Instead, digital transformation requires you to take a holistic view of your enterprise’s IT and organizational states. When you do, your transformational process becomes low risk: it’s incremental and consists only of improvements to assets you already own.

“Goals should not be about building products or delivering project scope. They should explain why such a thing would be useful . . . [they] should present the problem to be solved, not the solution,”

The humble leader recognizes that he or she has a fiduciary responsibility to deliver outcomes, yet cannot just order the world to be as he or she likes. He or she works for the complex system, rather than the other way around.

The real question for those leading digital transformations is how to maximize the business value they get from IT, not how to make projects finish on time.

Jim Highsmith is on target when he says, “Productivity measures in general make little sense in knowledge work.”13 Designing good software and infrastructure, solving business problems, and creating IT strategies are knowledge work.

The challenge, therefore, is not just to create an innovation; it’s to create a constant stream of innovations, to make innovation a normal part of doing business every day. And that can best be done if we overcome the duality of IT and the business.

Just as DevOps lets us manage a seamless flow of capability creation, our IT systems architecture now consists of a seamless blend of components. It has become difficult to say where one product ends and another begins. The digital world is one of continuous, rather than discrete, elements.

And the change to tomorrow is not accretive—to morph into the company it’ll be tomorrow, it will need to undo some of the doing it did yesterday, not just add more doing.

“What we want is not necessarily the lowest possible cost level,” he says. “What we want is the optimal cost level, the