What Change Excellence Is
Why sustained transformation performance demands a designed organizational system, and why the programs you are running cannot produce it without one.
Most of the organizations I have worked with over twenty years of international transformation leadership share a common characteristic. Their aspiration for change excellence is genuine. Investments in transformation programs is substantial. And their outcomes, measured honestly against the original business case, are consistently below what the investment and intent should produce.
The explanations most frequently cited for low success is cultural inertia, leadership and employee fatigue, and change resistance. In my view is not entirely wrong. But it is incomplete in in my view because they consistently produce the wrong interventions. You cannot solve a structural problem with a motivational response. And that is, in most cases, exactly what organizations attempt.
This article makes a different argument. Change excellence, which is the organizational capacity to execute complex transformation consistently, with progressively improving performance, which not produced by any given change programs, however well-managed. It is produced by the organizational system within which programs operate.
Building that system is a different kind of investment from running a program. It requires different decisions, different accountability, and a fundamentally different time horizon.
The Program Trap
John Kotter’s foundational model of change identified eight stages through which organizational transformation must pass to succeed. His later work in Accelerate extended this to describe the dual operating system, the network-based change structure operating alongside the traditional hierarchy.[1]
What both models share is an implicit assumption that has limited their practical impact: that the unit of change management is the program. That each transformation initiative is discrete, which is with a beginning, a coalition, a set of stages, and an end. That excellence is achieved by managing each program well.[2]
This is true as far as it goes. Programs need to be well-managed. The stages Kotter identifies are real and their neglect is consistently costly. But the program lens misses something fundamental about how organizational capability actually works.
Organizations do not start each transformation from the same baseline. They start from wherever their accumulated capability (or incapacity) has left them. An organization that has spent a decade treating change management as a program-specific resource, importing external consultants for each initiative and releasing them when it ends, is not at the same baseline as one that has spent the same decade deliberately building internal change capability. Even if both run their current program identically well, the accumulated capability deficit in the first organization will constrain outcomes in ways that no program-level excellence can fully compensate for.
Excellence at the program level is necessary but not sufficient. The ceiling on program performance is set by the organizational system. Raising that ceiling requires investment at a different level than the program.
Deming and the System Problem
W. Edwards Deming argued, from decades of quality management research, that 94% of failures in organizational performance are attributable to the system rather than to the individuals operating within it.
