Why most transformations stall

When I joined an IT services company, it had been losing money for several years in a row. On almost every client the team worked for, the margin was negative.

The clients had lost their trust in the service. Tickets stayed open too long, and the people on the other side had learned to escalate straight to the founder. So that's where almost every ticket ended up. He picked them up himself, one after the other.

In the leadership meetings, nobody said a word. People came in, looked at the numbers and waited for him to decide.

The company had already done the sensible thing. A consultant had worked with them on a strategy, and when I read it, I agreed with most of it. It just hadn't changed anything about how people worked on Monday morning.

The usual answer

When a transformation stalls, the first reflex is to look at the plan again. Is the strategy right? Should the structure on the slide be different? Do we need someone who knows the market better?

Sometimes the plan really is the problem. In the companies I've worked in, it usually wasn't. The plan was fine, and it landed on an organization that couldn't carry it yet.

Where I look

Over seventeen years and thirty-something engagements, I've come to look at every stuck company through the same lens. I call it human architecture: who decides what, who trusts whom, and how work actually moves between people.

At that IT services company, all of it had ended up with one person. The founder decided, because nobody else did anymore. Clients trusted him and hardly anyone else. And the work moved through his inbox, because that was the only route that still worked.

Nobody had designed it that way. Every escalation made sense to the client who sent it, and every ticket he picked up made sense to him, because it kept a client on board for another week. Together they made sure nothing else could change.

Starting with the founder

The obvious move would have been to take the tickets away from him. Put a process in place, route everything through the team, and ask him to step back.

I didn't start there. A founder who has carried a company for years doesn't hand over the one thing that still feels under control because a newcomer draws a new process on a whiteboard. (I wouldn't either.)

So in the first weeks I mostly spent time with him. I wanted to understand what he was protecting, and I wanted him to see that I was there to help him carry it. That relationship took longer to build than any structure I drew later, and everything after it depended on it.

Then the team

At the same time I sat down with the other people in the team, one by one. Most of them were good at their work. They had learned that whatever they decided could be overruled the next day, so they had mostly stopped deciding. The silence in the meetings came from there.

I coached them individually, on the decisions that were in front of them that week. We talked about who calls the client back after a bad week of service, and who is allowed to say no to work that loses money. They were small decisions, and this time they still stood the next day.

Then we reorganized the team around clear roles and decision rights, and tied each team's goals to what the business actually needed. We simplified the processes, so a ticket could move without passing through one person.

The founder as top expert

The last step was the founder's own role. We gave him the work where nobody could replace him: the hardest technical problems and the clients who really needed his expertise. The daily tickets stayed with the team.

Not long after, he said to me: "Finally I can work on the things I like doing."

The meetings changed in the same period. There wasn't one moment where someone broke the silence. People started talking once they noticed that what they said and decided actually counted.

Over 23 months, gross margin went from −35% to +35%, without letting anyone go. Service got faster, and clients noticed.

Why the strategy hadn't worked

Looking back, the consultant's strategy wasn't wrong. It asked the team to take decisions that, in that organization, only one person was allowed to take. The plan needed people to carry it, and those people had been taught to wait.

I see the same thing in most transformations that stall. The strategy assumes an organization that isn't there yet: clear decision rights, enough trust between the people who have to work together, and a way for work to move without going through a bottleneck. When that's missing, a new plan lands on the same foundation as the last one, and six months later the same problems come back in slightly different words.

What I'm still working out

What I still don't understand well is the tipping point. Frustration builds up. Old hurt from earlier departures or reorganizations stays in the room. Decisions get postponed, one after the other. For a long time an organization absorbs all of that and keeps going. Then at some point it turns, and everything locks up at once.

I can recognize the blockage when I walk in. I can't yet tell when a company is about to reach it, and that's the moment when it would be easiest to help.

What I do first now

When I join a company that has already tried a plan that didn't work, I don't start by writing a new one. In the first weeks I find out where decisions really get made, and who people go to when something has to happen today.

Usually that's one or two people, carrying far more than their role was ever meant to. I start by spending time with them, and with the people around them who have stopped deciding.