We’ve Been Writing in Cursive, and Now We Need to Print
Most companies don’t fail at strategy. They fail at translation.
For years, we’ve built systems that made sense to us but not to the people or machines trying to use them.
Our data mirrored how we think - messy, contextual, full of shortcuts.
Our ideas lived in slides, conversations, and habits.
We built the modern enterprise in cursive.
AI as the Translator
AI isn’t a new pen. It’s the translator.
It’s taking decades of human shorthand and turning it into something machines can act on.
That process is forcing clarity.
It’s exposing how much of our work lives in the grey; half-defined, inconsistent, assumed.
AI can’t thrive there.
It learns from what’s written clearly and connected.
When Clarity Gets Uncomfortable
In my own business, we never had a perfect sales playbook.
We had strategy and intent, and we updated the CRM to reflect components.
But we still weren’t aligned.
It looked like cursive - familiar to some, confusing to others.
We saw the same in project delivery.
Change wasn’t the core issue. Shared understanding was.
That’s what AI is surfacing across every organization:
It’s not automating the old. It’s revealing what was never clear in the first place.
From Handwriting to Hyperlinking
Every major platform is building the same bridge.
Salesforce, ServiceNow, HubSpot, Microsoft, Google - all chasing comprehension to add value and increase outcomes.
The real transformation isn’t in the software.
It’s in us.
We’re learning to express knowledge so clearly that both humans and machines can act on it.
That’s the shift.
From handwriting to hyperlinking.
From cursive to clarity.
The Takeaway
Transformation used to mean digitizing what we did.
Now it means making what we mean understandable at scale.
AI won’t erase the grey.
It will help us navigate it better.
But only if we start printing what we’ve been writing in cursive.