Key takeaways
- Wins become habits, habits become redesigned workflows, and when other teams reuse those fixes, how the company works changes.
- The order matters: earn trust, show value, drive adoption, build capability, scale.
- Leaders see value by team and workflow, never private work.
A simple loop
Lucy runs a simple coaching loop: she observes how work happens (with permission), spots the opportunity, plans with the person, coaches people as they build, then celebrates and, if they choose, shares the result. One turn of that loop is a win for one person. The interesting part is what happens when it repeats.
The bridge from a win to the business
- Wins
- Habits
- Redesigned workflows
- Fixes other teams reuse
- A new way of working
One quick win does not create lasting change; people revert unless the new behavior becomes automatic through repeated, felt value. So Lucy keeps the practice going until it sticks, because motivation alone fades first. When a workflow sticks, she suggests the adjacent one. When a solution works for one person, she helps turn it into something others can adopt.
The order that works
Skip a stage and the chain breaks: skip trust and people avoid the system; skip value and adoption is just for show; skip adoption and wins stay one-off; skip capability and wins don’t compound; skip scale and know-how stays with a few people.
- Earn trust
Permission to observe real work, earned by how the system is built, not by a policy promise.
Proof: permission granted and kept - Show value
The first useful win lands on day one, on work you chose.
Proof: hours back on named workflows - Drive adoption
Using your company’s approved AI becomes the easy way. Habits form.
Proof: usage you no longer have to push - Build capability
People go from using AI to building with it. Solutions for your specific work come from your own teams.
Proof: solutions you can count - Scale
Proven wins spread to other teams, credited to their builders and inside your guardrails. How the company works changes.
Proof: proven fixes reused across teams
What leaders see
The same observation that makes coaching specific gives leaders an honest view of the business, aggregated and shown only for teams large enough that no one can be singled out: value created on named workflows, capability trends, approved-tool adoption with shadow AI (unapproved tools people bring to work) falling, and unmet tool demand ready for a buy-or-retire decision. That lets leaders fund, expand or stop on evidence, and finally answer the board’s question about what the AI budget is buying.
Person, team, company
The payoffs show up in four places: revenue grows because the business moves at the speed its people can build; cost falls as consultant spend becomes capability that amortizes and unused software is retired on evidence; risk drops because educated people make fewer dangerous mistakes and the governed path out-competes shadow AI; and companies keep their best people, because the people most likely to leave are the ones who most want to fix things, and now they can. See what businesses get.
Sources and notes
- Examples in this series are illustrative, not claimed customer results.
- Phillippa Lally, Cornelia H. M. van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts and Jane Wardle, “How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world,” European Journal of Social Psychology 40(6), 2010.
Founder & CEO of Lucy Labs. Twenty years running enterprise transformation by hand in big tech and Global 2000 companies, now building it into software.
