Tag Archive for: Transformation

Fighting last year’s battles

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Are you preparing for the new year, or just reliving the old one?

Geoff Wilson

I’m going out on a very thick limb with this one:  You didn’t change much in your business between December 2025 and January 2026, did you?

I’m guessing not.  The winter is a strange time.  Too many of us are inside and too few of us are thinking about the outside. Particularly this past December, which strangely felt like half a month between the spacing of holidays and the pacing of the news cycle, it was hard to really think about what’s next.

So…didya?

If not, you are probably falling prey to the old adage about armies and their generals:  They tend to prepare to fight the battles of the past.  So, horseback armies are succumb to trenches, which succumb to tanks, which succumb to aircraft, which succumb to drones, which…well, you get the picture.

What does this mean for your business, your organization, or your family?  I think it means you need to turn your eyes toward the horizon and look at what’s coming…and boy could that be a challenge given the year we just had.

You just finished a year where trade uncertainty was at its highest since the Pandemic, and where geopolitics have been mired in the ambiguity of shifting spheres of influence in the Middle East, China, Russia, and Latin America.  You just finished a year where, depending on your industry, you are either seeing muted demand and sideways trends (hello to construction, automotive, consumer goods, and hospitality) or you are seeing skyrocketing demand driven by outlandish investment and development (shoutout to data centers, chips, electric power, and any number of the darling offspring of the AI craze).

So what?  What’s this year going to bring? That’s for you to estimate.

But, how?

Maybe it’s as easy as thinking about your sustainers, your changers, and your variables.

Your sustainers are the things you have high confidence to be foundational to your business… perhaps it’s a tried and true business that runs like a top or a customer segment that is loyal and dependable.  These are the things you need to plan to invest your time in to create a bedrock for your year.

Your changers might be the things that you have high confidence to be fleeting and flighty.  This could be a vendor you know is in distress or a customer segment you know to be tapped out.  These can be planned for and should all have contingencies.

Your variables are the toughest elements to judge.  These are the business drivers that present true ambiguity.  They require hedging and contingencies.  These may be a “high beta” project that could pay off nicely or an acquisition that may (or may not) get done.

So here’s the test:  If you can’t articulate what your sustainers, changers, and variables are, you’re probably caught up in last year’s war.  You are probably expecting the world to look like it used to.

And?

It won’t.  So get ahead of it.

What do you think?  Are you getting ready for this year by repeating last year’s habits?

Do ‘C’ students run the world?

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Leadership begins where excuses end.

Kobe Joseph

Have you heard the saying, “The ‘C’ students run the world.”? The quote has been attributed to Harry Truman, though Chat GPT informs me that the truth of the quote’s origin is only, “plausible but unverified.”

Regardless of who said it, behind many popular quotes lies some degree of wisdom, so let’s start by checking the validity of it. Do the early educational achievers – valedictorians, ivy leaguers, and so on – come to dominate the business world, or do we see plenty of the so-called ‘C’ students on top?

When documenting the educational backgrounds of Fortune 500 CEOs in 1999, David Kang, a Dartmouth Tuck professor, found that the most common bachelor’s degree held among them was not from Stanford, Harvard, MIT, West Point, or any other elite university – it was having no degree at all. While there certainly are academic elites at the top, there are just as many great leaders who found their stride later and rose to the top.

So… how does this work? What can bring supposed ‘A’ students down to normalcy and ‘C’ students into success?

A critical factor to look at is a simple mindset difference. The ‘A’ student often considers himself or herself to be gifted – innately smart, talented, and born with outstanding ability – whereas the ‘C’ student might not hold the same internal assumptions.

These internal assumptions can affect something called your locus of control. If you have an external locus of control, you tend to believe circumstances dictate your life. With an internal locus of control, you more so believe that you dictate your life. People who get labelled as “intelligent” or “talented” can often attribute their success to traits they possess but cannot change, contributing to the formation of an external locus of control. The unseen benefit to those with a less exceptional start is that they can more often identify themselves with controllable qualities, such as being “hard-working” or “reliable” and develop an internal locus of control.

This matters because it completely changes how you recover from adversity.

Imagine you’re faced with this scenario, which I found myself in a few weeks ago: you’re presenting an analysis to an executive and, suddenly, they tell you your dataset is wrong (and it is). Whose fault is it? There’s two ways to respond:

  1. Well, someone gave me the wrong data. It was their fault.
  2. I should have been more diligent, tested my assumptions, and found the problem. It was my fault.

