Reflections from Community Summit NA 2026

A few weeks ago, I returned from my 12^th Community Summit conference. When I wasn’t teaching my Academy courses or presenting, I tried to attend as many sessions as I could (between stints at the puppy snuggle booth, of course). One session that really sticks with me today was presented by Chris Gannon of Microsoft. It was called “Beyond the Tech: Why Solutions Fail Without Human Alignment (and How to Fix It).”

I love a good user adoption session, so this was hard to resist. I wrote down this quote he shared: “when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” It was an excellent parallel to the many times we have tried to solve tech scenarios by making assumptions. We assume a model-driven app will fix the issue. We assume the requirements we received reflect the user’s pain points. We assume many things and continue to iterate and build.

When we know how to build something, we tend to interpret problems through the tools that we know. Chris suggested that we ask one simple question to counter our assumptions and technical bias: Help me understand what you are seeing.

Brilliant. Simple. This one question can help change the conversation between a user and someone who is building the solution.

You can build a technically brilliant Dynamics 365 or Power Platform solution, but if the users do not use it, what is the point?

In my notes from this session, we have: “Chris’s session, cool shit.” True story. Chris delivered this session through beautiful storytelling, his takeaways were clear, and it goes down as the most impactful session I attended at Summit 2026.

Thanks, Chris, for challenging us to understand our own biases and assumptions and ask the simple question, “help me understand what you are seeing.” Going forward, I will be incorporating that exact question into the requirements-gathering process with my customers.