In Digital Innovation, It’s Not the Technology That Lags. It’s Us
By the time your team finishes its next status meeting, something somewhere has changed.
Maybe it’s a competitor quietly adopting AI to automate what still takes you 12 clicks and three approvals. Maybe it’s a startup rethinking your entire category, less bloated, more curious, unafraid of failure. Maybe it’s just another tool launched that no one on your team will hear about until it’s already mainstream.
This is not a crisis. It’s not even new. It’s just gravity now.
Technology moves fast. That’s the part we’ve all agreed on. What we often ignore is what moves slowly: us.
Scott Brinker once captured this with a single sentence that feels less like a quote and more like an X-ray of every boardroom conversation about “digital transformation”:
“Technology changes exponentially. Organizations change logarithmically.”
This is Martec’s Law. And like most truths, it hides in plain sight.
It explains why organizations with ample budgets, clear roadmaps, and competent teams still get caught flat-footed. Why “transformation” programs span years but still get leapfrogged by someone with fewer resources but less inertia.
The problem isn’t knowing. It’s moving.
If you visualize both curves, exponential (e^x) for technology, and logarithmic (log x) for organizational change, the divergence becomes striking.
At x = 1, they’re nearly aligned. But by x = 10, technology is 22,000% ahead. That’s not a gap. It’s a canyon. And it widens faster than most companies are structurally capable of responding.
The curve you don’t see on a dashboard
Every organization has two timelines running in parallel.
One belongs to technology, rapid, unforgiving, always nudging forward. The other belongs to the organization, structured, careful, shaped by meetings, memos, and legacy.
The first timeline doesn’t care how long your procurement cycle is. The second doesn’t understand how fast the ground is shifting.
You can visualize it: one line shoots up like a hockey stick. The other curves gently, then flattens as resistance grows. The space between them? That’s where missed opportunities, eroding margins, and “how did we not see this coming?” moments live.
And the kicker? Most organizations do see it coming. Just not together. IT sees the future. Finance sees risk. Operations sees disruption. Leadership sees PowerPoint slides.
Nobody’s wrong. They’re just not aligned.
Kodak didn’t die of ignorance
The story gets told like a punchline: Kodak invented the digital camera and still lost.
But look closer. Kodak didn’t lack foresight. They lacked permission to pivot.
Film was profitable. Shareholders were comfortable. The internal logic said “not yet.” The market didn’t care.
This is the true danger: not technological ignorance, but organizational drag. The kind that rewards caution in a moment that demands conviction. The kind that waits for clarity while competitors act on probability.
The kind that confuses alignment with consensus.
Innovation isn’t always a tool, It’s mostly behavior
If you’re a manager, here’s a sobering truth: buying new tech doesn’t make your organization innovative.
Innovation isn’t having an AI tool in your tech stack. It’s building a culture where someone junior can suggest killing a legacy process without being politely ignored.
It’s less about “digitizing” your current workflow and more about asking if the workflow still makes sense.
It’s replacing best practices with next practices.
If your org still makes strategic decisions by committee but buys tools like it’s 2030, you’re not innovating. You’re dressing up.
What can YOU actually Do?
Run at two speeds Trying to overhaul your entire organization in one go is like trying to do surgery while sprinting. Smart companies run bimodal: keep the core steady, but create protected space to experiment. Build a lab mindset inside the business. One group optimizes. Another explores.
Redefine ROI Not every innovation pays off in quarters. Some pay in capability. Some pay in culture. The ROI of experimentation is survival, not short-term uplift.
Modular thinking beats monolithic thinking Most legacy systems break when touched. That’s not a technical failure, it’s an architectural one. Design for modularity. Make it easier to plug in the future without tearing out the past.
Stop outsourcing digital thinking Every department is now a tech department. Not everyone needs to code, but everyone needs to understand how their role changes when data becomes the default and automation becomes expected. Digital transformation is not a department. It’s a language.
Build for change, not just scale Most organizations obsess over scaling what works. But what if the thing that works today won’t work tomorrow? Build for adaptability. Make change part of the operating model, not a panic response.
What happens if you don’t?
Here’s the brutal part: no one notices when you fall behind, until you’re too far behind to catch up.
Markets don’t announce when they’re done waiting. Talent doesn’t tell you when your culture feels outdated. Customers don’t protest, they just quietly switch.
The gap between your potential and your actual value creation widens until the organization becomes efficient at delivering diminishing returns.
The losing gap as a leadership job
The gap isn’t inevitable. But closing it isn’t tactical, it’s philosophical.
It requires leaders who are not just tech-literate but change-literate.
It requires cultures that don’t idolize stability more than progress.
It requires managers who aren’t just asking “what do we need to do,” but “who do we need to become?”
Because in the end, digital transformation is not about the future of technology.
It’s about the present of your organization.
And whether it can handle what it already sees coming.