If you choose option 1, while it may be true, you’ll find no way to improve upon the error. You didn’t cause it, so why should you fix it? But, if you respond with option 2, you can find ways to learn and become better – all because you took ownership of an issue that might not have been your mistake.

In your organization, even when you make a mistake (as we all do inevitably), don’t follow it up with a much more serious error: the fundamental attribution error, where you think success is a result of your character, but failure is blamed on your circumstances. When you believe external factors cause your problems, you won’t sharpen your internal toolset to prevent them from reoccurring.

In truth, your GPA, SAT, or technical expertise alone won’t get you all the way to the finish line – so own the problems and find ways to improve from them, or else you’ll get passed by someone who does.

When an initiative doesn’t hit its targets, a product must be recalled, or a workplace accident occurs, who usually gets the blame? The person in charge, whether it’s the product manager or the CEO.

So, if you want to be a great leader, then start owning things now. Own the issue even when, “It’s not my fault,” because you won’t be responsible for something tomorrow if you don’t take responsibility for it today.

What do you think? Where have you seen talented people fall behind in the workplace?

AI and getting trapped inside the box

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New tools raise the bar on the need for creative thinking.

Geoff Wilson

A recent essay from AI Snake Oil (here) made a surprising claim: that artificial intelligence might slow down science. Not because it’s inaccurate, but because it’s too good at being accurate–within the wrong frame.

The author points to the centuries-long dominance of the geocentric model of the universe. At one point, predictions of planetary motion based on Earth being the center of the universe were astonishingly precise. But they were also deeply wrong. The math worked. The understanding didn’t.

The essay poses an unsettling idea: if AI had existed then–and been trained on those models–we might have clung to the wrong theory even longer. The system would optimize the pattern, not question the premise.

That idea should raise eyebrows in business, too.

Because if AI has the potential to reinforce flawed scientific models under the guise of precision, what could it do to our strategic and operational models in the business world? Could the efficiency of the tool blind us to the fragility of the box it lives in?

Let’s rewind to the 1990s.

Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was an elite hedge fund run by some of the most decorated minds in finance — including two Nobel Prize winners. Their trading strategy was based on elegant models, airtight math, and decades of data. They had accounted for everything — except what had never happened.

When the Asian financial crisis hit, and then the Russian debt default followed, the market behavior fell outside the box. LTCM’s models didn’t break–they simply didn’t apply. Within months, the fund teetered on the edge of collapse, threatening to drag the global financial system down with it.

That story wasn’t about incompetence. It was about conviction–conviction in a model that worked, until it didn’t. A belief in historical precision, at the cost of hypothetical imagination.

Which brings us back to AI.

Artificial intelligence excels at pattern recognition. It’s built to identify structure, predict based on precedent, and optimize for success–all within the observed dataset. But what happens when the next critical insight lives outside the dataset? Or when the market moves in a way it never has before? Or when a first-principles challenge is needed, not a predictive output?

What happens to outside-the-box thinking when the most powerful tools we use only look inside the box?

That’s not a knock on the technology. AI can enhance insight, increase productivity, and surface connections humans might miss. But it’s also a mirror–reflecting what’s been done, not necessarily what should be done next.

In that way, AI can become like the geocentric model: precise in the wrong direction.

Or like LTCM: confidently accelerating toward the edge of a cliff because the GPS has never seen a cliff before.

Strategic leaders–the real kind, the ones who hold the long arc of value creation and risk–can’t afford to outsource the act of questioning. AI can suggest. It can support. But it cannot wonder. It cannot imagine the inverse, the anomaly, the edge case that no one has seen but everyone should fear.

The job of leadership–now more than ever–is to ask: what if the model is wrong?

What if the future doesn’t look like the past?

What if we are right about everything, except the thing that matters most?

Outside-the-box thinking is not a luxury. It is, increasingly, the only kind of thinking that will matter. Because as the boxes get smarter, the need for human insight–uncomfortable, abstract, imperfect insight–only grows.

We should use AI. But we should also stay skeptical. Every model has a boundary. Every dataset has a blind spot. And every organization that overfits to efficiency risks underfitting to reality.

So yes, use the tool.

But keep one eye on the horizon–and one foot out of the box.

What do you think?  How do we keep a foot outside the box?

Michael Collins? Who’s That?

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The spotlight doesn’t reach everyone — but success does.

