olistician.ai

olistician.ai

Berlin · Est. 2026

Research

Why most digital transformations don't work — and what to do about it.

During five years of doctoral work at the University of Amsterdam, I examined why digital transformations recurrently fail and what the rare successful ones do differently.

PhD Dissertation: Moving Beyond the Technology Fallacy in Digital Transformation Research

The dissertation reframes digital transformation as a cognitive problem rather than a purely technological one. The technology layer keeps shifting, so firms have to break with established routines and mental schemas — and they have to keep doing it. That is where the fallacy framework comes in: three recurring failure modes — the technology fallacy (overweighting tools at the expense of human capital), the control fallacy (assuming autonomy alone improves collaboration), and the cheap talk fallacy (treating language as a costless signal when it is not).

Across four studies — 832 Dutch firms, a three-year quasi-experiment in a health insurer, and a corpus of ICO prospectuses from the blockchain hype cycle — three constants surface beneath the change: organizational control, human capital, and the cost of cheap talk in strategic signaling. Each fallacy maps to a different stage of the transformation effort — input, process, output.

Programme
PhD, University of Amsterdam
Timeline
2020 → 2026 (degree expected)
Promotor
Prof. Dr. Henk Volberda
Supervisor
Dr. Taghi Ramezan Zadeh

Selected Conference Presentations

2024Strategic Management Society — Annual ConferenceIstanbul
2024Academy of Management — Annual MeetingChicago
2024R&D Management ConferenceStockholm
2023Strategic Management Society — Annual ConferenceToronto
2022Academy of Management — Annual MeetingSeattle
2022Strategic Management Society — Special ConferenceMilan
2022European Academy of Management (EURAM)Winterthur

Areas of Expertise

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is an entity-centric change process that redefines the context, content, and process of strategy-making through digital technologies. Roughly 70–80% of digital business transformations fail to deliver on their stated goals. My research reframes the problem: most transformations stall not because the technology was wrong, but because companies bet on tools when the binding constraint was always human capital. I've studied the antecedents of successful digital transformation in the Netherlands, and sold digital transformation projects to SMEs and DAX enterprises.

01 / 04

Self-Managing Teams

Autonomy is sold as a path to better collaboration. In a three-year quasi-experiment with 233 employees across 61 teams, the result went the other way: removing managerial coordination made employees share less knowledge, not more. Only when managers kept clear output expectations did the negative effect disappear.

  • Knowledge sharing in teams
  • Effective output control design
  • Middle-management coaching
02 / 04

Digital Business Models

How can firms leverage digital technologies to build successful digital business models? Unlike pipeline-driven models, digital technologies enable greater scale, scope, and speed of business operations. Reprogrammability, data homogenization, and a modular-layered architecture mean firms now compete on layers — devices, networks, services — instead of finished products.

  • Digital strategy
  • Platform strategy
  • Startups and incumbents
03 / 04

Crypto Markets

Crypto markets sit at the intersection of attention, language, and capital. I build engines that track tokens, narratives, smart-money wallets, ETF flows, and on-chain activity in real time — connecting what's said on X, what's done on-chain, and what actually moves valuation. The same dynamics show up in any attention-driven market, including AI ventures and the next hype cycle.

  • Token and narrative tracking
  • Smart-money wallet analytics
  • Venture valuation in hype cycles
04 / 04

Linguistic Framing

In attention- and narrative-driven markets, language and linguistic frames do most of the persuasive work. Investors reward language that signals technical complexity and leverages rhetoric — and they punish vague future promises that nothing verifies. The hidden cost of cheap talk is the credibility you didn't know you were spending.

  • Pitch deck audits
  • Founder framing coaching
  • Enterprise transformation comms
Apps

Apps I've built and shipped.

I built an exclusive crypto intelligence platform, AI agents, and other progressive web apps for everyday life and computer use.

Showcase · Crypto research engine

A research and intelligence platform for crypto markets.

Tracks tokens, narratives, smart-money wallets, on-chain activity, and ETF flows through web scraping, REST APIs, webhooks, and LLM-powered classification. Used to run analytics that found evidence for the crowd-is-exit-liquidity thesis.

12+Unique data sources — CoinGecko, Helius, FRED, Apify, Farside, Solscan, +more
20,000+Tokens tracked across Solana, Ethereum, Base
100+Narratives identified and tracked over time
10,000+Smart-money wallets monitored for entries
Stack Python FastAPI SQLite Vanilla JS PWA Twitter via Apify CoinGecko Pro Helius GeckoTerminal Farside ETF Anthropic Gemini HDBSCAN

More

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