Darryl Carr is based in Perth, Australia. I am in Hampshire, UK. Between us we have somewhere north of sixty years of transformation experience. And in twenty-five minutes of conversation, he said something that I thought was really profound.

“The only thing that’s left when all this technology is deployed is humanity itself.”

He said it almost in passing. Which is exactly the point.

Darryl is a human-centred advisor, a prolific community builder, and someone who has been in and around transformation since the days of business process re-engineering in the mid-nineties. He does not describe himself as a philosopher. But when he talks about what organisations are for, and what happens when we lose sight of it, he is doing something that most transformation conversations never quite manage.

In Whatever Next? I write about The Five Human Lenses of Transformation™, five lenses through which to look at transformation. The fifth is Reconnect. It asks a deceptively simple question: how does the change we are designing actually feel for the people living it?

Not the people in the steering committee. Not the people whose satisfaction scores appear on dashboards. The people who wake up on a Monday morning, open their laptop, and navigate the reality of whatever the programme has delivered.

Reconnect is the lens that takes emotion seriously as information. It treats sentiment as strategy, not as a soft afterthought. It asks where adoption is quietly stalling, where trust is eroding, and what invisible work people are carrying that never appears in the project metrics.

It is, in my experience, the lens most likely to be left off the plan entirely.

What struck me about talking to Darryl is that he does not describe Reconnect as a framework or a phase. He describes it as a disposition. A way of seeing. He defines an enterprise as “a fundamentally human pursuit” a collective endeavour that exists to produce goods and services for human consumption. Not for the algorithm. Not for the board report. For people.

That might sound obvious. It is not. Most transformation programmes define an enterprise as a set of capabilities, a portfolio of platforms, or a target operating model. Which are all legitimate and necessary lenses. But they are not sufficient. Because capabilities do not adopt change. People do.

Darryl noticed something else too, which I have been thinking about for years without quite naming it as cleanly as he did. He observed that in the era of green screens and batch systems and eighty-character interfaces, the constraints of the technology forced practitioners to think harder about the human side. You had so little to work with technically that the human experience had to be the design problem.

As the technical constraints lifted, the human attention drifted with them.

We did not make a deliberate choice to care less about lived experience. We just had more exciting things to look at. And somewhere in that drift, delivery and experience quietly decoupled. That decoupling is the human gap: the distance between the plan and what people actually believe, experience and do. The Reconnect lens is, among other things, a prompt to notice that this happened and to ask what it has cost us.

Darryl runs communities. Multiple communities. Internal communities of practice, external professional networks, a group in Perth called Digital Transformation Perth that meets every six weeks. He does not do this because it is on a best practice checklist. He does it because he genuinely believes that people need to find each other across roles, disciplines, geographies, and time zones to make sense of what is happening to them.

The Reconnect lens in Whatever Next? is built on the idea that participation is not the same as involvement. Sending someone a communication about change is not the same as creating the conditions where they can make sense of it, connect it to their own experience, and choose to move toward it rather than around it.

Communities, when they work, do exactly this. They create the space where the official version of the change, the one on the Gantt chart and the stakeholder map meets the lived version. The frustrations, the workarounds, the moments of genuine excitement that nobody thought to capture. They make those conversations visible and legitimate. Which is exactly what most transformation programmes fail to do.

If you are a community builder reading this, I suspect you already know this instinctively. The question is whether the organisations you work in treat that work as strategic or peripheral.

Darryl flagged something in our conversation that I think deserves to be named explicitly rather than left as a passing observation. He mentioned that graduates across multiple industries are struggling to find work because the work is disappearing. And then he said, almost carefully, that transformation programmes do not tend to have a scope item that takes into account human wellbeing or the impact on society.

That is not a small point.

It is one thing to argue, as many do, that AI will create new roles while displacing old ones. That is a reasonable debate to have. It is quite another to observe that the programmes making those decisions are not structurally set up to even ask the question. There is no owner for that conversation. There is no workstream. There is no metric.

Which means the human consequences of transformation are being managed, if at all, informally. By the communities that exist outside the programme. By the advisors who show up in the gaps. By the practitioners like Darryl who are quietly running a meeting in Perth on a Tuesday evening because somebody needs to have the honest conversation that the programme is not resourced to host.

Here is where I want to push the conversation slightly further than Darryl and I got to in the episode.

Darryl notices the gap between technology and humanity in organisations. He names the consequences. He builds communities as a response. All of that is valuable. But there is a question underneath it that I think community builders and transformation practitioners need to sit with more deliberately.

When does the human experience of change appear on the plan? And who owns it?

Reconnect, as I have worked with it, is most powerful when it operates at the beginning of a programme, not the end. Not as a communications and engagement plan bolted on after the design work is done. But as a genuine input to the design work itself. Starting with how the change is currently felt. Where trust already exists and where it has already been damaged. What the lived experience of the current state is telling us about the future state we should be reaching for.

When that does not happen, communities end up doing the remediation. They carry the emotional load of transformation that the programme itself did not budget for.

That is too late, and it is too much to ask of volunteer energy.

If you build and sustain communities for a living whether internally inside organisations or externally across professions you are already doing Reconnect. You are already creating the conditions where people can find each other, be honest about what is happening, and decide together what to do about it.

The question I would invite you to sit with is this.

Is that work being treated as the strategic asset it is? Or is it happening in the margins, sustained by people who care, while the transformation programmes it is compensating for keep rolling on unchanged?

Darryl reminded me that organisations are, at their core, a human pursuit. The technology is the infrastructure. The community is the point.

Whatever next?

This post was inspired by a conversation with Darryl Carr, human-centred advisor and community builder, on Whatever Next? Unplugged.

Originally published June 2026