Geoff Wilson

I was swinging golf clubs with a younger professional recently — a sharp, curious guy early in his career. Somewhere around the 11th hole of virtual golf we faced a Par 5 and discussion of an “eagle” came up.  Since I had just chunked my umteenth shot of the game, I made an offhand comment: “I’m so far away from an eagle, you might as well call me Michael Collins.”

He laughed, politely. But then he asked, “Who’s Michael Collins?”

The question stopped me. Because while it was a reasonable question…it was telling.

Michael Collins, as you may or may not recall, was the third astronaut on Apollo 11. While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history in the Eagle lander on the lunar surface, Collins stayed in orbit, piloting the command module (Columbia, for the record) solo for over 21 hours. He never touched the moon. Never took a famous step. Never delivered a line that would echo through time.

But without him, no one would have come home (coincidentally, the return trip from the moon started on July 21, 1969…exactly 56 years ago).

Collins–orbiting the moon as the loneliest human in the universe–was the one who kept the mission alive while the rest of the world watched the main event. He was critical, and yet largely forgotten.

The moment made me think about how often this happens in business, in leadership, in life.

We celebrate the keynote speaker, not the team that built the deck. We remember the CEO who closed the deal, not the analyst who first spotted the opportunity. We quote the founder, not the engineer who debugged the product the night before launch.

We tend to build monuments to moonwalkers. And we forget about the people who kept the orbit steady.

But if you’ve ever led anything big–a transformation, a turnaround, a product launch, a merger–you know that success is rarely the result of marquee moves alone. It’s the result of many people doing their job well, quietly, persistently, without fanfare. Often, without being asked.

Every great outcome has a few people whose names will never make it into the press release. But take one of them away, and the whole thing wobbles.

I’ve seen executive teams spend months on strategy–and then watched a mid-level operations lead execute the plan better than the leadership ever imagined. I’ve seen project managers, schedulers, executive assistants, even interns, step into chaos and bring order. And I’ve seen those same people go home at the end of the day, not looking for credit–just knowing they helped get it done.

These are the Michael Collinses of our organizations.

They don’t need a statue. But they do deserve recognition.

Leaders look for talent that shines. They also look for talent that supports. They understand that success is not only driven by visionaries, but by role players who turn vision into reality. They know that someone has to keep the engine running while others plant the flag.

And they make sure those people know they’re seen.

So here’s a simple challenge: look around your team. Ask yourself: Who is tending the command module? Who is holding the line while others step onto the stage? And what are you doing to celebrate them?

Because the truth is: Not everyone needs to walk on the moon.

Some people bring you home.

What do you think?  How do unsung heroes factor into your organization’s success?  How do you recognize them?

In the new year, try better!

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What if we make 2024 the year of “better” instead of “best?”

Geoff Wilson

We are about to ring in the new year…again.

Everything is new.  It’s alive, glistening in its rebirth, and reimagined in its potential for perfection in 2024.

Right?     Right?       ???

Of course not.  If you are among the “executive class,”  you probably have just limped softly into a holiday season with more priorities than passion.  You’ve just spent the Christmas holiday at home or away in joy but with a low simmer of next year-itis starting to build.

If that is not an issue for you, then this is not the new year’s blog post for you.

This is the new year’s blog post for the grinders out there.  It’s for the people who look back on the year with confidence in accomplishment, sure, but also with knowledge of what didn’t get done.  And, it’s for the people who are nursing that minor stomach bubble of what needs to get done as the new year kicks off.

It’s for the entrepreneur who just spent the past two weeks trying to get back to working “on” the business vs. working “in” the business.  It’s for the finance executive who has been tying up loose ends for a calendar year fiscal close.  It’s for the operations executive who is in the throes of the holiday season where it seems like execution grinds to a halt for a portion of the team.

And, it’s for the professional who has been brought up on the fool’s gold of “optimizing.”  That’s the basic unit of unobtanium in complex systems that so many of us are chasing.

Yeah, this one’s for you.  Here it goes:

I grew up on “optimizing” and have slowly changed my tune and the tune of our professional work to softer tones of achieving “better” and “helping.”  Why?

Because optimizing is an ulcer.

Better is a celebration.

I’d rather celebrate.

Optimizing is a McKinsey-polished graph on a piece of paper that shows what’s “possible” (your mileage may vary, we accept no responsibility for your decisions based on our advice–all ulcers belong to you). It’s the financial model that nobody understands or even inspects. It’s the supermodel ideal.  It’s the private jet.

