The ten-month execution gap that quietly breaks transformations
By Sarah Boorman, Organisational Development & Agile People, Project X Partners
I sat with a leadership team once who were genuinely ready to go. Budget agreed, programme designed, comms drafted, energy high. It was a good plan. I believed in it.
And then, somewhere around month nine, it started to drift. Not dramatically. Just a slow loss of momentum that nobody could quite explain, while everyone privately wondered whether it was just them.
It almost always happens around the same time. And it’s almost never the strategy’s fault.
Two organisations, not one
Here’s the pattern I’ve watched repeat more times than I can count.
A strategy gets built for the organisation that the leadership team believes it has. Then it lands in the organisation they actually have — and those turn out to be two different organisations.
The cultural conditions weren’t quite what the plan assumed. The talent layer was thinner than the model suggested. The middle-management cadre that was supposed to be the engine of the change had quietly disengaged a year earlier, and nobody had measured it.
None of that shows up in month one, when the energy is high. It shows up later — and in our experience, the gap between strategy ready and organisation ready tends to run close to ten months. Long enough that, by the time the drift is undeniable, nobody connects it back to the start.
The gap is always in the people layer
I’ll be honest about something I learned the hard way. Early on, I’d have looked at a stalling programme and reached for the process — the plan, the governance, the milestones.
But the gap is rarely there. It’s in the people layer: adoption that didn’t happen, talent that leaked from the roles that mattered most, leaders who were never genuinely aligned, a workforce that was tired before the programme even began.
And here’s the part that still gets me: it’s almost always findable beforehand. The signals are there. They’re just not being looked for, because everyone’s busy building the plan.
What helps — and it’s simpler than another programme
This isn’t an argument for more analysis or a bigger programme. It’s an argument for a sharper starting point. A few things make the difference:
→ Quantify the people-side risk before you commit, not after it surfaces.
→ Get an honest, independent read of how ready the organisation actually is — including the parts that don’t show up in dashboards.
→ Align your leadership team on the two or three things that genuinely matter, before anyone acts.
→ Bring people into shaping the change, so adoption is built in from the start rather than bolted on at month nine.
When we worked with the global legal function of a major bank, we didn’t start with a solution. We started by asking 1,200+ colleagues across 19 countries how it actually felt to work there, and co-creating the way forward with them. The engagement numbers moved across every index — but more importantly, the change belonged to the people who had to live it.
Get the position right before you commit to the route
The most expensive moment in any transformation isn’t the planning. It’s the month-seven realisation that the starting point on the map was wrong — and now the whole route has to be redrawn mid-flight, while the programme is already running and the budget is already spent.
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