The backbone of an implementation takes one to two months. The rest depends on the state of the organisation

The backbone of the answer is short. Six to ten sessions of one to two hours each, and at a pace of one or two meetings a week that gives one to two months of preparation. Only then does the pilot quarter start, meaning work with objectives in a smaller slice of the organisation. The order of these sessions is fixed: first we check that the mission, vision and values are consistent with the strategy, then we write down the implementation criteria, then the annual goals, and finally the quarterly objectives and the teams that work around them. We write the implementation criteria in both directions, because they work better that way: how we will know the implementation brought the expected results, and how we will know it pushed the organisation the other way.

This backbone is almost never the whole answer, and that is where the content of the episode begins. The thirteen reasons for slowing down are not ranked by importance; the order only reflects the order in which we wrote them down. Some concern the calendar: how much time the key people have available, the moment the organisation is in (peak season, a system migration, an important release) and the number of changes being run in parallel by the same people. Some concern the material we work on: no written-down strategy, no habit of working with it, no habit of working with data and an inability to think in terms of results instead of tasks. The rest concern people: a new person brought in for the transformation, agreement on the board about what working with objectives should look like, a shared need in middle management, clarity of responsibility, the condition of the board and the organisation, and experience of previous, failed changes.

We describe two of them more strongly than the rest. The board's condition comes in two variants, and they divide implementations into fast and hopeless. Fatigue with anger is a high-energy emotion and drives change. Fatigue with resignation stops it, because from a state of resignation you can't motivate anyone, and there is almost no middle state. The second is a new person hired to carry out the transformation. They are usually competent, because they have done it somewhere before, but authority doesn't come with the job title. What takes them longest is building relationships with middle management, because that is where the real blocker sits, not in the work itself.

What to do with this list before you set a date

The list is not there to scare you off. It is a checklist of the state of the organisation before the start, so go through it and mark the items you can see in your own company. The second point concerns what we do once the date has already slipped. We don't pretend we will catch up with the original schedule; we name plainly which of these reasons came into play and update the plan. Big blockers don't disappear in a week, and naming the cause is part of managing change, not an admission of failure.

The third point surprises people most often. Implementing across the whole company at once looks like a shortcut, but in reality it scales all these inefficiencies at once to several hundred people, so it takes longer by itself. A pilot in one slice looks slower and is faster, because it lets you put out fires one at a time. We have our own lesson here, too. One company summed up its earlier experience with consultants by saying that it had outlasted them: they left, and the company went back to its old way of working. We know that our presence can also be a crutch: we only have to step away for a month and old habits can come back. That is why we stay for several quarters, not just until the end of the first.