🎬 The Next 90 Days: A fictional digital transformation journey – grounded in reality
🔹 This article compiles the full Next 90 Days series, originally published as a sequence of LinkedIn posts in April and May 2025.
📗 Episode 0 – The Setup
In 20+ years of driving digital transformation, I have seen the pattern repeat: ✅ The ambition is real. ⚙️ The tools are available. 🤖 The AI and digital pilots are everywhere.
But impact? That is harder. Why? Because it is not just a technology problem. It is a leadership challenge. A trust issue. A strategic misalignment that lives in the messy middle.
🏢 Meet Medibiovia: Fictional company. Real tensions.
Employees feel overwhelmed. Customers frustrated. Leaders under pressure to prove value.
Enter Emma, the new COO. Her mandate: “Make digital deliver. Turn AI into value. You have 90 days.”
🧭 What to Expect
This series follows Emma’s journey — through resistance, tough calls, and the quiet wins that create real momentum. It is fiction rooted in first-hand experience.
For C-suite leaders navigating the digital transformation.
📘 Episode 1 – The Wake-Up Call
We don’t need a digital strategy.
Emma had seen the briefing deck. Forty slides. All glossy charts and acronyms. But when Raj, the CEO, looked her in the eye and said — “You’ve got 90 days to make digital and AI work.” — she knew she needed to hear the real story. Not the PowerPoint version.
So, in her first week as COO, she called a full-day offsite with the senior leadership team. No slides. No consultants. Just one flipchart. And one question: “What’s working?”
At first, the energy was high. Everyone had something to showcase:
Each function had moved fast. Innovated. Delivered pilots. And yet… nothing connected. No shared goals. No measurable outcomes.
Later that afternoon, one of the enterprise architects shared a landscape slide of the company’s AI initiatives. It was impressive: dozens of tools, pilots, logos.The room slowly turned. “I don’t know what ops is doing with that data.” “That’s not how we define margin in my team.” “We were never consulted.” “We already tried that — didn’t land.”
Emma listened. Took notes. Let the discomfort hang. Then she walked to the flipchart. Drew a large circle. And inside it, she wrote:
✍️ VALUE.
She turned to the group. “Which of these initiatives is creating real business value — today?”Silence. That evening, Emma reflected in her notebook: “We don’t need a digital strategy. We need a business strategy that understands what digital and AI are for.”
Transformation fatigue often hides behind impressive activity. But momentum without aligned focus is just expensive noise.
📘 Episode 2 – The Real Problem
We don’t have a technology problem. We have a direction problem.
The silence in the room after Emma wrote “VALUE” on the flipchart had said it all. Over the next few days, the pushback started to roll in: “We’ve already invested in these tools.” “It’s not our fault adoption was low.” “Legal blocked our integration — we couldn’t go live.” “We’ve already presented this to the board.”
Emma had seen this before. Well-meaning teams, pulling in different directions. So she scheduled three meetings: One with Holger, the CFO. One with Maya, the Head of Strategy. One with Raj, the CEO.
Each conversation started the same way: “We don’t have a technology problem. We have a direction problem.” Then she put three business realities on the table:
“These are what we need to solve,” she said. “Not just launch another pilot. Not just push another dashboard.” “What if we stopped measuring transformation by how many tools or AI pilots we deploy — and started measuring it by how these numbers move? ”Holger looked cautious. Maya intrigued. Raj silent.
Raj leaned back. “It’s a bold move,” he said. “Let’s treat it like one — and align the way we lead.”
The biggest risk in transformation? It is not slowing down. It is continuing at full speed — with no shared definition of success.
📘 Episode 3 – The Data Disillusion
We spend more time aligning on the numbers than acting on them.
The offsite had rattled the surface. Now Emma needed to see what was underneath. She picked one use case that had come up repeatedly: improving supply chain forecasting. On paper, the business case was clear. But the outcomes were not. So she asked a simple question: “What does the data tell us?” And watched three teams produce three different answers.
All technically correct. All completely incompatible. “Forecast errors alone cost us $2 million last quarter,” someone admitted. “And we still do not agree on what the number is."
Emma sat with a business analyst later that day. Bright. Frustrated. “We spend more time aligning on the numbers than acting on them,” he said.
Then came the breaking point. A functional leader cancelled a planned workshop with the transformation office: “What’s the point,” she said, “if no one trusts the numbers?”
Emma closed her notebook. This was no longer about reporting. This was the erosion of confidence.
If your data foundation is fractured, your strategy will be too. You cannot automate what you cannot trust.
📘 Episode 4 – The Adoption Void
"Another tool?” someone said. “We weren’t even trained on the last one."
The numbers were not the only thing breaking. Emma wanted to understand how the work actually got done. So she left the exec floor and started shadowing teams.
📍 First stop: customer operations. They were using a workflow automation tool launched six months ago. In theory, it streamlined intake. In practice? “I still send most things by email. The tool adds five clicks.”
📍 Then: HR. A new onboarding assistant had been rolled out. But no one remembered the training. One person had saved the old Excel checklist to their desktop. “Another tool?” someone said. “We weren’t even trained on the last one.” Emma asked who maintained it. The answer came back flat: “Someone built it in Python, but they left. No one here can touch the code.”
Later, she learned the project had been funded out of a local cost center. And it was not just internal. Emma pulled customer service feedback from the last quarter. The message was clear: Slow. Fragmented. Hard to navigate. One customer even asked whether Medibiovia had “fallen behind the times.”
