the demo passes, the problem disappears — until it doesn’t.
Because no one is incentivized to hold the system.
(And no one models what holding it would even mean.)
5. What It Leaves Behind
These systems don’t explode.
They decay.
Ownership drifts.
Change becomes dangerous.
Support becomes oral history.
Every fix feels like surgery.
People work around the system — not with it.
The interface is loaded with logic no one mapped.
The automation stack hums until it silently stalls.
And everyone acts surprised — even though they felt it coming for months.
And everyone feels it.
At first, it’s light and well accepted. The newness comes with built-in buffer for tolerance.
Tickets are created.
Issues are raised.
Issues are re-raised.
Questions are asked.
Resent is seeded.
What started as adaptation becomes resistance — not at the team, but at the system that pretended to be solid.
6. What This Really Is
This wasn’t system design.
It was project management dressed up as architecture.
It was demos in a sandbox.
It was hope.
You didn’t build something that can evolve.
You built something that can only persist — until the context changes.
Which means it’s already collapsing.
It wasn’t just fragile.
It was worse than before.
No one asked how the work was done.
No one noticed that everything was harder.
A spreadsheet became a SaaS platform.
The interface looked clean.
But the work was bent around the edges to fit the tool.
And no one ever went back to ask what it was all for.
→ Seen this pattern up close?
I work with teams to diagnose and stabilize fragile automation systems — before they collapse under growth.