Digital Insights

I had a conversation recently with a web team at a college who were stuck in a painfully familiar trap. They had a sprawling, chaotic website that had grown like an untended garden over the years. They knew it was letting users down. They had plenty of ideas for how to make it better. And yet, every time they tried to improve things, they hit a wall.Sound familiar? I suspect it might.The team had been there for years, and they had developed what I call "institutional scar tissue." Every suggestion was met with an internal voice saying "we tried that once and it didn't work" or "I don't have the power to change that." They had been worn down by years of small defeats until the only option that felt possible was incremental improvement to what already existed.And incremental improvement, when applied to something fundamentally broken, is a bit like repainting a house with a crumbling foundation. Sure, it looks nicer from the street, but you're still one bad storm away from serious structural failure.The trap of