Revisiting Lance Younger’s Criticism About the Negativity Surrounding Emerging Technology (Does It Still Hold Water Today — Did It Ever?)

In November 2024, ProcureTech CEO Lance Younger responded to one of my posts with this challenge:

“Jon – you are asking the wrong questions. Procurement will not achieve its ambition or potential without digitalisation. For every single company and person that is championing digitalisation either personally or as part of a team I believe that we should all be advocating for and helping them to succeed rather than speculating on their failure. It is your and our collective responsibility to change the (wrong) narrative and focus on accelerating the positive. Time is short.”

It was a reasonable sentiment. Who doesn’t want to be positive? Who wants to be the person “speculating on failure”?

But here’s the problem: positivity doesn’t change outcomes. Narratives don’t move flat lines.

What a LinkedIn Comment Revealed

This week, a simple observation from Hassan Ahmed — comparing enterprise technology adoption to iPhone users who only use 10-30% of their device’s features — set off a chain of analysis that produced four graphs spanning 42 years.

Each graph tells the same story. Each line stays stubbornly flat.

Graph 1: The Utilization Gap (1990-2025)

• 96% of organizations have shelfware
• 44% of SaaS licenses go unused
• $3.5M to $99M wasted annually per enterprise
• Technology capability purchased keeps rising; actual utilization stays flat at 20-30%

Graph 2: The Spreadsheet Paradox (1990-2025)

• Despite $1.3 trillion in digital transformation spending (2020-2025 alone)
• 70% of critical business processes still run on spreadsheets
• 35 years of trying to move organizations off spreadsheets
• The line barely moved

Graph 3: The Uncomfortable Truth (1990-2025)

• Technology investment: up and to the right
• Implementation failure rate: flat at 80%
• 35 years of “positive narratives” changed nothing

Graph 4: The Design Intent Test (A 42-Year Pattern)

The Question Lance Didn’t Ask

Lance said we should “change the narrative” and “focus on accelerating the positive.”

But spreadsheets didn’t need a positive narrative. No one ran advocacy campaigns for Excel. No CEOs wrote LinkedIn posts urging the industry to “champion” spreadsheet adoption.

Spreadsheets just worked — because they were designed as extensions, not replacements. They matched existing readiness. They made people better at their jobs instead of threatening to eliminate them.

A positive narrative wrapped around replacement technology is still replacement technology. The marketing doesn’t change the design intent. That’s why the flat lines stay flat.

Does Lance’s Criticism Hold Water?

Let’s test it against the evidence:

The problem isn’t negativity. The problem is that the industry keeps asking “How do we get people excited about this technology?” instead of “Is this organization ready to absorb it?”

The Subtle Yet Fatal Mistake

In my original response to Lance, I noted that in his Cirtuo Procurement Forum presentation, he spent about 3 minutes on people and process — then pivoted to solution maps for the remaining 27 minutes.

That’s the pattern. Technology-first thinking dressed in people-first language.

Phase 0 exists because someone has to ask the readiness question before the purchase decision — not after the implementation stalls, and not buried in a 3-minute preamble before the real agenda begins.

The Through-Line

What started as Hassan’s iPhone observation became a four-graph framework that answers Lance’s criticism definitively:

The issue was never the narrative. The issue was the design intent.

Technology succeeds when it extends human capability. It fails when it attempts to replace human judgment.

That’s not negativity. That’s 42 years of evidence.

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Related: ProcureTech CEO Younger stresses we must change the negative narrative and focus on accelerating the positive