The Tools Aren''t the Problem

Setting adoption targets for new technologies is one of the dumbest things you can do as a leader trying to accelerate delivery.

I’ll give you a partial pass on the soft stuff. Mandating “we’re all using Scrum by Q4” is mostly harmless. It reveals a lack of leadership, but it won’t burn the house down. The danger comes when you apply that same thinking to fundamental changes in how you work.

In 2015, I was on a tiger team learning how to move from quarterly to daily delivery. We did this by doing it, not theorizing about it. Continuous delivery isn’t a technology. It’s an entirely new way of working that requires a new mindset, new skills, and months of deliberate practice. After about 18 months, we had several teams on the path and some shipping to production daily.

Then there was a change at the Sr. Director level.

The new director presented to the VP that all teams would be “doing CD” by Q1 of the next year. So it must be so. He mandated pipelines rolled out to every team in the area, without the ability to teach the modern software development techniques required to use them safely. The teams got the tools without the foundation. Production incidents followed. Then added process. Then the banning of CD for all teams. The good people left.

That’s what happens when you confuse tools with transformation.

I’m watching the same movie play out with AI. Companies are investing heavily in the platforms. They’re setting 80% adoption mandates and pushing people to use the tools. They’re shocked when things don’t improve, or when things get worse. They think the tools are the secret sauce instead of understanding a simple truth: tools only amplify what already exists. Good engineering discipline, technical leadership, clear thinking about quality and flow. If you have those things, AI accelerates you. If you don’t, AI accelerates your problems.

AI rewards the practices many of us have been beating the drum about for decades: behavior-driven development,
continuous delivery, test driven development, fast feedback loops. If your teams don’t have a solid foundation in these, an AI adoption
mandate is not going to fix that. It’s going to expose it.

Don’t mandate adoption. Educate on the fundamentals. Use AI to clean up your tech debt and remove delivery friction. That’s where speed comes from, without the risk of becoming the next cautionary headline.

The tools were never the problem. The foundation was. Fix that first.