The usage report is not measuring adoption. It’s measuring the tool you paid for.
Somebody pulls the numbers before the meeting. Fourteen percent monthly active. It’s a disappointing figure, and everyone in the room treats it as a starting point — early days, adoption curve, we’ll get there.
The number is wrong. Not slightly wrong. Wrong in a way that changes what the meeting should have been about.
It counts seats on the platform you licensed. It cannot count the tab open on somebody’s own laptop at nine at night. Or the phone that rewrote a difficult email in a parking lot. Or the person who has been running first drafts through something for the better part of a year and has never mentioned it, because nobody asked and there was no visible upside to volunteering.
Real usage in most knowledge organizations is not fourteen percent. Nobody knows what it is. That is the finding.
You are not at the beginning of this
The model most leadership teams are running is we are deciding whether to adopt this.
That decision was made some time ago, without you, one person at a time, by people with deadlines.
What is actually in front of you is not an evaluation. It’s an unsupervised rollout already in progress, at unknown scale, with no standards, no review, and no shared idea of what good looks like. That is a considerably less comfortable meeting, and it’s the accurate one.
Why nobody tells you
It feels like cheating. In any organization that sells craft, the first instinct about assisted work is that using help is a confession of not being able to do it alone. So the work gets submitted and the method doesn’t.
There is no upside to disclosure. Best case, you say something and nothing happens. Worst case, you become the example in a policy nobody has finished writing. People are good at that arithmetic. They do it instantly and they get it right.
Rank filters everything. You don’t hear it because of what you are, not because of anything you’ve said. Conversation about method travels sideways — between peers, at lunch, in a message thread you’re not in. It travels upward only when there’s a reason. An open-door policy is not a reason.
I have presented usage figures I believed. They were off by a wide margin, and the dashboard wasn’t the problem. I had made it very slightly costly to tell me the truth. Slightly is all it takes.
What the invisibility costs
The risk everyone names first is data — what gets pasted where. That one is real, and it is also the easiest thing on this list to fix, because it’s a sentence, said clearly, more than once.
The three that matter more are harder to see, which is precisely the problem.
There is no standard. Twelve people are each deciding privately what counts as good enough to ship. No shared bar, because there has never been a shared conversation. The bar is now whatever twelve separate Tuesdays produced.
Nothing compounds. Somebody has genuinely solved something — found the method that turns a four-hour task into forty minutes. Nobody else will ever have it. The organization pays for the same discovery over and over and books it as individual talent.
Nothing gets corrected. Weak output ships. Not obviously weak — plausibly weak. Confidently wrong in a register that reads as competent. And nobody upstream knows to look for it, because officially it didn’t happen that way.
Ask like an amnesty, not an audit
The instinct is to send a survey. Don’t. A survey asks people to write down, with their name attached, the thing they have spent a year not saying.
You say it first, out loud, in a room. That you assume people are already using these tools. That you are not looking for who. That you want to know what’s working, so it can become a standard instead of a secret.
Then be specific about the rules in the affirmative. “Approved tools only” is a fence, not guidance. People need to know what they may do, what may never leave the building under any circumstances, and who to ask when it’s ambiguous. One page. Written down. Ambiguity is not caution — it’s the thing that drives the behaviour underground in the first place.
And then the part that decides whether any of it was real: something has to happen to the answer.
If people tell you and nothing changes — no clarified rule, no adopted method, no visible thanks — you have taught them something efficient and permanent about what honesty is worth here. You will not get a second attempt at that question.
The uncomfortable reading of shadow adoption is that it isn’t a discipline problem at all. It’s a report card on the teaching.
People went and taught themselves — alone, unevenly, in private — because nothing was offered and asking cost more than not asking.
They didn’t wait for permission. They just didn’t tell you they’d stopped waiting.
I write about creative leadership, AI adoption, and the parts of the job nobody puts in a keynote. One post every two weeks.