That afternoon, an employee caught her in the hallway. He glanced around, then leaned in, voice low. “You want to fix the future? Start by fixing what broke last quarter.” He turned away, muttering under his breath as he disappeared down the corridor. Emma knew this was not about AI. It was lack of focus on solving users’ problems.
Transformation that forgets the frontline is not transformation. It is disruption in disguise.
📘 Episode 5 – The Strategic Reset
You are killing what we have built.
Emma had seen enough. Disjointed data. Unused tools. Demoralized teams. The symptoms were everywhere. But now, the path forward had been agreed. So she stood in front of the leadership team to follow through:
“If it does not serve these goals,” she said, “it stops now.” The room went quiet.
Then came the resistance. “You’re killing innovation.” “We’ve already sunk cost into this.” “You can’t just stop everything.” Especially vocal: Sophie, Director of Customer Service. Her team had spent months piloting a GenAI chatbot to reduce response times. “We built this to take pressure off our teams — it is already reducing wait times. You’re killing what we’ve built.”
“No,” Emma said. “I’m making it deliver.” Sophie sat back, arms crossed. Her silence was louder than words.
Saying no risks resistance — but it is how clarity gets enforced. You cannot scale everything. You can only scale what is aligned.
📘 Episode 6 – The Compliance Collision
Do we want another PR disaster?
After weeks of tension, something finally clicked. Emma’s team had delivered two MVPs tied directly to business priorities:
Pilot users gave strong feedback. Frontline teams called them “the first tools that actually help.” Momentum was back.
Until it was not. Three days before the onboarding MVP was scheduled for a wider launch, Mark, the CISO, requested a review. Nothing unusual — until he read the system documentation. “Where’s the data flow mapping?” “What consent mechanism was used for customer data?” “Which jurisdictions are these records stored in?” Emma did not have good answers. And she could see where this was going.
By the end of the day, the launch was frozen.
At the next leadership meeting, Raj, the CEO, was livid. “How did we get this far without validating compliance?” Emma owned it. But not everyone was as measured. One leader —still bitter from having their own initiative shelved — spoke up: “This is what happens when you shut everyone else down.” The air in the room shifted.
That night, Emma received a message from Raj. Brief. Blunt. “Do we want another PR disaster?” No one replied.
Ignore compliance, and your transformation dies on the launchpad.The cost of trust is never as high as the cost of losing it.
📘 Episode 7 – Trust by Design
Are you here to explain it — or fix it?
Emma did not try to defend the oversight. She did not push back. She did something unexpected.
She walked down the hall to Mark’s office. “Got a minute?” He looked up, arms crossed. “Depends. Are you here to explain it — or fix it?” Emma did not flinch. “Both. I want you to co-lead this with me.” No posturing. No spin. Just an offer: “Let’s fix this — together.”
What followed were two intense weeks of late nights and deep work. Together, they built a new execution framework grounded in:
They did not just review code. They redrew the map for how transformation would move forward.
The relaunch was tense. Eyes on the metrics. Eyes on legal.
But the system held. It did not just pass scrutiny — it performed better. Employees trusted it. Customers noticed the clarity of the experience — more structured, more accountable, more professional. It gave them confidence that Medibiovia took data and ethics seriously. And for the first time, even the skeptical leaders leaned in.
After the relaunch, Mark turned to Emma and said: “This is the first time I’ve felt confident putting my name on one of these.” Then after a pause: “And meaning it.”
You cannot bolt on trust at the end. It must be built in — through clear roles, early accountability, and shared ownership. Ethics and compliance are not the enemy of innovation. They are what make innovation sustainable.
📘 Episode 8 – Built to Scale
We’ve got something that works. Let’s not screw it up.
The customer onboarding solution was no longer a pilot. It was live. Auditable. Trusted. Integrated. And it worked.
Confidence was rising — not because of flashy features, but because the system now made sense.
David, the Head of Commercial, pulled Emma aside. “Emma, can we scale this to other product lines?” Emma smiled. “Yes. But only if we keep building the same way — together.”
For the first time, teams were aligning around value, not tech. The new model was working:
At the next leadership meeting, no one mentioned tools. They talked about outcomes. Raj, the CEO, looked across the room. “Emma — well done. This is what I hoped for when we started.”
A pause. Then someone asked: “Where do we go next?” Emma paused. Then replied: “We’ve got something that works. Let’s not screw it up.”
Then, more seriously: “We stay focused. We build on what delivered. And we shape the roadmap to scale what matters.”
The next initiative?
🏁 It came from the team — cross-functional, aligned, and focused on impact.
Big wins build belief. But belief without direction burns out fast. You need an early outcome to unlock momentum — and a clear long view to stay focused and scale what matters.
📚 Links to the Original Posts
Narrative by Roland Schmid. Wording and visual support assisted by ChatGPT. Illustrations generated using AI tools to align with the series’ digital transformation theme.
Digital Transformation Executive
5moThank you for your insightful story Roland Schmid. Let's collaborate to make sure the beautiful Basel Area is prepared to ride the AI wave 🌊
Exploring New Ways of Working I Transformation Architect I Organizational Change I 📈 Growth & Scale-up I Futures Studies & Foresight I 💡Strategic Innovation I🐥 Proud Mum I 🌱 Deputy CGO
5mothanks Roland for sharing your reflections, very insightful. Looking forward to the upcoming 90 days with Emma