RH.
10 May 2026Enterprise AI adoptionPersonal systems

Spreadsheets and good intentions

Most transformation teams have neither the data nor the system to support what they're trying to do.

Talking to leaders in transformation teams about how they currently track capacity, the answer is usually some version of a spreadsheet maintained by one person, who is currently on annual leave, that was last fully updated in March.

This is fine until the moment a decision needs to be made. Then everyone agrees the data isn't good enough, and the decision gets deferred to "after we sort the data". The data doesn't get sorted, because there's no system around it. Just a spreadsheet and a willing volunteer.

The bar for what counts as a system here is genuinely low. Almost anything beats the spreadsheet. The hard part isn't building it. The hard part is convincing the team that filling it in is worth their time, which it only is if the output is actually used.