Digital literacy used to mean knowing how to use email, spreadsheets, and maybe a CRM. Today, that definition is dangerously outdated. The new literacy companies need revolves around three pillars: prompts, data, and judgment.
Prompts are the new interface. Knowing how to ask the right question to an AI determines the quality of what comes back. Data is the new raw material: not just having it, but structuring, cleaning, and governing it. Judgment is the new differentiator: the ability to decide what matters, what is biased, what is ethical.
Training employees in software is no longer enough. Without these three literacies, organisations risk becoming fluent in tools but illiterate in value. And that gap is what separates companies that adapt from those that drown in dashboards.
Corporate training used to mean a classroom, a PowerPoint deck, and a fixed number of hours. The ritual was more important than the result. But the eight-hour course is dying, and it should.
Learning in organisations today must be liquid. Flexible, adaptive, embedded into work rather than isolated from it. AI accelerates this shift by making learning moments shorter, more personalised, and more contextual. The idea is not to “train once and forget,” but to flow continuously between work and reflection, between practice and augmentation.
The real challenge is cultural. Many companies still measure training by hours invested instead of skills gained. They treat learning as an event, not a system. Liquid learning, on the other hand, dissolves into daily routines — micro-scenarios, quick experiments, AI-augmented feedback.
The companies that thrive will not be the ones with the biggest training catalogues, but the ones that design learning as an ongoing ecosystem.
You launched a bold initiative. AI, automation, circular design, remote-first… Whatever the buzzword, it came with big expectations and internal slides full of rocket emojis.
But three months in:
The approvals take forever
The “legal gate” blocks every prototype
The leadership insists on ROI in 90 days
Teams are told to “be innovative” but “don’t break anything”
What you’re experiencing isn’t just resistance. It’s innovation debt.
🧨 What is Innovation Debt?
Just like technical debt accumulates when old code gets patched instead of rewritten, innovation debt builds up when new ideas are forced to live inside old mental models.
It happens when:
Bold ideas are trapped in legacy processes
“Agile” means sticking a sticky note on a waterfall
“Test and learn” is just code for “Don’t really launch it”
Leadership supports “transformation” but behaves like yesterday
It’s the cost of pretending to change without changing how we decide.
📉 A Case from the Real World
A large retail company rolled out a “Digital Accelerator Lab” with full press releases and internal fanfare.
They hired young talent, hosted hackathons, and even launched a podcast.
But within 6 months:
The new teams couldn’t ship anything without going through 12 compliance checkpoints
Procurement insisted on 18-month contracts for 3-week experiments
The lab’s ideas were reviewed by the same steering committee as all legacy projects
Guess what happened? The best talent left. The lab became a slide. And the exec team blamed “lack of impact”.
🔗 Metaphor: The Anchored Rocket
Imagine building a sleek rocket, designed to fly. But every time it’s ready to launch, someone ties one more chain to it:
A budget rule from 2008
A “best practice” from a different era
A mindset of fear masked as caution
Eventually, that rocket doesn’t fly. It rusts on the launchpad. Not because it was badly built— but because it was never allowed to lift off.
🚨 Signs You’re Carrying Innovation Debt
Everything “new” must go through the old system You’re innovating with yesterday’s playbook.
You pilot endlessly but never commit Pilots without a runway are just theatre.
You celebrate ideas but punish mistakes Innovation without tolerance for failure is a façade.
Your governance model never changed If the same people make the same decisions, nothing is really new.
🧯 What to Do About It
Burn one sacred rule Each quarter, kill one legacy policy that blocks speed or creativity.
Fund teams, not projects Empower people with purpose and freedom—not task lists.
Tie KPIs to learning, not just delivery Celebrate validated learning even when the idea “fails”.
Design decision paths as if you wanted speed You can’t scale agility with a 12-step approval process.
Audit your mindset, not just your strategy Ask: What beliefs are we holding onto that no longer serve us?
✨ Closing Thought
Innovation doesn’t fail because people aren’t creative. It fails because we don’t unchain the system they work in.
Stop pretending your rocket can fly while holding it down with your own hands.
Agile was supposed to liberate teams. Faster iterations. Closer to users. More learning, less bureaucracy.
But somewhere along the road… Agility became ritual. Process became dogma.
We stopped thinking, and started worshiping the ceremony.
🔄 The Agile Paradox
We’ve seen it before:
Daily stand-ups that last 45 minutes
Retrospectives filled with silence
Teams sprinting without understanding the race
Agility became a checkbox. A theater. A safety blanket for control disguised as freedom.
