Comparing the human grieving process to what organizations go through when trying to digitally transform might sound like a stretch. And yet, while working with 200 or so large organizations over the past decade, I began to notice a pattern: strong parallels between Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s classic book, On Death and Dying, and the journey organizations undergo while attempting to digitally transform.
Kübler-Ross describes the grieving process in five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Those stages, it turns out, are uncomfortably close to what many CEOs and their teams have experienced. We can view the five stages of digital transformation in overlapping chronological order, with the aim of learning from the efforts of others.
