Embedding Change in the Organisation’s Daily Work
The transformation was planned: consultants came in, workshops took place, the plan was presented to the board. Everyone nodded. And yet, six months later, the day-to-day work of teams hasn’t really changed.
It’s not a matter of bad faith. The problem lies elsewhere: between vision and results on the ground, something needs to connect the two.
1. How to Fail a Transformation
A transformation involves multiple levels of an organisation, with strategic vision at one end and operational reality at the other. Here is how these two ends can miss each other badly enough to derail a transformation.
When the vision doesn’t reach the ground: a director knows where they want to take the organisation and why it matters. The strategy is built and communicated to managers. But on the ground, teams don’t see why they should do things differently. Nothing really changes in their daily work, and the transformation remains a leadership project, disconnected from operational reality.
When the ground exhausts itself without direction: teams want to change, the energy is there, initiatives emerge everywhere. People even take things into their own hands. But there is no clear direction because leadership is waiting to see what emerges: each team pulls in its own direction, creating local optimisations that undermine the whole. A lot of effort gets spent without collective coherence, gradually wearing teams down.
2. The Missing Ingredient
In both cases, what is missing is the same thing: a living connection between vision and operations. Living, because it has to exist in daily work: meetings, decisions, the adjustments that happen week after week.
This connection needs to work in both directions. The vision shapes what gets experimented on the ground, and the ground sends back concrete observations that allow the strategy to be adjusted. It is a continuous feedback loop that aligns initiatives and tests hypotheses in practice.
3. What Allows Change to Take Hold
Intervening in Real Work
During a transformation, it is common to create dedicated spaces for change: training programmes, off-site workshops, steering committees, dedicated presentations. These spaces have their place. But change also needs to enter the actual workspaces: team meetings, day-to-day decisions, the moments where concrete problems arise.
By intervening in existing spaces rather than alongside them, change stops being a separate project from the real work. It becomes part of operational reality.
Short Cycles
A vision produces hypotheses that shape a first plan. Since the situation evolves with unexpected obstacles and new opportunities, that plan needs to be adjusted continuously. With cycles of a few weeks, it is easier to adapt initiatives based on what is observed and to leave room for surprises that emerge from the ground.
Feedback That Travels Up
Short cycles allow for frequent feedback. To make that feedback useful, it helps to remove as many filters as possible between the ground and leadership. It is with real signals that strategy can be adjusted without spending too much time on things that are not working as expected.
This also means accepting feedback that does not always confirm what leadership had in mind.
4. How I Work on This Kind of Transformation
I work across all levels of the organisation, from leadership to teams.
With leadership, the work focuses on vision: formulating it concretely enough to guide real decisions, identifying how to measure progress, and maintaining its coherence through adjustments over time.
With teams, I intervene directly in their daily work: their meetings, their decision-making processes, how they handle tensions. The aim is to observe what is happening, name what is blocking, and create conditions for adjustments to come from the inside rather than imposing a ready-made solution.
Between the two, I support what circulates: how vision translates into concrete decisions for teams, how observations from the ground travel back up and inform leadership.
The ultimate goal is for this connection to no longer depend on an external intervention. The organisation should be able to sustain this dialogue between vision and ground on its own.
Let’s Talk About Your Situation
A first conversation can help clarify what is getting in the way of your transformation.
30 minutes to understand your context and see what would be useful — free and without commitment