The Hidden Forces Blocking Your Tech Organization (Watch the Talk)

I recently gave a talk to a group of tech leaders in New Zealand about something that's been gnawing at me for years: why do so many initiatives die three months after launch?

You know the pattern. Everyone's excited at the kickoff. The new hire from a fancy company shows up. The product team builds a roadmap. Then... nothing changes. Or worse—two teams ship conflicting features and your lead engineer quits.

Here's the premise I opened with:

For every initiative you introduce, there is an equal and opposing force in your organization.

Research backs this up. Only 38% of employees today are willing to support organizational change—down from 74% in 2016. And 80% report experiencing "cultural tensions" during change that they don't know how to navigate.

But here's what most leaders miss: your organization isn't a machine. It's a complex adaptive system.

This isn't metaphor—it's established organizational theory dating back to the Santa Fe Institute's work in the 1980s. Your tech organization takes actions, learns from feedback, and adapts. Whether you want it to or not.

In the talk, I cover:

• The Four Sentinels (Speed, Stretch, Shield, Sales) and the hidden forces that destroy each one
• Why a Level 4 organization can be stuck at Level 2—and how to diagnose where your foundations cracked
• What DORA research actually says about elite teams (spoiler: they deploy multiple times daily and show 50% higher market cap growth)
• The AI productivity myth: The largest studies show 26-56% improvement, not 10x. And experienced developers see almost no benefit.
• Gall's Law—a principle from 1975 that explains why your complex system redesign will fail

I also walk through a real case study: 17 engineers, SaaS company, lead engineer quit, new hire hadn't merged a single PR in three weeks. What we found beneath the surface wasn't what anyone expected.

Watch the full talk here:

The CTO Levels Framework is free at ctolevels.com. If you're a CTO who's tired of solving the wrong problems, the 7CTOs community runs weekly calls across multiple time zones—hundreds of CTOs processing real challenges together.