Monday Myth: Talking About Transformation Creates Transformation

There exists a comforting myth inside modern organisations: that transformation begins, advances, or even completes itself through language. Speak about scale, announce ambition, rename initiatives, refresh narratives, and reality will somehow follow. This belief feels sophisticated. It sounds modern. It flatters intelligence.

It also fails every time. Talking does not transform systems. Action under constraint does.

In the fragile, postmodern corporate era, language has replaced causality. Words no longer describe change. They pretend to create it. Reframing substitutes for execution. Intent masquerades as progress. Leaders believe that declaring transformation generates momentum, while organisations quietly accumulate entropy beneath the surface.

This myth survives because it feels productive without demanding sacrifice.

When Language Replaces Decisions

Real transformation always carries a cost. It disrupts comfort, redistributes power, exposes incompetence, and invalidates legacy success. Systems resist this naturally. Language offers an elegant escape hatch.

By speaking instead of deciding, organisations avoid:

• Cutting initiatives that no longer justify their existence
• Removing ownership from teams that consistently fail outcomes
• Changing incentives that reward noise rather than results
• Confronting structural bottlenecks embedded in hierarchy

As long as transformation remains rhetorical, nobody pays a price. Nothing essential shifts. The system remains intact while the vocabulary evolves.

This pattern reflects a distinctly postmodern failure mode: meaning detaches from reality, symbols replace substance, and intent substitutes for causality. In fragile organisations, this semantic drift feels progressive while it quietly accelerates decadence. Companies endlessly “transform” not because change proves difficult, but because language has become a shield against action, allowing decay to progress without resistance.

A Familiar Pattern: When Transformation Turns Performative

This dynamic has played out publicly, painfully, and at scale.

Nokia stands as one of the clearest examples. The company did not lack talent, technology, or market reach. What it lost was the ability to let reality correct the system. As described by Mik Kersten in Project to Product, Nokia talked extensively about platforms, ecosystems, and software transformation while internal structures, incentives, and decision rights remained anchored in a legacy hardware worldview. Engineers saw the gaps early. Signals travelled upward diluted by fear and comfort. Language accelerated while feedback weakened. By the time leadership acknowledged the depth of the problem, entropy had already crossed the point of recovery.

General Electric followed a similar trajectory from a different starting point. GE embraced the language of digital transformation, agility, and software-driven value creation. Entire narratives formed around reinvention. Yet capital allocation, accountability models, and power structures stayed industrial and centralised. Transformation became an identity rather than a mechanism. When results failed to materialise, language intensified instead of structure changing. The outcome was not innovation but fragmentation, credibility loss, and long-term damage.

These cases do not illustrate bad strategy. They illustrate fragile systems where comfort overrules truth and where postmodern language substitutes for causality.

The Watermelon Effect as a Survival Strategy

In this environment, the watermelon effect does not merely appear. It flourishes.

Green dashboards signal progress. Red interiors tell another story. Surface metrics glow while foundational indicators rot. Activity replaces impact. Visibility outranks contribution. People learn quickly that survival depends on sounding aligned rather than delivering change.

Noise becomes currency. Ambiguous achievements gain polish. Teams celebrate outputs disconnected from outcomes. Performance theatre spreads because the system rewards it.

Entropy increases quietly. No single decision causes collapse. Instead, decay accumulates through misaligned incentives, deferred accountability, and diluted responsibility.

From the outside, everything looks busy. Inside, the system loses coherence.

Experts Enter, Then Get Neutralised

Nothing reveals organisational fragility more clearly than how it treats expertise.

Companies hire specialists to modernise platforms, redesign systems, or correct accumulated debt. Publicly, leadership praises their experience. Privately, the organisation resists everything that expertise threatens.

Experts encounter familiar patterns:

• Their diagnosis feels “too radical”
• Their recommendations clash with political realities
• Their timelines disturb existing roadmaps
• Their clarity exposes inconvenient truths

Soon, pressure mounts to adapt expertise to existing constraints rather than removing the constraints themselves. The expert becomes a translator, then a decorator, then a liability.

Eventually, either the expert leaves or learns to perform the same theatre as everyone else. Everyone needs a job. Rent still needs paying. When trapped inside a system that rewards performance over progress, many professionals fake alignment not out of cynicism, but survival, while quietly searching for a place where reality still matters.

The organisation claims transformation while silencing the very signals capable of producing it.

Comfort as the Hidden Driver

At the heart of this myth sits a simple force: comfort, reinforced by tenure and vested interests. For those who have been around long enough, especially those holding equity, status, or historical wins, the old way did not merely function. It paid off. Change threatens not only habits, but identity, rewards, and personal upside. The question quietly shifts from “What should change?” to “Why should we change, when this worked so well for us?”

Truth disrupts comfort. Systems thinking reveals trade-offs. Structural change generates losers. Honest metrics expose mediocrity. None of this feels pleasant.

But comfort offers safety. It preserves status. It avoids conflict. It allows leaders to appear visionary without altering power structures or personal incentives.

In fragile organisations, comfort consistently defeats truth. Not through malice, but through avoidance. Over time, avoidance becomes culture.

The organisation learns to prefer explanations over corrections, stories over mechanisms, and language over structure.

Entropy Does Not Negotiate

Entropy does not care about intent, communication plans, or leadership narratives. Systems either maintain coherence or drift toward disorder. When feedback loops weaken, accountability diffuses, and causality blurs, decay accelerates.

Talking increases entropy when it replaces action. Each additional layer of narrative introduces interpretation. Each reframing delays intervention. Each postponed decision compounds future cost.

Eventually, decay crosses a threshold. Damage becomes irreversible.

At that stage:

• Talent disengages or exits
• Decision latency explodes
• Risk tolerance collapses
• Trust erodes across teams

Recovery demands far more energy than early correction ever required.

The Human Cost Rarely Appears on Slides

Organisational damage never remains abstract. People absorb it directly.

Careers stall because performance no longer correlates with results. Capable individuals burn out navigating incoherent systems. Experienced professionals lose credibility by association with failed initiatives they never controlled.

Worse, organisations normalise this damage. They label it resilience, adaptation, or change fatigue. In reality, they sacrifice people to preserve comfort.

This cost rarely appears in post-mortems. It should.

The Only Antidote

Transformation begins when language reconnects with consequence.

Words must bind to decisions. Metrics must attach to accountability. Expertise must alter structure. Leadership must accept discomfort as proof of progress rather than a signal to retreat.

Without structural consequence, language accelerates decay. With consequence, it regains meaning.

In Essence ...

You cannot talk your way out of a system you refuse to change.

If words carry no cost, they carry no force.

What many organisations call transformation is merely entropy with better storytelling.