To Use or Not to Use Digital Tools?
For the last six months, I have been deeply immersed in analysing interview transcripts with leaders and change agents involved in digital transformation initiatives in their companies.
Defining digital transformation
Digital transformation is a concept with varied meanings for researchers and practitioners. It can represent backend transformations, such as integrating existing information systems or AI tools for automatic customer interactions. It could mean developing mobile applications or implementing online analytics and reporting tools. Broadly, I define digital transformation as any organizational initiative aimed at building digital capabilities for employees in key roles or business functions, or for enhancing customer interactions to generate business value.
Regardless of the specific type of digital transformation, my research focuses on the challenges leaders perceive and the creative behaviors they adopt when leading digital initiatives.
The challenge of blind spots and leaders’ creative responses
One of the most common challenges identified across the 45 interviews relates to self-awareness. Leaders frequently see resistance to digital tools as a result of people not knowing what they don’t know in order to navigate the digital transformation. In other words, blind spots exist that prevent employees from fully embracing digital workplaces, often due to their attachment to familiar tools and working habits.
One respondent described how he addresses this attachment:
“Currently, I’m challenging everyone to rethink how we approach scope, schedules, and costs, how we collaborate with business partners and contractors, and how we obtain materials. What I’m specifically changing in my current role is making sure we expedite material delivery as much as possible.”
Moreover, for this leader, new digital tools that track and monitor materials globally offer critical data for informed decision-making. He places greater trust in AI-driven, fact-based decisions than in decisions based solely on experience:
“In each department, we usually have experienced advisors. However, with trends toward artificial intelligence, we’ve found that fact-based decisions often surpass those based on experience. Experience can sometimes be misleading, but facts are facts.”
Whether employees and leaders embrace digital tools depends significantly on their willingness to reframe expectations around these technologies. Digital tools can be seen as opportunities for greater creative thinking and insight at work. The leader quoted earlier encourages his team to use data insights as learning and improvement opportunities:
“We collect facts as we initiate, plan, and execute projects. Throughout this process, we monitor, control, and gather data. For example, data tells me how much money and time we spend on road construction or unit replacement, pinpointing areas of struggle and suggesting alternatives.”
So, resistance to digital transformation often stems from employees not recognizing that new technologies can help them do their jobs more creatively and productively. Another support for this finding comes from Eetu Siira’s bachelor thesis on university lecturers’ adoption of generative AI (genAI) tools to enhance creativity, which I supervised in the last 7 months. GenAI tools support human creativity best when viewed as thought-provoking resources rather than replacements for individual thinking.
Conclusions
Thus, whether using genAI or data analytics tools, their usefulness depends on how we perceive their outputs: either as a type of input, along with other sources of information, to informed decision-making or as rigid directives to follow unquestioningly.
Ultimately, the choice to embrace digital tools hinges on recognizing which information sources we rely on and remaining open to reframing digital technologies as valuable and reliable sources of information for creative problem-solving.
-Oana, postdoctoral researcher, JATKOT-group