Essay
Before the budget is committed: how a transformation’s framing decides how it ends
I spent twenty years implementing planning systems in multinationals, watching mathematically correct plans die in organisationally predictable ways, then a year at Oxford Saïd and HEC studying why, and wrote the results up in 2018. The hypothesis placed the failure early. The conception and inception of an intervention, before a single requirement is written, is where success is largely decided.
The pattern behind that claim is familiar to anyone who has sat through a transformation. The RFP is written before the problem is understood. By the time the vendors present, the intervention has been chosen and the diagnosis has not happened, and everything that follows, the demos, the scoring matrices, the negotiation, is carried out with great professionalism in a direction fixed on day one. Studies have put the failure rate of change initiatives above seventy per cent for five decades, and few of those failures trace to the execution.
The book follows one such programme, disguised but drawn from life, at a large acquisitive manufacturer: an archipelago of plants with proud local cultures, a corporate function convinced that integrated planning can be imposed, software chosen behind closed doors, a consultancy contracted for technical deliverables only, no budget for the human work, and a business that understood the implications perfectly and was not listened to. Every one of those choices was made before the kick-off meeting. The programme ended, as these things do, not with a bang but with a case study at a conference.
Most struggling planning organisations have had years of intervention and no diagnosis.
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