After Digital

Why Leadership Feels Hard Right Now

Feb 01, 2026

Truth be told, it’s years since my role was narrowly ‘product’. Product is my professional identity but since 2018 I’ve worked across multiple professions, and multiple bits of organisations, in broad leadership roles.

It’s in these leadership roles, and in my consultancy helping leadership teams, that I’ve noticed something: the ‘digital transformation’ mission that sparked the beginning of my career 20-years ago is largely complete. Digital is ‘done’. Leadership needs to recognise this and adapt. This month’s newsletter explores what we do . . . after digital.

Scott Colfer, February 2026

After Digital

Why Leadership Feels Hard Right Now

The last two decades had a clear “Digital” ambition:

Use technology to reduce manual work
Improve services and experiences through good design
Build more capability in-house
Shift from static systems to learning ones.

Today, that Digital ambition has been largely fulfilled in many organisations (albeit unevenly, and painfully at times). Compare the reality of the workplace now to the late 90s/early 00s and the distance travelled is huge.

The pandemic pushed ‘digital transformation’ over a finish line of sorts. Suddenly the normal barriers to change were removed. Organisations moved with ‘once in a generation’ speed and efficiency so their teams could work remotely.

Standing back and objectively looking at where we’re at . . . “Digital” looks to be done.

What many senior leaders are now dealing with is not the failure of that “Digital” vision, but what comes after its (at least partial) success. We now live in a professional landscape shaped by multiple unfinished initiatives, overlapping ways of working, and decisions that cut across functions that were never designed to agree with one another. The language of “Digital Transformation” no longer fits — not because change is over, but because the problem has shifted.

This is the ‘after Digital’ condition. Organisations where the challenge is no longer invention, but integration. “Delivery” alone is not a winning strategy, coherence must be the strategy. Effective leadership is now less about launching the next thing, and more about making hard choices in the space between competing ways of working — each rational on its own but collectively difficult to navigate.

Collision & Friction

What this looks like in practice is rarely dramatic, but it is wearing. Most large organisations now carry the baggage of multiple unfinished improvement efforts: programmes that never fully ended, operating models that coexist without quite agreeing, and ways of working that made sense in isolation but strain when decisions cut across them. The result is not chaos, but friction. Persistent, low-grade, and difficult to resolve cleanly.

Senior leaders experience this most clearly when decisions must be made in the spaces with the most friction. Choices that should be routine become protracted because they sit between functions optimising for different things. One part of the organisation values learning above all else and is trying to keep options open; another is trying to reduce risk, stabilise services, and make commitments stick. Both are acting rationally. The difficulty arises not from incompetence in either part of the organisation, but from their collision.

This is why so many leadership decisions and strategies stall despite good intent and capable people. What appears, on the surface, as disagreement about priorities or pace is often something else: a mismatch in how uncertainty is carried, and when learning is allowed to end. Until that is seen clearly, efforts to “align” tend to produce more discussion, not movement.

Enshitification

Alongside these internal shifts, something bigger has changed in the background. For a long time, “Digital” carried more than technical meaning. It arrived with aspiration attached — a shorthand for progress, improvement, and, often, moral confidence. Technology companies were seen not just as suppliers, but as exemplars of a different way of working and thinking.

That relationship has matured. Large technology firms are now deeply embedded in the fabric of organisations and society, subject to regulation, scrutiny, and visible trade-offs of their own. Big tech no longer holds the aspirational place it occupied a decade ago. No longer is “Digital'“ the same short hand for great design that delights users. For may people it’s now a synonym for enshitification and attached to a degradation in user experience.

This matters because it removes a simplifying force. The word “Digital” can no longer act as a shared label for direction or legitimacy. It no longer tell leaders what what to value or where to start. After Digital is the time for us to reconsider the narratives we wish to borrow. It’s time to own more decisions about the direction we’ll take and borrow less legitimacy from the decisions of others.

What Leadership Looks Like After Digital

In this context, leadership work has changed in ways that titles don’t always reflect. Authority rarely comes with clean boundaries, and few significant decisions sit comfortably within a single function. Most consequential choices now cut across product, technology, operations, risk, and delivery — each with its own obligations and constraints. The result is leadership that is inherently cross-cutting, whether or not roles were designed that way.

Let’s look at product leadership as one example. For many product leaders the work is no longer primarily about shaping features or teams, but about shaping the conditions under which decisions are made. It involves judging when learning has reached a point of sufficiency, when commitment is necessary despite incomplete information, and when deferring a decision carries greater risk than making one. Progress depends less on optimisation within a domain and more on judgement across them.

