The green numbers are not the problem.

The problem is everything they do not show.

In leadership meetings, a business case can make a complex decision dangerously simple. Costs go down. Capacity goes up. The curves point the right way. Everyone wants to act. 🥊

Then the change starts.

Customers notice that the flow is not as good. Employees lose ownership of processes they used to control. Coordination gets heavier. Quality dips a little before anyone can explain why. And the benefits that looked so clear in Excel begin to leak in operations. 💣

That does not mean transformation is wrong. On the contrary. Change is necessary.

But good transformations do not start with a neat spreadsheet alone. They start with a more honest picture of reality — the whole reality!

My concrete advice is simple.
💥 Do not approve the project until someone has built the underside of the spreadsheet.
What does the change mean for customers, people, quality, coordination and ownership?
That is often where benefits are either realised or lost.

McKinsey has long pointed out that around 70% of transformations do not reach their original goals. I have seen this often myself too, and my experience is that the cause is rarely weak strategy. It usually lies in analysis that is too narrow, too little anchoring, and too weak execution capability.

AI can be a timely example. Many organisations adopt AI quickly, driven by ambitious benefit estimates and legitimate pressure to keep up. But AI does not create value because the technology is rolled out. It creates value when it is built into workflow, roles, quality, accountability and leadership.

One case I recently noted was Elkem and Egde's E2 model. It treats AI as an operating model that must be built through platform, concrete use cases and organisation, where user adoption and workflow matter as much as technology. The results were formidable!

So next time the numbers look a bit too neat, I would ask one question first:
What does Excel not see?

Because leadership is not only about making a change add up.
It is about seeing what the change does to people, customers and operations.

#Transformation #Leadership #ChangeManagement #Strategy #DecisionBasis