CONCEPT
Technology Adoption Framework
Goldratt’s four questions that most organizations skip when adopting new technology—and whose neglect turns a powerful innovation into an elaborate rearrangement of the same constraint.
The most expensive pattern in the history of organizational change is also the most predictable: a technology removes a limitation, and the organization celebrates while continuing to operate by every rule designed to accommodate that limitation.
Eliyahu Goldratt identified this pattern in his 2000 novel
Necessary But Not Sufficient and distilled it into four questions: What is the power of the technology? What limitation does it diminish? What old rules accommodated that limitation? What new rules should govern now? The first two questions are the celebration—organizations answer them enthusiastically and repeatedly. The last two are where the leverage lives—and where the organizational scar tissue of every rule built around the old constraint quietly becomes the new bottleneck. In the AI transition, the
coordination bottleneck that governed software development for fifty years has been eliminated, and the old rules—team structures, sprint ceremonies, specification formats, capacity-planning hierarchies—persist in most organizations as invisible new constraints on a system whose nature has fundamentally changed. The framework does not promise that technology delivers on its