Today, decisions are the things delivered by leaders. These decisions are made amidst ambiguity. And in the spaces between different bits of the organisation.

After Digital, leadership is therefore less about championing a particular way of working, and more about holding competing logics long enough to choose between them. Any such choice will privilege one mode of operation over another, and its cost will be felt somewhere in the system. The task of leadership is not to avoid that cost, but to recognise it, name it, and take responsibility for it.

Why Things Get Stuck

What sits underneath much of this friction is not a lack of skill or goodwill, but a collision between different default ways of operating. Parts of the organisation are oriented towards learning: keeping options open, testing assumptions, and delaying commitment until uncertainty has reduced. Other parts are oriented towards stability: setting standards, reducing variance, and making decisions that can be applied consistently and safely over time.

Each of these modes is rational. Each is optimising against a different kind of failure. Difficulties arise when decisions cut across both at once. What one side experiences as necessary exploration, the other experiences as unacceptable exposure. What one experiences as responsible constraint, the other experiences as premature closure. Neither is acting irrationally but they are acting inside different logics.

This is why so many leadership decisions stall despite clear intent and capable people. The disagreement is rarely about objectives. More often, it is about timing: when learning should end, when constraints should begin, and who is willing to carry uncertainty in the meantime. Until that underlying tension is recognised, discussions tend to circle: producing more analysis, more negotiation, and little movement.

Jurisdiction

What is missing in many of these situations is not effort or alignment, but a way of deciding where different ways of working should legitimately apply. When a single approach is treated as universally correct, it tends to harden into belief. Over time, that belief becomes ideological: defended everywhere, even where it no longer fits.

Jurisdiction offers a different way of seeing the problem. Instead of asking which way of working should prevail, it asks where each mode is appropriate. Some parts of an organisation benefit from extended exploration and learning; others depend on stability, repeatability, and risk control. The difficulty arises when either mode is expected to govern the whole system.

Seen this way, many familiar tensions shift. Disagreements are no longer about values or competence, but about placement. The task becomes one of coherence: ensuring that different parts of the organisation can operate according to what they require, while still relating to one another in predictable ways. The notion of ‘jurisdiction’ does not eliminate tension, but it makes it intelligible and therefore manageable — without forcing false compromise or dominance.

Movement after Digital

Movement in this context does not come from better alignment or more detailed plans. It comes from making explicit choices about which way of operating should dominate at a given moment — and accepting the consequences of that choice. Learning cannot continue indefinitely, and neither can constraint be imposed without cost. Progress depends on recognising when each is appropriate, and on being willing to name the trade-offs involved.

For leaders, this means treating mode switching as a deliberate act of judgement rather than an emergent compromise. Deciding when exploration gives way to commitment, or when stability must temporarily yield to learning, is rarely comfortable. Each decision privileges one set of risks over another. The work is not to eliminate that tension, but to hold it long enough to choose. And to take responsibility for where the cost lands.

This is the moment when we have to stop managing work and instead improve workflow. Leadership is about steering through our organisation. Optimise for how our most important opportunities flow through our organisation as smoothly as possible. Something that requires us to stand back and objectively identify the biggest friction in our human systems.

For many senior leaders, this will already feel familiar. The difficulty has not been a lack of effort or intent, but the absence of language that accurately describes the task. After Digital is simply a way of naming the work that remains.

Epilogue

The ‘GDS way of working’ drew me in to Digital Government during the last decade. It was fantastic and exciting at the time, truly transformative. And now I want to see a ‘GDS 2.0’.

I don’t mean literally changing the Government Digital Service. I do mean a modern, updated ‘movement’ to help us navigate whatever it is we’re creating after “Digital”.

This movement has to be more pragmatic, less ideological: trying to establish a single way of working is doomed to fail.
This movement has to be more context aware: we need more ‘plays’ based on the realities of our complicated organisations, fewer manuals and operating models based on fictional descriptions of aspirational organisations.

The movement that comes next needs to be less about invention and more about integration. Less about belief and more about judgement. Coherence becomes the aim, not uniformity. Leadership consists of making choices across competing logics, without the comfort of a single dominant story to justify them.

I don’t know what the next movement after Digital will be or what it’ll be called but I do know that it’ll be made by us. For my part I’m going to use my newsletter to think about it, write about it, and share what I’m seeing.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, read your articles, and generally work with you all to create whatever it is that comes next.

Product in Service by Scott Colfer

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