While gadget-heads, Googlers, and governments all over the globe are going gaga for GPTs, we’ve left thousands of leaders, entrepreneurs, and workers behind, and we’re leaving behind others still.

When the electrician installed the charger for my electric vehicle last year, he wrote the quote and invoice on carbon paper.

Redefining The Digital Divide

We once defined The Digital Divide as the gulf of access – or not – to the Internet – but it’s more insidious than that. As simple access to the internet moves into ubiquity, we really ought to redefine the Digital Divide.

Today’s Digital Divide is the gulf in those skills which enable us to exploit digital technologies to add value to our lives. It’s about familiarity, transferrable skills, learning agility and confidence. The Digital Divide is as much a problem of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, perhaps more so, than it is a problem of telecommunications infrastructure.

Successful Digital Transformation happens when leaders deliberately build their desired future state from a strong foundation of ethics, through strategy into to specific operational and tactical requirements. If any of these elements are absent or faulty the long-term viability of the change is doomed.

The Human Aspect of Digital Readiness

Last year my team hired someone with – on paper – outstanding experience. The role was a work-from-home role analogous to the role the candidate was currently in. The candidate had clearly displayed the job-specific skills and had an outstanding performance record. After our candidate accepted, we shipped them a welcome package with some small gifts, their IT equipment (laptop, dual monitors etc) and our quick-start guide.

After we picked our jaws up off the floor, we soon learned the underlying reason: they lacked basic computer skills & the confidence to learn.

Perhaps we might have trained those skills given enough time, but we didn’t have a Computers 101 curriculum ready to deploy. Even if we did, we could not overcome our colleague’s anxiety and save the resignation.

We had merely shipped them a basic laptop and monitor – arguably the most rudimentary of digital tools available – and only asked of them to set up the PC and log in to Windows. Yet the digital divide they felt was so palpable that they quit before they started.

This underscores the importance of how we address Digital Transformation. More than technology, it's about people, developing transferable skills, and change-readiness. Successful digital transformation requires the confidence to abandon that which no longer serves us, the discipline to change today, and the outlook to keep one eye on the horizon. It requires adaptive leaders who can steer their organizations with empathy.

Is the digital divide really about getting more internet to more people, or is it about getting more people to more internet? What have you learned along the way?