Execution
Why Your Transformation Programme Keeps Going Back to the Drawing Board
Most transformation programmes do not fail in one dramatic moment. They stall. The board signs off a plan, a consultancy produces a deck, and a year later the business still works the old way.
In 1944 the US Office of Strategic Services wrote a field manual on how to slow an organisation down from the inside. One tip was to send every decision to a committee of at least five people. We read it and recognised most of the programmes we get called into. So we wrote our own version: How to sabotage a transformation programme.
This post looks at the first method in the guide. It is the most common one we see: distract the executives.
What we'll cover
Why a distracted leadership team stalls a programme
The company that paid for the same strategy three years running
What happens when two leaders are given the same job
What to do instead
Get the executives excited about an outcome
The easiest way to distract a leadership team is to put them in a strategy project with an expensive consultancy. These sessions are about outcomes, and outcomes are exciting. The hard work of delivering them gets pushed to later.
The same plan, three years running
One large multinational we supported led its market and earned billions a year. In 2020 its executives decided to invest in digital transformation so the company's size would stop slowing it down. They hired a well-known consultancy to plan the work and set up a transformation management office.
The outcomes were so exciting that in 2021 they hired the same consultancy to do the same job again. In 2022 they ran the exercise a third time with a different firm. That firm read the earlier plans and sent the executives back to them.
You can probably guess what happened in 2023.
Why this keeps happening
When people do not know where to start, they do not start. Some begin in the wrong place. Most give up. Nobody wants to be the person who got it wrong, so the team falls back on what feels safe. Usually that means another strategy project.
Give two executives the same job
If you want a leadership team to argue about small things for a long time, give two leaders the same responsibility.
At one large enterprise we supported, two executives were both given control of the firm's technology resources. Each drew up a different plan with different priorities. The fight spread down the org chart. Nobody below them could tell what leadership actually wanted.
The sensible fix was to split the responsibilities. It never happened, because each executive was trying to prove they should be the one in charge.
A close cousin: competing priorities
At another firm the COO and the CIO disagreed about what the business needed from its technology budget.
One said the priority was to make the systems it had already paid for actually work.
The other said the priority was to invest in new things.
Both had a fair point. That is what made the argument last. While they argued in front of anyone who would listen, neither priority was met.
The damage goes beyond the two people involved. A dispute like this pulls in the rest of the executive team, and while it runs very little else gets done.
What to do instead
You probably already have a plan that is good enough. The problem is usually getting started and keeping the executive team pointed the same way.
Start from the plan you have. Before you commission new strategy work, ask what stopped the last plan from being delivered.
Give every outcome one owner. If two people share a budget or a team, decide who owns it and tell the people below them.
Settle priority disputes at the top. When two executives both have a valid case, the CEO has to choose and say so.
Measure what has changed. Track how the business runs today compared with last quarter. A finished plan does not count.
Read the full guide
Distracting the executives is one of five methods in the guide. The others are:
Put the wrong people in the right roles
Terrify everyone
Set vague and contradictory requirements
Under-invest in the whole endeavour
Each comes with true stories from programmes we have worked on, with the names removed. It takes about 15 minutes to read and there is no form to fill in.
