A candid conversation with Marco on why so many local transformation programmes stall, and the leadership blind spots driving the failure rate.
In boardrooms across Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, “digital transformation” has become one of the most over-promised and under-delivered phrases of the decade. Budgets are approved, platforms are bought, launch events are held and two years later, little has genuinely changed. We sat down with Marco Pires, consultant/director at AIC to unpack why South African organisations keep falling short, and what leaders are still getting wrong.
Let’s start bluntly. Most research suggests the majority of digital transformation programmes fail to deliver on their promise. Is South Africa any different?
Not meaningfully, and in some respects we have it harder. According to Marco, the failure rate here mirrors the global picture, but our constraints amplify the consequences. “We import the same playbooks that were written for stable-power, high-bandwidth, deep-talent markets,” he says, “and then we’re surprised when they don’t survive contact with the South African reality.”
But Marco is quick to stress that the root cause is rarely technological. “The technology almost always works. What fails is the assumption that buying it is the same as transforming. Leaders approve a platform, tick the box, and expect the business to reinvent itself around software it barely understands.”
So where does it actually go wrong first?
At the top, and earlier than most executives are willing to admit. According to Marco, the first failure is conflating digitisation with transformation. “Scanning your paper forms into PDFs is digitisation. Rewiring how you serve a customer, price a product or allocate capital, that’s transformation. Most boards fund the first and expect the returns of the second. The gap between those two is where the money and the credibility disappear.”
You’ve pointed at leadership specifically. What is it that leaders get wrong?
Marco identifies three recurring mistakes. “First, they delegate the vision to IT and then wonder why it has no business teeth. Transformation handed to the technology function becomes a technology project, full stop, and technology projects optimise for delivery, not for changing how the organisation makes money.”
“Second, leaders sponsor the launch and then vanish during the hard middle the eighteen unglamorous months where adoption is actually won or lost. And third, they reward activity over outcomes: number of systems deployed, not customers retained or costs removed.” Marco is emphatic that transformation is a leadership behaviour long before it is a technology budget.
South Africa has genuine structural challenges the energy environment, connectivity costs, a tight skills market. How much of the failure is environmental rather than self-inflicted?
“The environment is real, and you can’t wish it away,” Marco concedes. “But it has also become the most convenient excuse in the country.” In his view, resilient organisations design for the South African reality rather than pretending it doesn’t exist building for intermittent power and variable bandwidth, retaining scarce skills deliberately, and partnering where they cannot realistically build. “The organisations that fail tend to use load-shedding and the skills market as permission to stand still. The ones that succeed treat the same constraints as a design brief.”
The skills question keeps surfacing. We train people and they emigrate or get poached. How do you build digital capability that survives that churn?
According to Marco, the mistake is treating skills as something you buy once rather than a renewable system you cultivate. “If your only lever is salary, you’ll always lose to someone with a bigger balance sheet or a foreign currency.” He argues for deliberately pairing scarce senior talent with juniors so knowledge compounds internally instead of walking out the door, building genuine career paths, and competing on the quality of the problems people get to solve. “Talent doesn’t only leave for money. It leaves boredom, and it leaves the sense that the organisation has no future worth staying for.”
Let’s talk culture. Is resistance from employees the real blocker?
Marco pushes back on the cliché. “People don’t resist change they resist loss. Loss of status, loss of competence, loss of certainty about where they fit.” If a transformation makes the average employee feel newly incompetent or quietly surplus, he says, resistance is the rational response, not the irrational one. “Good leaders make the new way of working a path to mattering more, not less. Get that right and your so-called resisters become your most credible champions.”
What does good actually look like? Give us the markers of an organisation getting this right.
Marco lists a handful of tells. “There’s a clear line of sight from a real customer or citizen problem to the technology being deployed. An executive can explain the ‘why’ without reaching for a slide. The metrics are tied to outcomes, not output. The organisation is willing to kill projects that aren’t working instead of protecting them for political reasons. And critically, there’s patience they treat transformation as a multi-year discipline rather than a campaign with a launch date and a ribbon.”
If you could put one instruction on every South African boardroom wall, what would it be?
Marco doesn’t hesitate. “Stop buying transformation and start leading it. The technology is the easy part it’s available, it’s proven, and your competitors have access to exactly the same tools. The hard part is the honesty, the consistency and the staying power. And those aren’t things a vendor can sell you. They’re decisions leaders make, every quarter, whether anyone is watching or not.”
It is an uncomfortable message for organisations hoping to spend their way out of the problem. But on Marco’s reading, that discomfort is precisely the point and the starting line for the ones that finally get it right.
About Marco Pires: Consultant/Director, AIC. Marco is an MBA graduate and has progressive leadership experience spanning enterprise technology, AI governance, operational management, and organisational change