Better is a policy changed, a machine moved, a key hire made, a customer won, or a product launched that will all bring real-world results. It’s pencil and paper…working out the decision we will make today. It’s a spouse you love.  It’s a manual transmission in an old truck that still hauls your stuff.

In other words, better is the ability to take on a complex, often broken system (world, even) led and executed by complex, often broken people…and to eek out a few more happy customers.

It’s the avoidance of analysis paralysis.

It’s giving it a go.

It’s having at it.

It’s moving forward…even when you know you are limping.

Most importantly: It’s something to believe in.

And, so, I offer you this simple phrase:  In 2024, focus on better.

Happy New Year!

Geoff Wilson still looks to optimize way too much in life.  How about you?

5 ways strategy deployment fails

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Deploying your strategy isn’t easy, here are 5 reasons deployments fail.

Geoff Wilson

The reality of strategic management is that it requires having a strategy and actually managing with the strategy as the touchstone. The first part isn’t easy…plenty of management “stories” masquerade as strategy without actually being founded on real choices about what to do and not to do.

The second part–managing with the strategy as touchstone–is downright hard. It’s hard because organizations have inertia…they keep moving in the direction they are already going. Overcoming this inertia is a real challenge when it comes to deploying strategy that involves a change in direction. Here are 5 root issues that we frequently witness for companies that “have” a strategy but are struggling to deploy it.

  1. Nobody knows: The executive team has focused on building a strong, coherent strategic plan.  The organization never gets the word. Need I say more?
  2. Strategy management is left to staff functions: Every strategy at organizations of any significant size and complexity comes with a need for coordination, control, reporting, and management.  So, many organizations set up a staff organization (in some companies, it’s a single person) to help coordinate the strategy.  The problem starts when line leaders start leaving strategy program execution to the staff organization.
  3. Initiative definitions are lofty and cute but ultimately meaningless: The company has a great, tailored set of marketing messages, but initiatives based on marketing messages are hard to manage. They need to be based on actual process change. “Customer success” may sound great to you and your friends, but how do you drill that down to the bedrock actions that deliver on such success? If your strategy can’t connect to economic and process reality, then you are probably here.
  4. Workstreams masquerade as initiatives: An initiative is a self-contained effort to change “something” within the company.  Great strategies are made u up of initiatives. The change may be around a process or product.  A workstream is a subset of activities within an initiative.  It may be somewhat self-contained, but it ultimately lacks standalone sense apart from the Initiative.  In other words, a workstream rarely delivers an overall result…it requires the result of other workstreams and coordination among them.  Many, many strategic deployment structures fail because they create “accountability” for workstreams and call them initiatives.  This results in every “initiative” requiring constant and tedious C-Level intervention to actually get things done because, well, none of the “initiatives” is actually self-contained.  While this may look like an odd and technical distinction, it actually matters a lot because it represents a failure of delegation.  An initiative ought to be self-contained as to design and to general decision rights, or else it’s just another cross-functional conflagration.
  5. The future is undefined: The deployment lacks a vision for the future. This is the opposite of point 1.  Strategic deployment looks like business as usual, but with PowerPoint and neat messages about component outcomes.  If your strategy lacks a view what the future state of the business is, it may be lacking something.  People are much better at executing when they have a view of a future than they are when they are given only concepts and objectives.  If you find that you are spending more time communicating with powerpoint and slogans than asking about the latest progress toward margin or sales improvement, you might be in this bucket.

There you have it:  Five reasons that strategy deployment fails.  There are many others, but these are my “five.”  The antidote is actually pretty simple to articulate, but harder to execute:  vision, communication, integration, and followup.

What do you think? Have you found the secret to great strategy deployment? 

 

 

Really smart people try to do too much, and that makes them look stupid

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Why the proliferation of initiatives does not make you look smart, motivated, or aggressive.

Geoff Wilson

“I have too much on my plate.”

You probably hear that from people occasionally, but you rarely if ever actually hear it from the highest performing people.  And that’s the problem this post is about: When smart people try to do too much, it makes them look stupid.

If anything, one old management adage is “if you want something done, give it to the busiest person in your organization.”  Why?  Because, well, the busy people are the ones who are always finding a way to get things done.  And there’s a ton to like about that platitude.

But, as with all platitudes, there’s a ton of insight left on the cutting room floor. If you want something done, find someone who is smart, focused, and motivated.  Sure.

