7 min
Field Notes
The last mile is the whole trip.
The final stretch of a transformation, the part after go-live, is where the value is either realized or lost. It is also the part everyone is out of energy for.
July 19, 2026
7 min
The Method
Measure behavior, not attendance.
A full training-completion report tells you people showed up. It says nothing about whether anyone works differently, which is the only thing that matters.
July 18, 2026
7 min
The Method
Sunset the old way on purpose.
As long as the old way still works, the new way is optional. Adoption that holds usually requires deliberately closing the door behind you.
July 16, 2026
8 min
The Method
Design the decision, not the org chart.
Organizations spend enormous energy designing structure and almost none designing how decisions get made. The second one is what determines whether anything moves.
July 14, 2026
6 min
Field Notes
The quiet no.
The most dangerous objection in a leadership room is the one no one says out loud. Agreement in the meeting, absence in the follow-through.
July 13, 2026
7 min
The Method
A pilot is a rehearsal, not a demo.
Most pilots are staged to succeed. A pilot built to prove the concept teaches you nothing about whether it will survive contact with the real organization.
July 11, 2026
7 min
The Gap
The reorg reflex.
When performance disappoints, the reflex is to redraw the org chart. It is visible, decisive, and often the wrong fix for the actual problem.
July 9, 2026
7 min
The Gap
Scope creep is a decision-rights problem.
Scope does not creep because people lack discipline. It creeps because no one has the clear authority to say no.
July 7, 2026
7 min
The Gap
Adoption is a lagging indicator.
By the time low adoption shows up in your usage numbers, the causes are months old. The measures that matter are the ones that move first.
July 4, 2026
8 min
The Gap
The frozen middle.
Executives approve the change and the frontline is told to adopt it. In between sits the layer that quietly decides whether either happens.
July 2, 2026
8 min
The Gap
The dashboard is green. The outcome is not.
A program can be busy, on-schedule, and entirely off-target. The most dangerous moment in a transformation is the one that looks like success.
June 25, 2026
7 min
The Gap
Seventy percent is not bad luck.
Most large transformations fall short. A failure rate that high is not a run of misfortune. It is a method problem, and that is the good news.
June 23, 2026
7 min
The Gap
Resistance debt.
Every change that does not stick teaches the organization that change does not stick. That lesson compounds, and the next transformation inherits the bill.
June 20, 2026
7 min
The Gap
The credibility tax.
Sponsorship runs on credibility. Every change a leader backs that fails to land quietly reduces their power to mobilize the organization for the next one.
June 18, 2026
8 min
The Gap
Governance is not a steering committee.
Most transformations are governed like projects when they should be governed like enterprises. The meeting has all the trappings of governance and almost none of the decisions.
June 16, 2026
7 min
The Gap
When no one can say who decides.
Unclear decision rights are the quiet tax on every stalled transformation. They never appear under their own name. They appear as slowness, rework, and re-litigated choices.
June 13, 2026
7 min
The Gap
How good transformations starve.
A transformation rarely competes against opposition. It competes against everything else the organization is already trying to do, and the urgent beats the important every time.
June 11, 2026
8 min
The Method
Architect before you build.
Most transformations design under fire, improvising the operating model and inventing governance as they go. That is the most expensive possible time to design anything.
June 9, 2026
7 min
The Method
Alignment is built, not announced.
A design on paper changes nothing until the people who must execute it are genuinely committed. Most efforts assume alignment rather than build it, and then die on it.
June 6, 2026
7 min
The Method
Anchor the change, or it drifts back.
A new way of working that is not anchored will decay back toward the old way under the steady pressure of habit, turnover, and fading attention. Reversion is the default.
June 4, 2026
6 min
The Method
Baseline, or it didn't happen.
You cannot prove an outcome you never baselined. The phase most transformations rush is the one that makes every later claim of success or failure measurable.
June 2, 2026
6 min
The Method
Sequence by value, not by volume.
There is always pressure to start with the loudest thing. The disciplined move is to do first what unlocks the most and what everything else depends on.
May 30, 2026
7 min
The Method
Sponsorship is a coalition, not a name.
