Five mistakes that derail transformation 

A good few years ago as a younger consultant I was working with a group of senior leaders trying to create a significant shift in their organisational culture. They were clear that things needed to change, but whenever the conversation turned to what actually needed to happen, they kept coming back to the same answer: their direct reports needed to take this away and make it happen. 

I remember having a strong sense that it wasn’t going to work, but what I couldn’t have articulated nearly as clearly then was why. 

Fast forward more years than I’d probably like to admit, and I’ve now worked on transformation programmes that have succeeded, as well as plenty that have struggled. Most recently, our work with Immediate Media was recognised with a Brandon Hall Group Gold Award for Best Unique or Innovative Learning and Development Program, for a programme designed to build the leadership agility needed to deliver transformation. 

It’s made me reflect back on that earlier experience. With hindsight, those leaders weren’t simply failing to take enough ownership, they were inadvertently designing a change process that was likely to fail. 

Here are five mistakes I still see organisations making today. 

1. Aligning the Executive, but not the wider leadership system 

Getting your Executive Team aligned around a transformation is important, but transformation almost always cuts across organisational boundaries. Functions have different priorities, divisions protect resources, fiefdoms develop and different parts of the organisation see the problem, and often the solution, very differently. 

Yet we still tend to approach alignment through the hierarchy. We work with the Executive Team, then perhaps the top 100 or 250, then middle managers, when the transformation itself requires people to work across all of those boundaries. 

And alignment isn’t just about everyone understanding the vision. It’s about developing a shared understanding of where we’re trying to get to, what’s getting in the way and what we don’t yet know. 

We often use Three Horizons to help leadership populations do exactly this, exploring not just the future they’re trying to create, but what’s holding the current system in place and the tensions and dilemmas they’ll need to navigate along the way. 

2. Treating transformation like a project plan 

Of course transformation needs a plan, but the mistake is believing that the plan represents a predictable route from where you are now to where you want to get to. 

If you’re doing something genuinely transformational, there are going to be things you don’t know yet. You’re going to make assumptions, some of which will be right and some of which won’t. Transformation isn’t simply a plan to execute, it’s also a series of hypotheses to test, which means organisations need to be able to learn and adapt quickly. 

It’s perhaps not surprising that leadership agility has become such an important priority. HCI’s 2025 research found that 94% of executives see leadership agility as essential. And yet there’s a contradiction here: we say we need agile leaders, while continuing to manage transformation as though it’s a linear plan to deliver. 

Real agility means being able to acknowledge when something hasn’t worked, challenge assumptions and change course. This is where psychological safety becomes fundamental, because you can’t learn quickly if people don’t feel able to challenge one another or surface what’s not working. 

In our work with global leadership teams at Hubert Burda Media, over 90% of respondents reported a significant improvement in their ability to have productive conflict. In our Brandon Hall Gold winning work with Immediate Media, the proportion of people agreeing that “we are encouraged to experiment even though some of our initiatives may not succeed” increased 17 percentage points over three years, to 84%. 

The plan will change, so the real question is whether your leaders have the capacity to challenge it, learn from what’s happening and adapt quickly enough when it does. 

3. Mistaking communication for participation 

We talk a lot about “bringing people with us” through change, and usually that leads pretty quickly to communication. What’s the narrative? How do we explain the case for change? How do we make sure everyone understands where we’re going? 

All important, but understanding somebody else’s transformation isn’t the same as having some agency within it. If we want people to work differently, collaborate across boundaries and solve problems we haven’t solved before, they need opportunities to participate in making sense of the change. 

That doesn’t mean pretending everything is up for grabs. Good participation requires leaders to be clear about what is fixed, what isn’t and where there is genuinely space to shape the answer. 

We’ve been applying this thinking through the Best of Both campaign, which we designed with Leeds Community Healthcare and Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust to support their journey towards becoming one NHS Trust. More than 4,000 people have been invited to participate, with over 1,500 taking part so far, helping to shape the values, behaviours and leadership approach for the future. 

The point isn’t simply to define a new culture and then communicate it, but to give people genuine opportunities to help work out what the best of both organisations actually looks like in practice. Otherwise it’s easy to call something “engagement” when what we really mean is communicating a decision we’ve already made. 

And if transformation is genuinely full of unknowns, we don’t simply need people to buy into the answer. We probably need them to help us find it. 

4. Delegating the work, but not the power 

We create transformation workstreams, cross-functional teams and steering groups, give them difficult organisational problems and tell them they’re empowered to solve them. Six months later, we’re frustrated that they haven’t made enough progress. 

But were they ever really empowered? Did they have the autonomy to make meaningful choices, make decisions that affected resources or priorities and access senior leaders to remove the barriers that only they could remove? 

There’s an idea in Adaptive Leadership called work avoidance, describing the ways people and systems avoid facing into difficult adaptive challenges. Delegation can sometimes become a sophisticated version of exactly that. 

It certainly was for those senior leaders I worked with all those years ago. Asking their direct reports to lead the work looked like empowerment, but with hindsight they were asking other people to solve a challenge that required them to work differently too. 

Before blaming a transformation group for not delivering, it’s worth asking whether we ever really created the conditions in which they could. 

5. Expecting everyone else to change 

A few years ago, we were working with an NHS Board on a significant transformation programme. We ran a pulse survey asking people to rate both the level of collaboration across the Board and their own contribution to it. 

What came back was fascinating. People rated collaboration across the Board relatively poorly, whilst rating their own contribution significantly more positively. In other words, everyone could see there was a problem, but almost everyone thought the problem was somewhere else. 

That dynamic played out through the work. People participated, but there was very little sense of genuine ownership for making the transformation happen. It increasingly felt at risk of becoming a box-ticking exercise, where everyone could point to what they’d done without really asking: what do I need to do differently? 

At the end of the contract, we were invited to continue into a second phase and we declined. We didn’t believe there was enough genuine intent within the organisation to follow through on the change, and running more workshops wasn’t going to fix that. 

Because genuine transformation almost always requires something different from the people leading it too. Maybe I need to let go of some control, listen differently, make decisions differently, work across boundaries differently or let go of behaviours that have been fundamental to my success until now. 

We saw the opposite in our Brandon Hall Gold winning work with Immediate Media. Every member of the Executive and Senior Leadership Team, from the CEO down, saw themselves as part of the programme and the transformation it was there to support. They weren’t asking others to develop around them, they were exploring their own leadership, their impact and what they needed to do differently alongside everyone else. 

Transformation is a participation activity 

Transformation needs plans, governance, milestones and measures, but organisations don’t transform simply because the transformation plan says they will. 

They transform because people across the leadership system align around difficult challenges, learn quickly, participate in finding answers, exercise real ownership and are prepared to change themselves along the way. 

Which takes me back to that room all those years ago. Those leaders saw transformation as something they were responsible for making happen elsewhere in the organisation, rather than something they needed to participate in themselves. 

Change isn’t a delegated activity. It’s a participation activity.