25 Not Out: Reflections on a Career in Transformation

My observations focus on what organisations don’t typically excel at, but I’ve seen many organisations do lots of things well, and those traits are reflected in my recommendations on how to improve.

Naturally, I have deliberately avoided referencing specific clients, but my observations are drawn from experience working across many sectors (from Financial Services, central and local government, to Higher Education, and most in between) and different departments – including the change and IT functions that can typically bear the brunt of transformation activity.

1. Vicious Cycle of Inaction

Organisations, teams and managers are so consumed by daily demands that they’re “too busy” to implement changes that would free up time—like automation. Similarly, budget constraints then reinforce this tunnel vision, meaning they are unwilling to invest in changes that will reduce costs.  Organisations are therefore unwilling to ‘step out’ of the routine to break the cycle, leaving them stuck in the same routines.

What to do:

• Create an enabling culture, set from the top down, that allows such time and cost savings initiatives to be successful. Establish enduring teams with responsibility for their own backlog, and full-time allocation of people to those teams to ensure they have sufficient capacity to deliver.
• Be clear on the value created by such initiatives and create space within the budget for initiatives that provide in-year returns
• Refine funding models to focus on value delivered (outcomes)
• Carve out protected “innovation sprints” in the calendar, where no operational tasks are allowed

2. Poor Accountability and Decision-Making Gaps

Committee decisions, fear of owning outcomes, and endless escalation paths paralyse decision-making, and dilute responsibility. Teams shy away from decisive action, leaving transformation initiatives in limbo.

What to do:

• Establish Centres of Excellence (or “Practices”) that provide clear guiderails and best practice for given disciplines, ensuring clarity and consistency of approach, reducing the need for escalation or review.
• Take a ‘zero-based’ approach to governance structures, challenging the need for each stage or meeting, considering if the outcome could be achieved in a different way.
• Clarify decision rights: use a RACI matrix to pinpoint who decides, advises, and executes
• Establish a culture of empowerment and accountability, to minimise the need for “decision by committee”
• Similarly, drive decision-making down to those that are closest to the question, rather than managers.
• Celebrate quick, low-risk decisions as much as marquee wins

3. Avoidance of bold action

Both a cause and effect of the other issues, organisations often lack the courage to test different approaches. Transformation programmes can replicate old patterns – a reluctance to apply alternative governance models, or assign sufficient resources, for a pilot.

Also, organisations seem unwilling to make difficult people-related decisions. Not the ‘gross misconduct’ issues, but the resigned acceptance of culture and momentum hoovers, “behind-the-scenes” hijackers, and political manoeuvrers. These characters exist, often in plain sight, yet little is done to address the actions, or inactions, and hence the harm caused.

Why is this? A lack of training for middle management, fear of retribution, lack of accountability, and poor leadership all contribute.

What to do:

• Launch small, high-visibility pilots with sufficiently resourced teams. Define “minimum viable governance” for each experiment to accelerate approvals.
• Be clear that these pilots will be treated differently but scrutinised closely.
• Empower leaders at all levels with clear escalation thresholds
• Build a culture of accountability and co-creation – empowered cross-functional teams that work together, challenge and call-out negative behaviours.

4. Limited Organisational Agility

Lengthy procurement cycles and rigid project plans leave companies unable to pivot. Overly specified requirements increase delivery timescales and don’t stand the test of time.  Projects trundle on past the point of viability, consuming skills and leadership capacity.

These characteristics can be linked back to other themes – a lack of trust in, and empowerment of, organisations’ individuals and experts; combined with a need to justify the existence of certain teams, and a false faith in having a detailed plans and documentation.

What to do:

• Adopt agile procurement approaches – “trust with consequences” models, supplier framework agreements with guiderails
• Measure the ‘what’ not the ‘how’: Establish and empower cross-functional teams to make difficult decisions and pivot from the original plans.
• Build rolling roadmaps that incorporate regular course-correction points

5. Siloed Thinking and Behaviours

Phrases like “IT and the business” entrench divides. Framing work as “us versus them” fuels empire-building and misaligned goals. Departments optimise locally but erode wider value.

Why does this occur? Organisational culture and goal setting can unintentionally incentivise protectionism (“so long as my team meets its goals, I’ll get my bonus”).

What to do:

• Introduce shared, organisation-wide KPIs that reward cross-departmental collaboration
• Map value streams end-to-end to reveal interdependencies and waste, and align effort to value over department or function
• Establish cross-functional teams that co-create their shared goals, ensure these are clearly traceable to organisation-wide KPIs.

6. Inconsistent Change Execution

Too many initiatives start, few finish.

Fuelled by a lack of accountability and hesitance to make bold decisions, organisations find prioritisation immensely difficult, instead overseeing a portfolio of dozens of initiatives. This results in people and skills being spread too thin, significant context switching, and delays as people wait on others to complete their tasks.

Change activity is often handed over the fence to a Project Manager to deliver, with limited input and ownership from those that will benefit from the change.

Furthermore, cultural change and people readiness are often afterthoughts, inhibiting adoption, restricting the value delivered, and increasing change fatigue.

