#90: Digital Transformation: You Can't See It to Believe It with Pip Coburn and Brynne Thompson

Welcome to our series on digital transformation. We are in a period in which every product or service we touch has already been defined in some digital way: each grain of wheat, each picture on our phone, each manicure, each life insurance policy has a digital marker, trail, story, or a digital facilitator.

"Digital transformation" can become a statement of the obvious, of the time and space we live in....except we don't see or experience many of these digital markers. We don't feel them so much, we don't sense them, all the way, really. Digital doesn't always "live" in our physical world as something easy to point to for concrete changes happening all around us. Instead, we have abstract ideas like the "cloud", (which is really one of the best uses of language we have thus far to describe something abstract in a way we can understand for this new age), and we have trouble translating what's happening digitally to our very physical world. This sounds like an opportunity to discover blind spots.

We are doing this series on digital transformation because we think it is grossly underestimated. Sometimes, we can’t always characterize the very water we are swimming in. Sometimes, we don't even know we're swimming in water. Over the next few weeks, we will put some concrete examples around this very big topic with a series of interviews. I hope you enjoy it.