A client asked me recently what was the #1 issue holding organizations back from stronger digital performance, across all sizes and industries. I hesitated a few seconds before arriving at leadership. Inside web teams, which we make a case for as the foundation of most digital success, face increasing responsibilities to not only serve the whole organization with publishing, but also lead entirely new engagement or mobilization functions, while driving innovation across all programs.

Come on, be honest, this has happened to you, right? You're all fired up after a meeting because you've come up with the perfect strategy to help your department - and maybe the whole organization - move forward in a big way. You write it up, deliver it to your boss, and...nothing happens. Your boss doesn't think it's so great and is so focused on other things she won't really tell you why. Or she tells you to work it out with an underling, who shows no interest in helping "you" succeed. Maybe she brought it up at a meeting and it got shot down by one of her peers. Maybe she switched jobs, and the new gal isn't so interested in ideas from the "old regime".

It's sad how many great, thoughtful ideas for change end up D.O.A. like this, but this is kind of the way of life inside many institutions isn't it?

One of my wiser clients once told me “Culture eats strategy. Every time”. If you’ve worked in this field for a while now you see how many change projects fail to achieve their (admittedly often too high) expectations. The idea of embracing change sounds great on paper, but as any therapist will tell you, it's extremely difficult to break away from years of patterned behaviour. Add all those individual pattens into a structured system, and you've got a big barrier standing in the way of innovation.

My experience from leading digital change projects for 15 years is that if you don’t use the catalyst of a digital project to shift the culture of your institution towards a more innovative and responsive model, you’re really just building a website.