What to do:

• Stop starting, start finishing: Cap the number of in-train initiatives to 5 or 10, and have a laser focus on completing them. Don’t start any news ones, until an existing initiative has completed
• Shift from “spiky” delivery of projects to an operating model of product teams that managing ongoing backlogs of change and BAU activities. Such teams should include representation from all necessary parts of the business, with clear ownership for the outcomes
• Embed change management from day one, assigning dedicated roles for communications and training

7. Operational Inefficiencies

Eternally full diaries, ever-growing to-do lists and escalation paralysis (see below) cause delay to change activities and prevent ‘deep work’ – with context switching from meeting to meeting and no time for effective preparation.

What to do:

• Focus collective and individual efforts on fewer things – prioritise change initiatives and reduce the number of concurrent projects.
• Encourage all colleagues to block regular “focus hours” for uninterrupted work and preparation – individually and as a collective. For example – ‘no meeting Mondays’
• Introduce a ‘continuous improvement’ culture to review and retrospect on delivery AND governance processes.

8. Poor management of consultancies

Consultants are hired, sometimes at significant expense, but underutilised. Delays in access to SMEs and client feedback reduce impact and increase cost.

Organisations (especially smaller ones) ‘mismatch’ with their 3rd party suppliers and consultancy providers – often hiring global behemoths under the auspices of a ‘safe bet’ but not receiving the attention they require for success.

What to do:

• Adopt a sourcing model with those suppliers that rewards partnership and pragmatism over ‘to the letter’ delivery.
• Build trust in a small number of specialist advisors, for whom your business is of high importance, to ensure you are “top of their list”
• Work collaboratively – avoid version ping-pong. But where necessary, schedule regular alignment checkpoints and review sessions, not just milestone signoffs.
• Agree and secure upfront time commitments from SMEs and leaders

So what? Breaking the Cycle…

These eight issues dilute value and stall progress. But they’re interrelated – improving one helps unlock others. Fundamentally, they all require changes to the operating model of an organisation, to make them effective and efficient in delivering transformation.

At Mozaic we consider an organisation’s operating model to comprise seven elements:

1. Functions – the functional capabilities required within the operating model, required to achieve the strategic business objectives

2. Processes – these describe the policies, processes, procedures that enable the effective flow of work through the operating model

3. Governance– this describes the control framework for the model.  In a product-oriented model new governance and funding models are typically required

4. People – the organisation structure, roles and responsibilities, the underpinning culture and the approach to communications and business change

5. Tools – the tools necessary to underpin the model and enable high levels of automation.

6. Sourcing – functional capabilities can be sourced in various ways.   This describes the strategy for sourcing capabilities and engaging with suppliers.

7. Data – this describes the data architecture required to enable the services, functions and the overall operating model.

All of these are important for an organisation to operate effectively. However, when it comes to transforming effectively, some elements are particularly critical. The recommendations I’ve made in this paper fall into these critical elements, namely:

Process

• Commit to doing things differently, focus on value not “progress”.
• Make continuous improvement part an integral part of how things are done – embed reviews and retrospectives
• Establish cross-functional teams with ownership of value outcomes. Ensure these teams are appropriately resourced
• Adjust funding models accordingly

Governance

• Prioritise and review ruthlessly, be ready to pivot and adapt
• Establish “minimum viable governance” – ensuring risks are managed and reporting requirements met, and empower teams to make decisions within agreed guiderails
• Support experimentation and resist reverting to old governance models
• Establish guiderails within which teams can operate without needing to obtain permission
• Assign delivery experts to one cross-functional team (or initiative) at a time

Sourcing

• Establish a small cadre of trusted advisors, for whom your business is important.
• Work collaboratively, with a commercial model that rewards partnership and pragmatism

People

Ultimately transformation is a human endeavour, so changes to culture, leadership and behaviours are needed to maximise an organisation’s capability to transform. It really is “all about the people”:

• Align the organisation around value streams or “products” rather than capabilities – ensuring a focus on what matters to customers.
• Create cross-functional teams with accountability for the end-to-end ownership of those products – bringing together responsibility for ‘run’ and ‘change’.
• Establish an ‘intent-based’ leadership culture – empowering individuals and teams to be proactive and make decisions rather than being directed.
• Lead from the top – through leadership vision, active advocacy, walking the talk
• Prototype from the bottom – to get empirical evidence and create ‘demand’ for change
• Align incentives to reward cross-functional value delivery over individual achievements
• Make the difficult decisions – address behaviours that drain momentum.

What Next?

Mozaic has delivered change with over 120 organisations. Operating model design and transformation is our bread and butter.

Our collaborative approach combines deep expertise with practical innovation, enabling us to rapidly assess your challenges, co-design solutions and operating models, build internal capability, and accelerate delivery through our proven methodology and toolkit.

The transformation we enable isn’t just about change, it’s about empowering your teams for sustainable growth – work with us to deliver real-world outcomes and become Future Ready.

If you are looking to inject pace into your transformation, and embed sustainable change, contact Mozaic to start your journey,