OK, so on paper the operating model of the future is already here. The business case behind the multi million investment is signed off, and somewhere an AI vendor has shown the board the silver bullet.

Then I sit down with a CIO and hear: “I’m just firefighting right now.”

I’ve been talking to COOs and CIOs about The Human Gap, and two conversations this month worried me. They got it straight away. Then they said “if only”.

The question for me this month

I’m sure every transformation programme has a human gap to close. Every programme has to see more of the lived experience, name it and close it if it’s going to realise its potential, and the signed off business cases behind those multi million investments. My money is on most leaders agreeing with that.

But underneath both conversations ran the same current. If only we could see it, name it and close it. Right now we have technical and operational challenges that are fundamentally broken. Just fixing the foundations is keeping me up at night. Being able to look at the human factors is way beyond us.

And this worries me, because of what it says about where the pressure really sits, and how little of it ever shows up in the plan.

Have we forgotten what’s already running?

Are we forgetting what the real pressure is right now for so many CIOs and COOs? Years of deployed technology, and layer upon layer of improvements and replacements on poorly integrated platforms. Print and rekey, still very much alive and well in our organisations.

You’ll know the kind of thing I mean. The process that only works because someone rekeys it every morning. The platform nobody quite dares to switch off.

If that’s true, are boards and AI vendors smoking something to believe they have the silver bullet for the operating model of the future?

I wonder how many more CIOs and COOs are pulling their hair out over compliance and security issues in their live legacy IT stacks than are contemplating the sophistication of AI, let alone taking on the human side more fully.

I can see it, and The Human Gap can see it too. Not enough time is being spent seeing the vulnerabilities of the core operating model of today. Instead, we seem to be charging ahead with the operating models of the future, and creating yet more of a potential mess for the CIOs and COOs who will follow.

We’ve been here before, haven’t we?

A decade ago it was automation. I remember prioritising automation projects and assessing Blue Prism, UiPath and other RPA technologies, and the board presentation promised a “fundamental performance shift”.

In hindsight, most organisations didn’t see that shift, and most found it far harder than they expected. Many automated what they already had, messy processes and outdated workflows, and expected transformation to follow. It rarely did.

Now the silver bullet has a new name. The layers underneath haven’t gone anywhere, and some of them are the very automations we bolted on last time. So when the next board pack promises the operating model of the future, I can’t help but ask what it’s going to be built on.

Fixing the foundations is human work too

I get it. The foundations need to be fixed. Nobody is arguing otherwise.

But trust me, even fixing the foundations means facing the more honest side of change. And that’s just as important in closing The Human Gap and getting results.

I saw this when we offshored business processes to India. What we thought people did onshore wasn’t quite what they were doing. As we documented the processes, we discovered the process was the easy part. The knowledge holding it together was far harder. And yes, we also had to provide the cultural wrapper that our UK colleagues simply had without thinking about it.

Legacy is just like that. Every print and rekey step has a person behind it who knows why it’s there and what breaks when it doesn’t happen. Replace the platform without that knowledge and the problem simply moves house.

And there’s a trap on the other side too. When we do replace the old platforms, too often the requirements are based on what people do today. We end up recreating today’s processes on a shiny new thing, and the operating model underneath stays exactly where it was.

In these conversations, the honest side of change had a voice. It’s the one in the room saying: just stop, we’re getting carried away, look at what’s on everyone’s plate right now.

Most organisations even have a place for that voice: the portfolio debate. Stop, pause or continue. It happens, and people take it seriously. And yet it tends to reinforce continue rather than stop. Every quarter that ends in continue makes stop a little harder to say next time.

Why? Because the commitments were made to meet the promises of the exec. Unless those promises change, the programme still runs.

So the new programme stacks up on top of the old foundations, and the CIO keeps firefighting. That’s a human gap, right in the middle of the technical work.

What the gap between them decides

The signed off business case decides what was promised. The gap between the plan and the lived experience decides how much of it actually arrives.

If we keep charging ahead without facing what’s underneath, we will make progress with tech. We just won’t make the transformation leaps that so many of the business cases declare.

So before the board signs off the next operating model of the future, look at what’s on everyone’s plate today. Ask the people firefighting what they would stop if they could. And if the honest answer is stop, let the promises change.

Until they do, the programme still runs.

Whatever next?

If “just stop” is the line nobody gets to say in your portfolio debate, come and say it with Simon Payne and me at The Unseen and Unsaid online taster.