But if you really want something done well, find someone who is smart, focused, and motivated and then help them manage their workload appropriately. Smart, motivated people have a really hard time saying no to things.  And smart, motivated people often have a view of others that leads them to think others should be as smart and motivated as they are (and therefore have all the capacity they have).  This leads the smart, motivated, and overcommitted leader to proliferate initiatives ad nauseam.  

And that reality leads to big problems as you promote your smart, motivated people up the chain.  The problems look like executives who take on too much, and consequently ask their organizations to take on too much.  It looks like endless lists of initiatives, all running concurrently.   It looks like a mess of execution because everybody is scrambling to do too much.

And finally, it looks like really smart, motivated people experiencing failure as leaders because of the very virtues that got them to their leadership role in the first place.  Being smart and motivated leads some managers to take on too much, which leads to point failures in execution or in organizational leadership, which leads to the manager looking stupid.

The solution if this is your peccadillo?  Find that sounding board who will help you focus on the critical few things that matter and drive the organization to them.  Unfortunately, in an age where “more is better,” all too often those sounding boards have the same incentives as you do as a manager: To recommend more and bigger, not less and better.  If you can find an adviser or mentor who helps you know when to slow down and focus on fewer things, you’re already ahead of the game.

What do you think?  How do you find a way to ensure you don’t take on too much? 

 

Evolution and business transformation

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A brief notion of what it takes to actually evolve in the business world.

Geoff Wilson

“We need to transform” says the executive.

But what does that really mean?

To the dude with the MBA, it means driving margins higher, generating more cash flow, and establishing the efficient organization of the future. Only, it’s too often that such “transformations” are drafted on somebody else’s template. I grew up in an age where everybody wanted to “be like Mike,” and those same kids are now adults chasing the best in the business. Only instead of trying to dunk a basketball with their tongue sticking out, they are trying to implement the business system of their favorite high-flying company.

If you’re in an industrial company, that might mean you are emulating Danaher, or drawing on time-tested lessons from Toyota, or attempting to be like GE (not anymore, of course, because GE is passé).

If you’re in tech, then you are emulating Netflix, who creatively leaked a slide deck on culture years ago that seems to have inspired legions of management engineers. Or, maybe it’s Google parent Alphabet, Inc. that strikes your fancy.

You learn about these business systems at current or erstwhile world-class companies, and it all looks doable as you contemplate your transformation. But it’s not, and too many otherwise really bright managers don’t understand why.

So let me try to explain.

I just returned from a fascinating trip to the Galápagos Islands. The Galápagos are well-known for their unique and highly differentiated species, some of which have adapted over many generations to their own specific islands. Everybody knows about the Galápagos tortoise. Most people are aware of the marine iguana, and many people know about the legendary clumsiness of the blue-footed boobie. Finally, many people are aware of the many varieties of Darwin’s finches, with their many different beaks specially shaped for different food types.

These species all evolved through a course of natural selection from some primordial ancestors along their family tree: The marine iguana doubtless comes from iguana stock, the giant tortoise from tortoise stock, and the finches from a finch ancestor. And today they are competitively specialized to their specific environments, some of which are only miles apart in distance while being worlds apart in hospitality to non-local species.

Which brings me to the natural illustration: You wish to transform your company, and that’s fine, but you have to transform from your own template. If you have iguana DNA, don’t pine for the airborne life of the finch; if you’re a finch, forget about evolving to be a giant tortoise.

That’s not transformation, it’s a delusion.

The punchline is this: You must know your DNA, and once you know it, you must steer your transformation along it. Great things can happen to companies that take the best of their DNA and add or snip. Horrific things happen to companies that attempt to transform via somebody else’s DNA.

I, and probably you, have seen such mutant companies slogging along in confusion and demoralization while some “smart and worldly” senior executive tries to impose their iguana DNA onto a finch culture. That is not the way to evolve a corporate culture. You do it by knowing who you are.

What do you think? Can an iguana become a finch? Can your organization do the same?

 

Where heroes go to die

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For 95 percent of your business, it’s best to put your heroes in the graveyard.

Geoff Wilson

Meet Sam.

Sam is a hero.  She probably lives in your organization.  She’s the one that “gets things done.”

Product not getting shipped?  Sam is the one on the dock.

Work not getting done on time in the drafting room? Sam has uncanny ability to pitch in and get things over the goal line.

