Bridging the Technology-Organization Gap: How Martec’s Law is Biting You in the Back

The art of selective innovation: Making peace with Martec's Law in an exponential world.

In our recent Briefings, we’ve explored the dramatically accelerating pace of technological innovation, particularly in artificial intelligence and machine learning (there seemingly is a new foundational model popping up every week now). While these advances are remarkable (and dizzying), they highlight a fundamental challenge that every modern organization faces.

At the heart of this challenge lies Martec’s Law, elegantly expressed by Scott Brinker as:

Technology changes exponentially, but organizations change logarithmically.

This disparity creates a widening gap that demands our attention and strategic consideration.

Consider how your organization’s technology landscape has evolved even over the past 26 months (ever since ChatGPT launched). The tools and capabilities available today likely far exceed what was possible when you last updated your strategic plan. Yet organizational processes, cultural norms, and operational methods tend to evolve much more gradually.

When this gap between technological possibility and organizational capability becomes too wide, organizations often face what we might call a “reset point” – a moment requiring fundamental restructuring to remain competitive. These resets can be particularly challenging because they frequently occur after the optimal window for change has passed. And as Ernest Hemingway so astutely remarked in his novel “The Sun Also Rises”: “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways: Gradually, then suddenly.”

To address this challenge proactively, we often employ the “Killer Competitor” exercise with leadership teams. The premise is straightforward: imagine building a competitor from the ground up today, free from legacy constraints. What would they do differently? This exercise consistently yields valuable insights about potential initiatives and opportunities. However, it also reveals an interesting pattern: while participants readily identify new initiatives to launch or accelerate (“start” or “speed up” in the parlance of the exercise), they hardly ever identify existing activities to discontinue (“stop”).

This tendency to add rather than subtract creates significant additional organizational strain. Each new initiative requires resources, attention, and change management capacity – all finite resources within any organization.

The solution lies in strategic selectivity. Drawing inspiration from design pioneer Dieter Rams’ philosophy of “less, but better,” organizations must make deliberate choices about which technological changes to adopt and implement. The goal isn’t to embrace every new technology, but rather to select and execute those changes that align with your organizational capabilities and strategic objectives.

Success in today’s rapidly evolving landscape doesn’t require chasing every technological advancement. Instead, it demands thoughtful selection of which changes to pursue and excellence in their implementation – combined with an organizations ability and willingness to kill existing, alas mis-aligned, initiatives.

@Pascal