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Keith is a thought leader in ’s Insight Forum (become a member).
Making the right technology purchase is harder than ever.
Why? Because we’re wired to avoid pain, not to chase potential. As people, we are wired to avoid risk, more than we are to take swings for upside or the hope of ‘potentially better.’
This is painfully apparent in how we work, how we evaluate choices, and how we make decisions. In fact, loss aversion is so powerful that it was scientifically proven that the pain of losing something (like $100) is twice as powerful a motivator as the joy associated with gaining an equal amount.
When we contemplate the speed of technology innovation, the pressure to ‘digitally transform,’ and the sheer investment being placed on trying to cut through the noise, buyers are faced with a perfect storm creating a near paralytic state.
The term “FOMO” (Fear of Missing Out) is used to explain the feeling you have when you miss out on a fun night with your friends, but the FOMO in technology is just as real. Let’s combine a few conflicting headwinds that contribute to FOMO:
- Every media outlet, consultant, industry expert, and armchair technologist constantly expresses the need to digitally transform.
- Business leaders are told they must do some combination of the following: implement AI, secure their environments, automate processes, and gain insights, all while reducing headcount and opex. Technology solutions seem to be the clear winner in achieving many of these things.
- Soaring investments and constant hype have created an information overload with no off switch.
- Leaders are also barraged with alarming statistics such as 70% of all digital transformation projects fail (McKinsey), and only 16% of software deployments are deemed a success (Standish Group).
How can people possibly chart a course or make a technology decision when the deck is stacked against them? It seems like there is an endless supply of solutions to problems we didn’t know we had, and on the flip side, a stated documented high probability of failure if we get it wrong.
My advice? Start with the people.
I might not be popular for saying this, but for most use cases, technology is the easy part. Unless you are one of the folks working on quantum chipsets, writing new storage algorithms, or finding ways to train our next set of LLMs with greater efficiency, the tech problem you have is relatively linear. Where most people go wrong is prioritizing the technology as the solution, rather than the improvement it makes to the way people create value for their customers or team members.
With the fear of getting it wrong, an inordinate amount of time is spent evaluating the best solution, and often the tech evaluation hamster wheel leads you so far away from your problems you can’t remember the initial challenge you were solving.
As Albert Einstein reportedly said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution.”
Most leaders that feel stuck are afraid of what they will lose if they get it wrong, or if they miss out on some massive opportunity, but if the priority becomes truly understanding the current challenges faced, defining a mechanism to solve it and then looking to technology, the risk of getting it wrong is going to decrease significantly.
Technology can be powerful, but it’s not magic.
Most tech failures come from unclear goals, poor alignment, and a lack of context, not from bad design. Solve the real problem first. The right tools will follow.
