The most critical digital workplace skill we still don’t know how to hire, measure, or reward

Over the past year, I’ve been involved in more large enterprise digital workplace programs than at any other point in my career. That kind of exposure has a way of sharpening patterns – one stands out clearly.

New and newly revised intranet programs rarely fail out loud. They don’t blow up. They fade. They fail politely through unresolved confusion, quiet disengagement, and a slow erosion of trust that never quite shows up on a dashboard. In most cases, that decay starts after launch.

Momentum drops. Governance gets fuzzy. Stakeholders drift out of alignment. Content sprawl creeps in. Over time, the intranet stops being something employees rely on and becomes something they are simply supposed to use.

When that friction becomes impossible to ignore, organizations tend to reach for the most legible response: buying more technology. Confusion gets reframed as a feature gap.

Roadmaps expand. Platform replacements or “AI-driven” solutions start to feel like progress. But when the underlying problem is conceptual rather than technical, upgrading the platform is like installing a high-performance engine while the steering wheel isn’t connected to the tires. The motion increases. Control does not.

Unless someone knows how to help the organization make sense of the change itself, the confusion persists. The real problem is rarely the platform. It is the absence of a specific, hard-to-name capability that sits at the intersection of strategy, communication, and human behavior.

Systems Engineering for Humans

I use the term sense-making to describe this critical but under-recognized capability in digital workplace programs. It is not an alternative to governance. It is the operational layer that makes governance work in complex organizations.

A traditional project role might focus on whether a feature shipped on time. A sense-maker asks a different question: does this actually align with how work happens here?

More importantly, they have the judgment, measurement discipline, and architectural resolve to recommend stopping it when it doesn’t. This is what I mean by Systems Engineering for Humans.

In practice, this work looks like translating executive intent into language teams can act on. It means creating shared context across IT, HR, Communications, and the business. It involves anticipating resistance before misalignment turns into conflict.

Without this capability, decision rights may exist on paper, but they fall apart under pressure. Decisions appear to be made, then quietly unravel once implementation begins.

When sense-making is missing, the damage often shows up in the Information Architecture (IA). Architecture is the physical expression of organizational intent. Without someone accountable for coherence, IA gradually reflects internal politics instead of employee needs.

Taxonomies fragment because hard prioritization decisions never get made. Search degrades as outdated and competing versions of content pile up. You can invest heavily in UX software, but if the underlying business logic has not been clearly understood and aligned, polish cannot create clarity.

Across large enterprise digital workplace programs, this pattern shows up in familiar ways. Platforms get replaced every few years due to “adoption issues.” Large portions of intranet content become redundant or outdated within a year or two.

Search remediation drags on for months after launch. Multi-million-dollar migrations get triggered by organizational confusion rather than technical limits.

The Trap of Legible Hiring

Organizations struggle to hire for this capability because it does not map cleanly to traditional signals. Hiring processes tend to reward what feels concrete and defensible: platform expertise, certifications, and tool-specific experience. Fluency in a particular technology does not guarantee the ability to understand how decisions actually move through a complex human system.

In practice, a “Certification in Tool X” often becomes a filter that screens out the very sense-making capability the organization needs most. The result is teams of skilled builders who can configure features but lack the strategic depth to explain why some features should not exist at all.

Most organizations already have people doing this work. They simply do not recognize it as a role, measure it as a capability, or protect it as leadership.

That blind spot creates a quiet dependency. Recognition systems reward visibility over enablement. The people doing the invisible work of aligning stakeholders and reframing decisions keep things moving without accumulating influence or authority. Over time, decision-making power and credit collect elsewhere, while sense-makers absorb the complexity that keeps programs from stalling.

This is often where shiny object syndrome takes over. A headless CMS or an AI chatbot gets layered onto an already disorganized system in an attempt to regain momentum. Without foundational clarity, all the organization has done is automate the chaos and broadcast it at scale.

A Leadership Challenge

Digital workplace success now depends on whether leaders are willing to see, name, and invest in the work that actually makes change stick. Technology is accelerating faster than organizational clarity. The gap between what tools can do and what people are supported to understand continues to widen.

Employees do not just need better platforms. They need clear narratives, real decision-making, and leaders who can hold ambiguity instead of pushing it down the organization.

The future belongs to organizations that intentionally design roles, career paths, and recognition models that treat sense-making as essential infrastructure. When they get this right, intranet programs do not rely on individual heroics. They scale through shared understanding.

A CMS is just a container. It does not care whether what you put inside it is true, useful, or understood. If your organization depends on sense-makers but does not know how to recognize or reward them, the problem is not your tech stack.

It is your leadership design.

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