Catalog & Cocktails: The Honest, No-BS Data Podcast
Sep 3, 2026 · 6 min · 5 segments
This is the takeaway episode with Patrick McGarry, Federal CDO at ServiceNow and author of *The Adaptive Organization*, who has spent years watching organizations accumulate data and tools but fail to…
Juan SequedaHostPatrick McGarryGuestWhat are the organizational challenges that you're seeing out there? And obviously, you recently wrote and released a book, The Adaptive Organization, which goes into a lot of what we what we talked about today about organizations really struggling with overcoming the gap of just thinking about technology and not really focusing enough on the outcomes.
which I think is a good representation of the contrast between the anti-pattern or the anti-result versus how organizations should actually be oriented.
You first talked about ownership and outcomes and making sure that you don't lose sight of what you're trying to do.
In the case of government or even like DOD, DOW, thinking about what is the mission and what are we focused on? I think that's a key aspect.
And for every organization, regardless of what industry you're in, thinking about what is your mission, what are your goals, what are the results you're trying to achieve? That's what matters.
Even when technology trends emerge and grow, AI is obviously the latest huge wave around that.
And you mentioned that, you know, federal government is slow from sometimes going from an idea to an actual thing and the tech sometimes moves on by then.
And some of the symptoms there are like we leave people behind, we forget the art of the possible, knowledge sharing.
And we talked a little bit about organizational dynamics, like bringing in new blood, but really leveraging your tendered people as well, kind of blending that knowledge sharing together.
And you mentioned that like these semantic initiatives inside organizations can be very important because it focuses on translation issues.
So I thought that was one place where it doesn't necessarily mean technology, but it's an example of where kind of like socio technical together can can have a big impact.
Um, and you had a, um, framework, uh, that you advocated as part of your book and some of your latest writings now, which is a bit cutely called catalog.
Uh, but, uh, you know, culture and talent analytics and AI technology and architecture alignment, leadership and governance operations and delivery growth and measurement.
It's a pretty comprehensive framework for thinking about how to, how to have in a more adaptive organization, how to do proper sort of change in support of, uh, of different technology initiatives.
What are the organizational challenges that you're seeing out there? And obviously, you recently wrote and released a book, The Adaptive Organization, which goes into a lot of what we what we talked about today about organizations really struggling with overcoming the gap of just thinking about technology and not really focusing enough on the outcomes.
which I think is a good representation of the contrast between the anti-pattern or the anti-result versus how organizations should actually be oriented.
You first talked about ownership and outcomes and making sure that you don't lose sight of what you're trying to do.
In the case of government or even like DOD, DOW, thinking about what is the mission and what are we focused on? I think that's a key aspect.
And for every organization, regardless of what industry you're in, thinking about what is your mission, what are your goals, what are the results you're trying to achieve? That's what matters.
Even when technology trends emerge and grow, AI is obviously the latest huge wave around that.
And you mentioned that, you know, federal government is slow from sometimes going from an idea to an actual thing and the tech sometimes moves on by then.
And some of the symptoms there are like we leave people behind, we forget the art of the possible, knowledge sharing.
And we talked a little bit about organizational dynamics, like bringing in new blood, but really leveraging your tendered people as well, kind of blending that knowledge sharing together.
And you mentioned that like these semantic initiatives inside organizations can be very important because it focuses on translation issues.
So I thought that was one place where it doesn't necessarily mean technology, but it's an example of where kind of like socio technical together can can have a big impact.
Um, and you had a, um, framework, uh, that you advocated as part of your book and some of your latest writings now, which is a bit cutely called catalog.
Uh, but, uh, you know, culture and talent analytics and AI technology and architecture alignment, leadership and governance operations and delivery growth and measurement.
It's a pretty comprehensive framework for thinking about how to, how to have in a more adaptive organization, how to do proper sort of change in support of, uh, of different technology initiatives.
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