Life is hard. Your service should not make it harder.

In industries like insurance, healthcare, financial services, and education, leaders are often told to win by making service easier, faster, and more digital. But high-stakes services are not built around casual purchases or low-risk choices. In these organizations, the wrong modernization choices often shift more effort, uncertainty, and responsibility onto the people the system is meant to support.

In this keynote, Ryann Foelker names that pattern The Burden Tax: the hidden burden created when systems are redesigned around the wrong scorecard. She reframes modernization as a design challenge, not just a technology initiative, and shares her framework for bringing coherence to service change so value grows and change sticks. Drawing on years of turning messy transformation efforts into clearer operating logic, faster adoption, and measurable business results, she offers a more human path forward.

Attendees will leave better able to tell whether their service is creating more value or simply asking people to do more of the work.

Key takeaways

• A practical definition of The Burden Tax and where it shows up in service systems

• Why “easy” is often the wrong scorecard in high-stakes service, and what to measure instead

• A framework for creating change that sticks and value that grows

• How executive design leadership can bring coherence to service change, reduce hidden burden, and strengthen adoption, trust, and value