Digital Culture Is Built from Habits

A few years ago I read three books back to back that turned out to be about the same thing: Renshaw’s Building Digital Culture, Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, and, oddly, Ready Player One. My original write-up summarised them. Looking back, the interesting part is what they say together: digital transformation is a habit problem, not a technology problem.

Tools are the easy part

Organisations love to transform by purchase: a new cloud, a new portal, a new AI assistant licence for everyone. The tools arrive, the slide deck says “digital”, and six months later most people are working the way they did before, with an extra login.

Renshaw’s point is that culture comes first: adaptability, collaboration, using data to understand users rather than guessing, and taking privacy, security and ethics seriously as part of the work rather than a gate at the end. None of that ships with a tool.

Culture is what people do on a Tuesday

Duhigg’s habit loop — cue, routine, reward — is the most practical lens I know for culture. A team’s culture is just its habits at scale:

• Do people write a test before they fix a bug, or after an incident?
• Does a new service start with logging and alerts, or get them after its first outage?
• Do decisions get written down, or live in someone’s head?
• When the data disagrees with a senior opinion, which wins?

You don’t change those with a memo. You change them by changing the cue, making the routine easier, and making the reward visible.

Platforms are habit engineering

This is where my view has moved most since I first wrote about it. Platform engineering is, at heart, habit design:

• Make the good routine the default. A golden path that creates a service with CI, tests, observability and security scanning already wired in turns best practice into the path of least resistance. See Golden Paths and the Recommended Routine.
• Put cues where the work happens. A failing check in the pull request is a far better cue than a quarterly audit.
• Make the reward visible. Faster lead time, fewer incidents, less waiting on other teams — and measured, so people can see it. DORA Metrics are a reasonable start.

The same applies to AI adoption today. Handing everyone an assistant changes little. Giving teams shared instructions, examples, evaluation habits and safe defaults changes how they work.

The cautionary tale

Ready Player One is the reminder on the other side: technology used without balance isolates people and hollows things out. In a team, the equivalent is measuring activity because it’s easy — tickets closed, lines written, AI suggestions accepted — and slowly optimising for the metric instead of the outcome. Habits built around the wrong reward are still habits, and they’re hard to undo.

Takeaways

• Treat transformation as changing daily habits, not installing tools.
• Use cue, routine, reward: put the cue in the workflow, make the routine easy, make the reward visible.
• Platforms and golden paths are how you make good habits the default at scale.
• Measure outcomes, not activity, or you’ll build habits around the wrong thing.

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Originally written in 2022 → Building a Digital Culture