Two sentences, one impossible ask

Every executive hears the same two sentences today.

"We need to accelerate change."

"We need to reduce our costs."

The board wants innovation. Investors want efficiency. Customers want better digital services. Competitors move faster every year. Meanwhile inflation drives up operational costs, slowdowns hit revenue, markets get more volatile, and margins shrink.

So organizations get asked to do something extremely difficult: change faster while spending less.

Digital transformation promises exactly that. It's the answer sitting in every strategy deck. And it's also, quietly, the trap.

The trap nobody names

Here's the pattern I keep seeing, in company after company, industry after industry:

The more they try to transform, the harder transformation becomes.

Not because people are lazy, or the strategy is wrong, or the technology is bad. It's because transformation initiatives don't just fix complexity — they add to it. And the cure organizations reach for is often the poison.

I call this the Change Trap Cycle. Once you see it, you can't unsee it in your own organization.

Walking through the loop

It goes something like this:

Complexity slows us down. Legacy systems, tangled processes, too many exceptions. Change takes longer than it should.
We launch a transformation to fix it. New platform, new operating model, new program with a name and a logo. The intent is real. The urgency is real.
The initiative adds new systems, new processes, new exceptions on top of the old ones. Old systems rarely get switched off. Old processes rarely get retired. We layer the new on top of the old, because untangling the old is scarier and slower than building something new next to it.
Complexity increases, not decreases. The organization now has more moving parts than before the transformation started — the legacy it never removed, plus the new thing it just added.
The next initiative takes even longer. Because there's more to navigate, more to integrate with, more stakeholders to align, more exceptions to respect.
Leadership concludes: we need to transform faster. And the cycle begins again, at a higher altitude of complexity than before.

This is why so many transformation programs report early wins and then quietly go quiet. The scoreboard doesn't lie forever — it just takes a year or two to catch up.

Why this feels familiar (and why Martec's Law isn't the whole story)

If you've read about Martec's Law, you know one half of this: technology changes exponentially, organizations change logarithmically, and the gap between the two grows every year. That gap is real, and it explains part of the pressure everyone feels.

But the Change Trap Cycle explains something Martec's Law doesn't: why the organization's own attempts to close that gap often widen it instead. It's not just that the world moves faster than we do. It's that our response to that speed gap is frequently self-defeating — we bolt on complexity in the name of reducing it.

Where most organizations intervene (and why it doesn't work)

Most leadership teams try to break the cycle at step 2 or step 6 — they change the transformation itself. New methodology. New vendor. New reorg. New name for the program office.

That's intervening at the symptom, not the mechanism. The methodology isn't the problem. The mechanism is: new things get added, old things don't get removed, and nobody is accountable for the net complexity of the whole.

There is one point in this cycle where an intervention actually breaks the loop instead of feeding it. It isn't where most people look, and it isn't a bigger transformation program. It's a discipline decision, made upstream, before the next initiative is even funded.

I walk through exactly where that point is — and what it looks like in practice — in the book. It's one of the ideas the rest of the chapters are built on, because once you see where the real leverage sits, you stop launching transformations that make next year harder than this one.

Get the first chapter, free

The book launches in about three weeks. If you want to see how the Change Trap Cycle connects to what comes next — including where that single intervention point sits — you can get the first chapter free right now, plus €5 off at launch, just by signing up.

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