What tends to be underestimated is the reality of business as usual: teams still need direction, clients still expect delivery, and revenue targets don’t go away.
This is where it gets difficult: managing both transformation and operations at the same time. Having seen this play out across multiple organisations, I’ve found a few things that can make a significant difference.
The motivations behind transformation matter more you think
When people understand why the organisation is changing, not just what is changing, they engage meaningfully rather than going through the motions. But communication alone won’t sustain a programme running two to three years or more. Fatigue is one of the most underestimated risks in any transformation. When the initial excitement fades and complexity deepens, teams that were once energised can feel depleted. And when that happens, business as usual starts to feel like it’s getting in the way, rather than the very thing the transformation is supposed to improve.
Added to this, while transformation might create new roles and/or demand new skills, this can cause anxiety. Who will be restructured? Whose role looks different on the other side? Will my job remain? If these questions aren’t addressed directly, they can become a distraction you can ill afford, especially when you need people focused on change and delivery.
Another pattern I see involves promising too much, too fast. If a roadmap is overly ambitious, the gap between the promise and the delivery becomes a credibility problem that’s very hard to recover from. I have seen many transformations that overlook or oversimplifying cultural dynamics: different working styles, expectations and ways of engaging with leadership. When these factors aren’t properly accounted for, early delays and eroded trust become almost inevitable.
What actually makes transformations work
The organisations that navigate these factors well tend to share a few things in common. None of them are revolutionary ideas, however all of them are harder to execute than they look.
Leaders who walk the walk
Role modelling is not optional, and I say that having watched it go wrong many times. When senior leaders visibly behave in ways consistent with the transformation by adopting new processes, engaging with new tools and holding themselves to new standards, it sends a clear signal that the change is real and permanent. When they don’t, the organisation notices that too.
This goes beyond optics. Leaders who roll their sleeves up and problem solve with the team when it matters, give people confidence that the transformation is shared, not imposed. Leaders who treat it as something happening to the organisation, rather than something they’re actively driving, create a credibility gap that cascades downward faster than any communication plan can fix.
Communication that actually communicates
Most transformation programmes have a communication strategy: Town halls, updates, leadership briefings, intranet posts. But volume isn’t the same as clarity. The question worth asking is whether people at every level of the organisation can answer four things: What are we trying to achieve? Why does it matter? What does it mean for me? When will things happen? If these questions can’t be answered clearly and consistently, the communication programme needs to be redesigned, not expanded.
It’s also about communicating the honesty of the programme and its progress. If something is not working, call it out. If you permit underperformance or misalignment to go unchallenged, you’re inadvertently telling the audience you’re ok with it.
Goals, metrics, and the right KPIs
This is where many transformations lose their way. Metrics are agreed early, reported on diligently, and then become disconnected from how the organisation actually makes decisions. KPIs become a reporting exercise rather than a management tool. You need to choose fewer, more meaningful measures, and then hold the entire organisation accountable to them.
KPI alignment
Which brings me to a point that doesn’t get enough attention. Very often, across transformation programmes, teams don’t have KPIs fully associated with the change programme
Think carefully about what that creates. A dedicated programme team, measured on transformation outcomes, working alongside teams measured almost entirely on BAU performance. The incentives diverge. Ownership fails to cohere. And when pressure mounts BAU wins, because that’s where the accountability lives.
My strong recommendation based on my own experience, is to ensure that KPIs align. Everyone has a role to play, and that role should be related to the end transformation goal. This single step changes the dynamic fundamentally.
Less is more
The instinct is to measure everything. Comprehensive dashboards. Multi-layered scorecards. Dozens of KPIs cascading through the organisation. However, the reality is that too many KPIs create noise, diffuse accountability, and make it genuinely unclear what success looks like. When everything is a priority, nothing is.
Forensic analysis depends on knowing what to prioritise, not all data carries equal weight, and treating every metric as if it does leads to the wrong conclusions.
A better approach is to identify a small number of measures that are truly meaningful; indicators that will tell you, without ambiguity, whether the transformation is delivering its intended value. These should include:
- Outcome KPIs: the business results the transformation is ultimately designed to improve
- Process KPIs: whether new ways of working are genuinely being adopted
- Internal programme KPIs: the health of the transformation itself such as pace, risk, team capacity, stakeholder confidence
Governance: the architecture
The operational question at the heart of all of this is governance. How do you set up decision-making that keeps BAU running effectively while genuinely driving transformation forward without them both working against each other?
A few principles that I’ve seen work in practice:
- Make governance inclusive, not central. If a Finance or HR transformation is being run exclusively by the central programme team, with no active participation from the rest of the business, it will produce solutions that don’t fit the people who have to use them. Representatives from other functions need to be in the room, not consulted afterwards. This breaks down silos and builds the kind of broad ownership that makes transformation stick.
- Set up decision-making that gives people genuine ownership. Governance structures that are purely hierarchical (where all decisions flow upward before anything can move) slow transformation down and disengage the people closest to the work. Designing appropriate levels of devolved decision-making, with clear boundaries, creates energy and accountability at the same time.
- Build leadership KPIs before you build the programme. As above, this is a prerequisite, not an afterthought. Leaders measured only on BAU outcomes will, rationally, prioritise BAU. That’s not a character issue, it’s a system design problem that’s entirely solvable before the first workstream kicks off.
Is transformation ever finished?
There’s a philosophical version of this question, and a practical one.
Philosophically, probably not, as organisations that thrive are in continuous adaptation. But the practical answer matters just as much. Transformation programmes need an end state: a point at which new ways of working are embedded, new capabilities are in place, and the programme can stand down with confidence. Without that horizon, transformation becomes a permanent fixture that people learn to work around rather than with.
The discipline is in being honest about what “done” actually looks like. Not in terms of activities completed, but in terms of outcomes achieved, behaviours changed, and capability built. If you can answer those questions clearly, you’ll know when you’re finished. And if you’re still tracking the KPIs as you should be, the data will tell you whether the answer is yes.
Transformation is hard not because the ideas are complicated, but because the human and organisational dynamics are. Getting the governance right, giving people real ownership, and building accountability structures that hold together under pressure – that’s where transformation is won or lost.
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