I recently completed a course called “Reskilling and Organizational Transformation” as part of my MBA program at Globis University. For someone like me — managing IT operations on the ground — it was one of the most personally relevant courses I’ve taken in years. I want to work through what I learned, in my own words.
How the course was structured
The six-day program was built around case studies, using real and fictional companies to examine reskilling and organizational change from multiple angles.
- Day 1 (AT&T): What is reskilling? How does it relate to competitive advantage?
- Day 2 (Hitachi): The reskilling process — and the obstacles that derail it
- Day 3 (Nakatake Pharma — fictional): Unlearning. Why “letting go before you learn” is essential
- Day 4 (Mastbuy Electric — fictional): Job crafting. How to find meaning after acquiring new skills
- Day 5 (DBS Bank): Organizations that keep transforming. How to sustain a capability shift
- Day 6: Individual final presentations
Real companies like AT&T and Hitachi alternated with fictional case companies, examining transformation from both the organizational and the individual perspective. This wasn’t a framework lecture series. It was six days of asking: how does this apply to my organization, right now?
The assumption that broke first: reskilling is not a program
Before the course, I thought of reskilling as “a multi-year capability development initiative.” Design the training, run it, measure skill uplift, mark it complete. That was my mental model. The DBS Bank case on Day 5 dismantled it completely. DBS, Singapore’s largest bank, began its digital transformation in 2009. Phase 1: rebuild the IT infrastructure. Phase 2: cultivate a digital culture across the organization (a re-education effort covering 22,000 people). Phase 3: create new value through AI and platform models. The process is still ongoing — more than 15 years in, with no end date. This is not a project with a completion milestone. It is the embedding of transformation into the organization’s DNA. Using the language from the course: the real goal of reskilling is to develop Dynamic Capability itself — the ongoing cycle of Sensing (detecting environmental change), Seizing (capturing the opportunity), and Transforming (restructuring the organization). What stayed with me most was the generational framing. Generation 1 rebuilds the infrastructure. Generation 2 embeds a data culture. Generation 3 creates new value through AI. What gets passed down is not a technology — it’s a culture of continuous questioning. In IT terms: the goal is not to teach a technology. The goal is to build an organization that keeps adapting to technological change.
Unlearning comes before learning
“What to let go of” matters more than “what to learn next.” This was another core idea of the course. Researcher Hislop describes unlearning in three stages. Freeze is the state of being convinced that the current approach is sufficient — new information arrives and nothing moves. Unfreeze happens when something breaks that conviction: a cross-boundary experience, direct customer feedback, or a small but visible failure. Refreeze is when the new approach becomes embedded in daily routine. Technical professionals carry a strong identity tied to their domain expertise. “I am a specialist in this technology” — that conviction, operating below conscious awareness, quietly blocks movement into new territory. Even when new knowledge is introduced, it gets reinterpreted through the old cognitive filter. The freeze has to thaw first. The sequence matters. That framing landed clearly for me.
Three assumptions holding Japanese IT workplaces back
Working through the cases, I identified three beliefs that are particularly common in Japanese IT environments — and that function as resistance to change. ① “I won’t get fired for staying the same” In a culture shaped by lifetime employment and seniority-based promotion, the penalty for not changing is diffuse and slow. But the real question isn’t “will I lose my job?” It’s “will I still be able to contribute value to the people I serve?” Client organizations are moving toward AI-first operations — and they are developing internal IT literacy at pace. The era of “we don’t understand it, so we’ll leave it to the IT team” is already ending. ② “I’m not ready yet” (the bar for “ready” is impossibly high) A perfectionist tendency, common in Japanese professional culture: “learn it completely before using it.” This mindset delays the start indefinitely. New technology is not mastered before use — it is learned through use. The practical counter is to minimize the entry barrier: start with a no-code tool, run one small experiment. Set “I can try it” as the first goal, not “I can do it perfectly.” The wall falls from there. ③ “What I do now will still be needed” This is the most entrenched belief. Past success generates an optimism bias: “my current expertise will remain relevant.” Researcher March called this the competency trap — dependence on what we’re already good at crowds out the space to learn what’s new. Stable IT infrastructure operations remain necessary — but they are no longer a source of differentiation on their own.
Why small groups are the rational starting point
How do you actually start a transformation? The concept that stayed with me most from the course was Social Contagion Theory (Christakis & Fowler). Emotions and behaviors spread from person to person — like a contagion. Research has shown this for obesity, happiness, and smoking cessation. The behavior doesn’t require instruction. It spreads through proximity. Organizational change works the same way. When a manager starts learning something new, their team starts learning. When a colleague tries something different, the adjacent person wants to try too. Proximity-driven behavior change is a stronger motivator than policy or mandate. This is why the starting point for transformation should not be a company-wide initiative — it should be a small group. Psychological safety forms first in small clusters of five to eight people. Two or three volunteers try something, and it spreads to five to eight, and from there into the wider organization. It takes time. But it is the only path to something that actually sticks. Large-scale launches generate proportionally large resistance, and tend to fail.
What you can do starting today: job crafting
For anyone who can’t wait for the organization to change around them: there is a concept called job crafting. The idea is that even without a change in role or structure, an individual can redefine the meaning, content, and relationships of their own work. It operates in three dimensions. Task crafting: gradually shifting the content of what you do. Relational crafting: proactively building new connections. Cognitive crafting: reinterpreting the meaning of the work itself. Cognitive crafting is the most immediately accessible. “Someone who handles system incidents” and “someone who protects business continuity for clients and generates value through that” are doing the same work — but operating from entirely different motivations. Nothing about the role or the org chart has to change. The reinterpretation alone shifts how the work is approached. And that reinterpretation can be the first step into unlearning.
Closing thoughts
As the DBS case shows, transformation takes more than fifteen years. It doesn’t close out as a project — it accumulates across generations. That’s exactly why starting today matters. From where I stand, managing an IT team: the signal I send by learning something new is stronger than any instruction I could give. Watching a manager learn is a more powerful motivator than being told to. Start small. Let it spread. That’s my conclusion.