Individuals not delivering their work packages on time in general?  Sam will step in, re-cast the process, lay out for the pass, and ensure that the deadline is met.

Sam knows–or at least is known by–the CEO.  Sam has made a living out of making her bosses look great. The people around Sam may not like Sam that much because of how hard Sam works and/or how much Sam pitches in to do their job, but the reality is that Sam has probably saved them from being fired countless times.

Sam delivers. Sam is a hero.

And, in 95 percent of businesses that I know, the need for Sam’s heroism is a problem.

Why?

Because heroism makes for good beer-drinking stories and for really awful business.  It covers up for bad processes.  It lulls bosses into a false sense of security because “we are always on time” when, in reality, processes are broken, and people are left in tatters by the heroic culture.

It also creates single points of failure.  That is, if the hero gets hit by the proverbial bus, the entire system reverts to chaos.  Chaos is not good.  Your best bet in building a strategically sound business is to eliminate chaos where humanly possible. And, that means (oddly enough) eliminating heroism–the ultimate cover for chaos.  I believe that to be possible in about 95 percent of business processes.  The other 5%?  Those are where we all deal with uncontrollable variables like last minute changes in customer preferences or mercurial executives.  For those, I love heroes.

For the rest?  Use your heroes as indicators of opportunity, not as indicators of success.  Know that an effort at the strategic renewal of your company through thoughtful planning and strategic focus should be a place where heroes go to die.

But beware, because the Sams of the world can turn toxic when it comes to putting a bullet in heroism.  In general, heroes really hate business improvement.  Heroes like Sam often (not always) create job security and ego-stroking visibility through their ability to lay out for the pass.  Heroes often hate it when processes are re-evaluated.  They are the first to bring up terms like bureaucracy and waste of time.  They are the ones who (rightfully) will focus everyone around them on the results, but when everyone around them stops to say “let’s fix the process,” they might say “no thanks, I’m going to go get some more results.”  Sam may be rightfully focused on results (I applaud her), but she may also be protecting a virtual fiefdom of heroism when it comes to opting out of the nearer term process fix.

That, my friends, is ultimately not scalable.  And, that can be toxic.  Sam’s a hero, but toxic Sam is merely another form of a high-performing corporate narcissist.

My advice?  If your heroes live anywhere outside of sales or otherwise in direct interactions with your customer, find a way to put them in the graveyard.  In your strategic efforts, take them to the place where heroes go to die.

What do you think?

 

 

How to keep culture from crushing progress

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Big ideas aren’t enough to change things. You need powerful sponsorship.

This anecdote has played out more times than reruns of the original “Star Trek” series, so bear with me as I set it up.

The situation

Geoff Wilson

A highly motivated, energetic, experienced new hire is brought into the organization as an agent of change by the business unit’s president. The new hire is brought in because she thinks differently and has rich and relevant experience in organizations that look the way her new organization’s president and leadership team say they want the business unit to look over the long term. She is the poster child for effective organizational change leadership in appearance, word, and deed.

The new hire does what all highly motivated, experienced hires do: She gets to work. Carrying the president’s imprimatur by virtue of being hired, she starts propagating new ways of doing things—perhaps on processes like project management or in performance areas such as pricing or cost efficiency. She’s driven. She’s smart. She’s organized. She’s logical. She’s practical. She is, quite possibly, right.

The president of the company, sensing the strong glow of a great hire, lets her “do her thing” without guiding or intervening. After all, that’s what great leaders do: They let great people go “do their thing.” Right?

The organization’s leaders quickly sense a world of pain coming from changes to the ways things have always been done. The changes aren’t necessarily bad—just different.

Fast forward to a year later. Our motivated change agent is watching the clock. She’s waiting for 5:48 p.m. every day (that’s just late enough to not signal that she’s thrown in the towel). Her great ideas sit on white boards and in documents across the organization. But progress has been slow. She’s figured out that the organization really didn’t want all of her resume—just a few parts. Her job is easy. Her life is hard.

The leadership team, having figured out that she had no power in the first place, decided that the change agent’s recommendations, while smart, were too painful for them to implement. They have marginalized her through passive and deliberate pseudo-compliance and back-channel opting out. When one functional leader delays participation with good reason, the rest simply follow suit.

The president has entertained every grievance. By making backroom agreements on who needs to comply and who doesn’t, he has undermined the change agent—unintentionally, but still.