Effective sponsorship is the highest-leverage variable in change. It is also the most misunderstood: a behavior to be sustained, not a title to be assigned.
May 28, 2026
7 min
Field Notes
Commander's intent.
A plan rarely survives contact with reality intact. What survives is intent, clearly understood, so that people can adapt the method without losing the outcome.
May 26, 2026
7 min
Field Notes
The after-action review your transformation never ran.
The military reviews every operation, win or lose, to extract the lesson. Most organizations end a transformation, declare a result, and quietly carry the same mistakes into the next one.
May 23, 2026
9 min
The Method
Assess: name the cost of standing still before you fix anything.
Leaders cannot prioritize a problem they have not sized. The first move in any transformation is quantifying what standing still actually costs.
May 14, 2026
8 min
The Method
Readiness is desire and ability, not a training deck.
A few sessions near go-live is not change management. People who do not understand why the change matters to them will quietly revert the moment the hype fades.
April 16, 2026
8 min
The Method
Manage resistance in real time, not in the comms plan.
Resistance is not a risk to slot into a deck. It is a live signal that surfaces during rollout, and the method that anticipated it holds while the one that did not unravels.
April 2, 2026
9 min
Field Notes
What leading under pressure taught me about making change stick.
Two decades of leading people through hard change, in conditions where a misread is measured in outcomes rather than slides, leaves you with one stubborn conviction.
April 26, 2026
10 min
Field Notes
The first ninety days of a stalled-rollout rescue.
When a live system is failing on adoption, the rescue has a shape. Here is how the first ninety days actually go.
May 19, 2026
8 min
The Gap
Deployed is not adopted.
Go-live is a milestone, not an outcome. The gap between a system that is installed and one that is used is where the entire return lives or dies.
May 21, 2026
9 min
The Gap
The technology was never the problem.
Seven in ten transformations fall short. Almost none of them fail on the software. They fail on the part everyone treats as someone else's job.
May 28, 2026
9 min
The Gap
The shelfware you are still paying for.
The invoice cleared. The license renews. And most of the team quietly went back to the spreadsheet. Stranded capital is the most ignored line item in the building.
May 7, 2026
9 min
Field Notes
One operating model, many sites, none of them the same.
Standardizing across locations is the purest test of whether a change can actually hold. Most attempts fade within a quarter. The ones that last share a pattern.
March 26, 2026
8 min
The Gap
Why your sponsor goes quiet right when you need them.
Executives launch the change with energy, then return to their day jobs. Sponsorship fades exactly when resistance peaks, and it is the single biggest predictor of failure.
April 30, 2026
8 min
The Method
Automate a broken process and you just made it faster.
Encode a flawed workflow into a new system and you get an expensive version of the old problem. Redesign comes before deployment, not after.
April 23, 2026
8 min
The Method
If it needs you to stay, it isn't finished.
A transformation that depends on the advisor to keep it alive was never transferred. The last job is to make yourself unnecessary.
March 19, 2026
8 min
The Gap
Change fatigue is a balance-sheet problem.
An organization that has watched three transformations fizzle does not arrive at the fourth neutral. It arrives skeptical, and skepticism is the most expensive starting condition there is.
April 9, 2026
7 min
The Gap
The AI pilot that never left the lab.
The model works. The demo impressed everyone. And a year later nothing about how the organization operates has changed. AI has an execution gap, and it is the same one.
September 17, 2025
8 min
The Method
Governance before AI.
You cannot bolt oversight onto an AI system after it is making decisions. The question of who is accountable for what this thing does has to be answered before it ships, not after it fails.
November 5, 2025
7 min
The Gap
AI doesn't fail on the model. It fails on adoption.
An excellent model that no one trusts or uses is not a partial win. It is a complete loss that happens to run. The hardest part of AI was never the AI.
January 14, 2026
7 min
Field Notes
The human in the loop is the whole loop.
Every AI transformation is, underneath, a change in how people work, decide, and trust. The last mile of AI is not technical. It is human, and that is where leadership earns its keep.
March 4, 2026
The Compass