Why Your Digital Transformation Needs Three Leaders, Not One
· Nia
Here's a pattern I keep seeing in companies struggling with digital transformation: they appoint a single leader — a Chief Digital Officer, a VP of Innovation, a Head of AI — hand them a budget and a mandate, and wait for magic to happen.
It almost never works.
New research from MIT's Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) explains why, and their answer is elegantly simple: you don't need a digital leader. You need three types of them, working in concert.
The Three Bad Habits Killing Your Digital Initiatives
Before we get to the solution, let's name the disease. According to MIT CISR researchers Nils Fonstad, Martin Mocker, and Jukka Salonen, most companies failing at digital innovation share three destructive patterns:
1. Traditional project management as default. They fully fund initiatives upfront and measure success by whether projects came in on time and on budget. This sounds reasonable until you realize that digital innovation is inherently uncertain. Funding everything upfront is like betting your entire bankroll on a single hand before seeing your cards.
2. Initiative independence without coordination. Each team operates in isolation. They build their own data pipelines, their own AI models, their own user interfaces. The result? Duplicated effort, fragmented systems, and initiatives that work beautifully in a pilot but can't scale because they weren't designed to integrate with anything else.
3. Delegating strategy to a single leader or unit. One person or one team becomes "the digital people." Everyone else mentally offloads responsibility. Strategy gets siloed, cross-functional collaboration dies, and digital becomes a department instead of a capability.
If you're recognizing your organization in any of these, you're not alone. Most companies I've observed exhibit at least two of the three.
The Troika Model: Three Leaders, One System
MIT CISR's research proposes a network of three complementary leader types, each with distinct responsibilities but operating as a coordinated system. Think of them as interlocking gears — each turns independently, but together they drive the machine.
1. Initiative Leaders — The Builders
These are the people accountable for individual digital offerings. They develop innovations in phases, generate evidence about desirability, feasibility, and viability, and secure resources for the next phase only when continued investment is warranted.
The critical insight: the best companies assign two co-leaders per initiative — one from IT/digital focused on technical feasibility, and one from the business side focused on user needs and strategic alignment. This dual-leadership model prevents the two most common failure modes: technically brilliant solutions nobody wants, and user-requested features that can't scale.
Real example: Repsol, the global energy company, implemented this model for their digital program. With dual co-leaders (product owner + technical lead) and phased funding, their business units launched 505 digital innovation initiatives and successfully scaled more than three-quarters of them over five years. The result: a 20% increase in cash flow from operations.
Three-quarters. Scaled. In a traditional enterprise. That's not a marginal improvement — that's a fundamentally different success rate than the industry average.
2. Shared Resource Leaders — The Connectors
Here's where it gets interesting. Autonomy is essential for teams to move fast, but autonomy without coordination is just chaos with good intentions.
Shared resource leaders are functional experts — in AI, cloud computing, cybersecurity, UX, or even HR and legal — who manage teams of specialists focused on overcoming common scaling constraints. They assemble reusable resources (platforms, tools, talent pools) that serve multiple initiatives.
Think of them as the people who build the roads while initiative leaders build the buildings. Without roads, every building is an island. Without buildings, roads go nowhere.
Why this matters in 2026: With AI adoption accelerating across every industry, the shared resource model is more critical than ever. Most organizations have dozens of teams building AI solutions independently — each training their own models, each managing their own data pipelines, each making their own governance decisions. Shared resource leaders consolidate this into platforms that amplify every team's work.
At Repsol, shared resource hubs in data analytics/AI, robotics, and UX design were explicitly tied to initiative outcomes. The AI hub didn't exist to "do AI" abstractly — it existed to solve specific scaling constraints that multiple initiative teams faced.
3. Portfolio Leaders — The Pruners
This is the role most companies are missing entirely. Portfolio leaders take a hypothesis-driven approach to managing the collection of digital initiatives as a whole. They decide which initiatives get continued investment based on evidence, which get restructured, and which get killed.
This is the hardest job because it requires saying no. It requires killing projects that people have invested time, emotion, and career capital into. But without active portfolio management, organizations accumulate zombie initiatives — not dead enough to cancel, not alive enough to deliver value, but consuming resources indefinitely.
Portfolio leaders ask questions like:
- Are we investing in the right mix of incremental vs. transformational initiatives?
- Which initiatives are generating evidence of value, and which are perpetually "almost there"?
- Where are we duplicating effort across the portfolio?
- What shared resources are bottlenecking multiple teams?
Why the Single-Leader Model Fails
Let me be direct about why the traditional "appoint a CDO" approach doesn't work: it violates a basic principle of organizational design. Complex challenges require distributed cognition. No single human — regardless of talent — can simultaneously:
- Understand technical feasibility across dozens of technology domains
- Maintain deep relationships with business stakeholders in every unit
- Make evidence-based funding decisions across a portfolio of 50+ initiatives
- Coordinate shared resources across functional boundaries
- Keep pace with the daily decisions that each initiative requires
It's not a talent problem. It's a structural impossibility. The troika model distributes these responsibilities across complementary roles, each with appropriate scope and expertise.
Making It Work: The Practical Playbook
If you're ready to move from single-leader to troika model, here's what I'd recommend based on the research:
Start with portfolio visibility. Before restructuring leadership, get honest about what you actually have. How many digital initiatives are running? What stage are they at? What evidence exists for their value? Most executives I talk to can't answer these questions with confidence.
Identify your shared resource gaps. Where are multiple teams solving the same problem independently? That's where your first shared resource leader should focus. Common culprits: data infrastructure, ML ops, identity/authentication, and design systems.
Pilot dual initiative leadership. Pick your three most strategically important initiatives and assign co-leaders (business + technical). Give them phased funding tied to evidence gates. Observe what changes.
Build the pruning muscle. Create a quarterly portfolio review with explicit criteria for continuation, restructuring, or termination. This is culturally the hardest step, but it's what separates organizations that accumulate technical debt from those that compound digital value.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Here's what I think the MIT research really reveals: most organizations don't have an innovation problem. They have a coordination problem disguised as an innovation problem.
They're generating plenty of ideas, launching plenty of pilots, hiring plenty of talent. But without the structural coordination that three complementary leader types provide, all that energy dissipates. It's like having a powerful engine with no transmission — lots of noise, very little forward motion.
The companies winning at digital transformation in 2026 aren't the ones with the biggest AI budgets or the flashiest innovation labs. They're the ones who've solved the mundane-sounding but brutally difficult problem of coordinating distributed digital efforts across complex organizations.
Three leaders, not one. It's not about dividing responsibility — it's about multiplying capability.