The organization likes her. But, hey, “Those great ideas could never work here.” And besides, the president sure didn’t seem to mind that key leaders opted out.

The president wonders why there hasn’t been more traction on his new hire’s ideas, but in reality, he just likes the fact that the business unit is performing well this year and that everyone will achieve nice bonuses.

The change agent polishes up her resume.

When our once-motivated, now-crushed change agent leaves for greener pastures, the organization gives itself a self-righteous pat on the back. See, they were right all along.

The change agent and the president (if he is a person of vision and integrity) wonder what happened.

Here’s what happened

First, the president quickly moved from a position of obvious sponsorship (he hired the change agent, after all) to a role of spectatorship. He removed the most important tool in his change agent’s toolkit: the lever of executive sponsorship.

Second, the change agent—armed with the confidence that her ideas would work and work well—fell into the trap of idealistic pursuit vs. practical and pragmatic progress.

Both have ignored the practical realities of power—call it influence, pull, or realpolitik. They misjudged the power of an organization’s culture to reject even the best ideas in favor of the status quo. They let the organization and its culture crush a valuable addition to its midst.

Don’t kid yourself: Culture is heavy. The weight of any organization’s culture will crush any change agent.

So what?

There’s no such thing as a “fire and forget” change agent. The agent—whether in the form of an initiative team or a seemingly heroic individual like our anecdotal new hire above—must have real power.

In any change program or worthwhile process, there comes a point in the organization’s journey where the broad population realizes that change is hard. They have an “Oh, shit” moment. At that moment, there must be enough momentum and felt need (or other sources of power) to move the change forward. Otherwise, change won’t happen.

In turnarounds, the momentum and felt need is easy. Either we perform or we’re gone. The change agent can drive change with that implication alone.

In improvement situations, the reality is far more nuanced. Going from good to better is hard. Really. How often do you see people who are in great shape make a New Year’s resolution to get in better shape? Not often. They make choices that diversify their focus vs. intensifying it. They want to spend more time with their kids, take up art, or shoot for that promotion at work. Their health is secondary because, well, they already have health.

That’s the problem with change in organizations performing “OK” or, especially, performing great but in an unhealthy manner (a diversified business with a few bright spots that carry the portfolio comes to mind). The organization—convinced it’s “doing alright”—sees the change as an annoyance. This is especially true in the absence of a transparent agenda. And that’s where power comes in.

Executive sponsors and change agents have to agree on the source of power that will ensure the change. And they must follow through on it!

The agenda must be explicit and have teeth. The change agent has to be able to walk into any room with the full blessing of power, and with a ready set of implications for non-participants and opt-outs. But the change agent should never have to articulate them!

For the other leaders in the organization, opting out must be a visible, deliberate action that is advertised to the highest levels of sponsorship. Opting out has to have consequences. Or else, why bother?

Practical points

Cognitive dissonance being what it is, human beings aren’t wired to admit that they individually are the problem. Chances are, you read the anecdote at the beginning of this article with a real notion of who the victim was, and the victim probably looked a lot like you. The reality is that all parties in the anecdote hold responsibility. So, here are some things to do about it:

  • Sponsoring executives have to stay engaged and deliver their positional and personal influence through their change agents. Tell the organization that the agent has power and why. Never, ever leave that communication to the change agent. Define—honestly—the agenda the agent is working to implement. And, for goodness’ sake, don’t undermine the change agent by entertaining back-channel grievances and allowing one-off deviations from the plan without explicit, advertised, and good reasons. Sponsor the right behaviors through influence or force.
  • Change agents need to clarify the source of their power. Can they state in a short sentence what would keep the organization from opting out? Are the power dynamics such that the change agent is set up to fail? Remember: Idealism is great, but not sufficient. Just going and doing a good job is not enough if the power structure isn’t in place.
  • Group or organizational leaders have to own and explain their priorities. To be sure, there are myriad good reasons—ranging from timing to talent—for opting out of change initiatives. Handled transparently, these reasons can be managed well. If handled passively or through backroom deals, however, opting out sends a signal to the rest of the organization (that doesn’t have such good reasons for it) that opting out will be tolerated and accepted. So, why bother?

If you deploy change agents, be sure to back them with enough power to make them effective. Practice sponsorship, not spectatorship. Define your agenda. Lead. Clear the way.

If you’re a change agent, be sure you have enough power through sponsorship to achieve what the organization expects you to achieve. If you don’t have it, get it. Can’t get it? Move on.

What do you think?