📍Real-world case
In a major European fintech company, the IT team proudly ran five Scrum teams. Backlogs were updated. User stories were written. Burndown charts looked great.
Yet product launches were constantly delayed. Users reported no significant improvements. Team morale? Flat.
A deeper review revealed:
30% of stories were rewritten 4+ times due to unclear ownership
Stakeholder reviews were box-ticking rituals
Teams followed Scrum, but had no shared vision
They were agile in motion, rigid in mindset.
🪞Metaphor: The Sacred Calendar
In some teams, the Jira board is more sacred than the customer’s pain. Sprint Planning becomes a liturgy. Velocity metrics are the new commandments. And the team becomes… priests of a process they no longer question.
🚨 Warning Signs of Process Idolatry
More energy spent on rituals than outcomes If retrospectives feel like paperwork, it’s time to pause.
No space to challenge the process itself Agile is iterative – including how we do Agile.
Dogmatic use of frameworks “We must do it this way” is the death of creative teams.
Low psychological safety, disguised as structure People obey the rules but don’t speak up.
🛠️ How to Break the Spell
Re-center on purpose Why are we using Scrum/Kanban/XP? Does it still serve the team’s mission?
Foster Agile literacy Ensure people understand why each practice exists – not just how.
Iterate on the process itself Teams should have agency to tweak, drop or invent rituals.
Make feedback loops real Feedback isn’t a retrospective note. It’s a daily muscle.
🚫 Avoid These Pitfalls
Becoming framework fundamentalists No method is universal. Adapt or die.
Conflating agility with speed Agility is about responsiveness, not acceleration.
Measuring what doesn’t matter Burnout with perfect velocity is still burnout.
✨ Closing Thoughts
Agility should be a lens, not a cage. A team that blindly follows Agile rituals may move fast — but in circles.
The most agile teams? They ask better questions. They outgrow their frameworks.
Sprint. Review. Retro. Repeat. Another cycle. Another iteration. But something’s missing.
In many “agile” teams, a strange kind of collective amnesia sets in. The ceremonies remain. The tools are used. But the why behind it all gets buried under velocity charts and Jira tickets.
This is what I call Agile Amnesia: A silent drift from purpose, disguised as high performance.
🧠 What it looks like
Teams focused on delivery, not value
Dailies become status updates, not collaboration boosters
Retros become rituals, not reflection spaces
The product backlog grows, but the vision blurs
They are doing Agile. But they’ve stopped being agile.
🧩 Real case
At a SaaS company, a product team had one of the highest throughput scores in the organization. But customer satisfaction had dropped 22% over the last quarter.
Why? They were shipping more features, faster than ever— But no one had challenged why they were building them.
After interviewing team members, a clear pattern emerged:
“We’re not sure who we’re building for anymore.” “We just focus on hitting sprint goals.” “The vision used to excite us. Now it’s just tasks.”
Agile had become a process. Not a mindset.
🔍 A metaphor: the agile treadmill
Imagine getting on a treadmill to train for a mountain hike. You walk, you run, you sweat. But if you never get off the treadmill, you’re just moving without direction.
That’s Agile Amnesia: a team in motion, but going nowhere meaningful.
🧭 Four signals of Agile Amnesia
No one questions the backlog anymore The list is taken as gospel, not as hypothesis.
Velocity is celebrated more than impact “We closed 28 story points!” But… did they matter?
Retros lose soul If people say “same as last time,” it’s not reflection—it’s fatigue.
Customers vanish from conversations If the only mention of the user is during sprint review, disconnection is guaranteed.
🛠️ How to revive the “why”
Reground every sprint in impact Start planning with: “What problem are we solving and for whom?”
Bring real stories into the room Invite a customer. Read a review. Show a case. Make it human.
Redesign retros as catalysts, not complaints Use them to imagine, reconnect, realign—not just fix annoyances.
Kill zombie rituals If a ceremony feels dead, stop. Reframe. Reboot. Or delete.
🚫 What to avoid
Obsessing over tools Tools are containers. Culture is what fills them.
Agile theatre Stand-ups and Kanbans look nice. But if there’s no ownership or learning… it’s just performance.
Pretending “done” means “useful” Something can be shipped and still be irrelevant.
✨ Final thought
Agile isn’t a checklist. It’s a constant act of remembering: Who are we serving? Why are we building? What do we want to learn?
A team that forgets its “why” becomes a team efficient at the wrong things.
