stopped, not strengthened
Most programmes get you to zero. Growth is a separate job.
Ask a founder what they expect from a transformation programme and the answer is usually some version of: turn this into something impressive. A struggling function becomes a standout one. A department that’s been quietly underperforming becomes the case study everyone points to.
That expectation is understandable, and it’s almost always wrong about what the first ninety days of a genuine transformation actually produce.
Picture a person who’s been unwell for a while — run down, underweight, not functioning at full capacity. The first phase of getting them healthy isn’t turning them into a competitive athlete. It’s stopping whatever’s been draining them, getting basic function back, and reaching a stable baseline. Building real strength comes after that, as a distinct, later phase, with different inputs and a different kind of effort. Nobody expects a doctor’s first intervention with a malnourished patient to be a bodybuilding programme, but that’s more or less what founders expect from transformation.
Why the gap between expectation and reality causes real damage
When a founder is expecting growth and a programme delivers stabilisation, the programme reads as a disappointment — even when it’s doing exactly the right thing in exactly the right order. Confidence in the initiative erodes. Budget gets questioned. The team running the transformation ends up defending progress that’s real but doesn’t look like what was promised, because what was promised was never actually the right first goal.
This is one of the quieter reasons transformation programmes lose momentum and get abandoned early. It’s not that the work isn’t working. It’s that the work was never going to look like what people expected it to look like at this stage, and nobody set that expectation correctly at the start.
What “stopping the bleeding” actually looks like
In a function that’s genuinely struggling, the honest starting point is almost always negative, not neutral. Processes are broken in ways that actively cost money or time every day. Decisions are being made on bad information. People are compensating for structural gaps with heroics that aren’t sustainable and won’t scale.
The first real work of transformation is identifying exactly where those negative-value activities are and closing them — not adding something new on top of a foundation that’s still actively losing ground. This is unglamorous work. It rarely produces a dramatic before-and-after story. What it produces is a function that’s stopped actively costing the business money and has reached a stable, functioning baseline it can actually build from.
That’s not a consolation prize. It’s the necessary precondition for everything that comes after it, and skipping it to chase visible growth early is exactly how transformation programmes end up building new capability on top of a foundation that’s still cracked.
Why growth is genuinely a separate phase
Once a function is stable — processes work, decisions are made on real information, the team isn’t running on heroics — the nature of the work changes completely. It’s no longer about closing gaps. It’s about deliberate investment: new capability, new systems, expanded scope, the things that actually produce the standout function a founder originally pictured.
Trying to do both phases simultaneously is where most transformation programmes overreach. Investing in growth before the negative-value activity has been closed means the investment is being built on ground that’s still moving, and it tends to get quietly undone by the same underlying problems that made the function weak in the first place.
What this means for how a programme should be scoped
Name the two phases explicitly, at the start, with the founder. A programme that says clearly “the first phase gets us to stable, the second phase builds beyond it” sets an expectation the actual work can meet. A programme that implies both will happen at once sets one it can’t.
Measure phase one against the right baseline. Success in the stabilisation phase isn’t growth — it’s the elimination of negative-value activity, measured honestly against where the function actually started, not against where the founder hoped it would already be.
Don’t let phase one quietly become the whole programme. Stabilisation work can expand to fill all the available time and budget if nobody’s watching for it, because it’s real, valuable, and never quite finished. A defined transition point into growth work has to be built in deliberately, not left to happen naturally.
The reframe worth making
A transformation programme that takes a function from actively losing ground to a stable, functioning baseline has done real, valuable work — even though it doesn’t look like the story most founders were picturing when they signed off on it. Getting from negative to neutral and getting from neutral to positive are two different undertakings, with two different kinds of effort, and conflating them is what makes good early-stage transformation work look like underperformance.
If your transformation programme is being judged against growth it was never actually scoped to deliver yet, that expectation gap is worth resetting before it costs the initiative its support. See how our Transformation Programmes engagement works →
