Most transformation post-mortems conclude that the plan was wrong. In my experience the plan is usually adequate. What is missing is ownership. Three things go unowned in almost every programme that stalls, and none of them appear on the project plan.
What this edition argues
- In a profitable company, nobody owns urgency. The numbers argue for continuity, and continuity always has the stronger evidence.
- Nobody owns the line between what is genuinely core and what the organisation has simply inherited. When both are treated as sacred, programmes move slowly and change little.
- Nobody owns execution across functions. Functional leaders optimise for their own domain, and they are right to. Transformation lives between domains.
The thesis
Transformation programmes in mid-sized companies rarely fail at the design stage. They fail because three forms of ownership are never assigned. And each one that goes unassigned makes the next failure more likely.
The sequence is consistent. Sustained profitability suppresses urgency, so the case for change is made late and made defensively. A defensive case cannot survive the harder question of what to protect and what to redesign. Leadership avoids that question and declares everything important. Execution then fragments across functions that each optimise for themselves. At that point the chief executive holds the programme together personally. This looks like commitment. It is the final symptom.
By the time the pace of change becomes visibly inadequate, the organisation has concluded that the strategy was flawed. It was not. The strategy simply never had an owner beyond the person who announced it.
Urgency needs an owner before the crisis supplies one
The most dangerous position for any company is sustained profitability without strategic challenge. Success does not create complacency in the lazy sense. It creates an imbalance of evidence, and the imbalance is rational. The current model has audited results behind it. The alternative has a business case. In any serious discussion, audited results win.
The resistance that follows is not intellectual. Leaders read it as an information problem and respond with more analysis, which is why so many transformation cases are argued badly. The real objection sits elsewhere. Everyone in a successful company has built expertise, standing, and professional identity around how things currently work. Transformation asks them to question all of it. That is identity resistance, and identity wins more organisational arguments than strategy does.
So the language of the case matters more than its rigour. Calling a programme a transformation triggers defensiveness before the first slide. Two moves work better. Frame the work as strengthening what already works. Start with small visible wins that build evidence before they threaten anyone’s position. This is not presentational softness. It is the only way to build conviction in an organisation that has no burning platform and should not manufacture one.
Test for this in your organisation: Can you name the person accountable for keeping the case for change alive when the quarterly results are good, or does urgency depend on the chief executive repeating it?
The line between core and inherited needs an owner
The programmes that overwhelm organisations are the ones that try to modernise everything at once. Priorities blur. The organisation reads the ambition as noise. And the capabilities that actually make the company valuable get disturbed alongside the ones that should have been dismantled years ago.
The discipline is to separate two things that most leadership teams hold as one. A genuine core capability is what your best customers would miss if it stopped, and what a competitor would struggle to copy. Not what the brochure claims. What a demanding customer would notice within a month. Those capabilities are protected. Everything built around them is open for redesign: processes, tools, reporting lines, decision rights, structures.
Most companies treat both categories as sacred, and that is why nothing moves quickly enough. Prioritisation is not a preliminary step before the transformation begins. It is the central act of the transformation. And it needs someone senior enough to make the call stick when a functional leader insists that a long-standing process is in fact core.
Execution discipline follows from the same logic. Run a clear sequence rather than six simultaneous workstreams. Review monthly rather than quarterly, because programmes drift quietly and small problems compound in silence. And make the commitment of the executive team visible. An organisation can tell when a programme is a side project, and it lowers its own effort accordingly.
Test for this in your organisation: Could your leadership team produce two lists today – what is genuinely hard to copy, and what is merely inherited – and would the lists agree with each other?
Execution across functions needs an owner who is not the chief executive
The third failure is structural, and it is usually mistaken for a strength. When a chief executive personally holds a company-wide programme together, this reads as commitment. It is a design problem. The programme then moves at whatever pace one person can sustain while also running the company.
The instinctive remedy is to distribute the work across the leadership team. That does not solve it either. Every functional leader optimises for their own domain, and they should. Finance protects financial discipline. Sales protects the pipeline. Operations protects efficiency. But transformation consists of the trade-offs between those domains, and its results sit in no single function. Nobody in that room is structurally positioned to own it.
I saw this clearly in a retail group operating in more than forty markets. A project I led had, for the first time in the company’s history, produced a systematic picture of what was happening in the stores. More than six hundred thousand data points. It showed that the value proposition at the point of sale was some distance from what the brand promised its customers.
In private conversation the chief executive grasped the implication at once and asked why nobody else had raised it. In front of his executive colleagues he carried the argument only half-heartedly. Shortly afterwards the chief operating officer told me the store data had nothing to do with his area of responsibility. Within the boundaries of his function he was not wrong. The store performance question had never been assigned to anyone. So the work stayed a data project when it should have become a retail transformation.
This was a failure of leadership, and it was also more than that. A company in which the store performance question had an owner would have absorbed a half-hearted chief executive. This one could not.
This is the job a dedicated transformation leader exists to do, and the profile is narrower than most hiring processes assume. Breadth across functions rather than depth in one. Credibility in the boardroom and on the shop floor in the same week. And the emotional intelligence to carry people through long uncertainty. That last quality is the one most often traded away for technical competence, and its absence is the most common reason the appointment fails.
Test for this in your organisation: When a cross-functional decision blocks, who unblocks it – the programme lead, or the chief executive, every time?
Three questions for your next leadership or board conversation
- Who is accountable for the case for change during a good year, and what happens to that case if the person who made it is unavailable for a month?
- Which capabilities have we explicitly agreed to protect, and which have we explicitly agreed are open for redesign – not by default, but by decision?
- If our transformation is currently held together by the chief executive personally, are we treating that as leadership strength or as the structural gap it is?
Transformation does not fail because leadership teams choose the wrong direction. It fails because direction is the only thing they assign, and the three ownerships that actually determine the pace – urgency, prioritisation, execution – are left for someone to pick up.
