TheHiddenForceKillingTransformationInsideBigCompanies

After surgery, the human body does something remarkable and quietly destructive. It forms adhesions. Fibrous bands of tissue that bind organs together in places they were never meant to connect. The body's own healing response, layer after layer, year after year, slowly fusing things into a rigid, painful mess.

Surgeons will tell you the adhesions rarely show up on scans. Patients describe vague, migrating pain. Everything feels wrong but nothing looks broken. And here's the part that matters: the only fix is to go back in and cut them away.

I've spent years inside large organisations trying to help them transform. And I keep finding the same thing. Adhesions everywhere.

The Accumulation Nobody Talks About

Many companies I walk into have a version of this story. Good people. Brilliant intentions. Decades of effort. And a slow, invisible accumulation of decisions that didn't work.

Restructures that created more confusion than clarity. Senior hires who looked perfect on paper and lasted eighteen months. Acquisitions that were supposed to be transformative and became expensive distractions. Strategies sold to the press and shareholders with such conviction that walking them back became unthinkable. None of these were malicious. Most were defensible at the time. But compounded across five, ten, twenty years, the result is something I can only describe as organisational sludge.

The consumer website doesn't match the product line. The product line doesn't match the mission statement. The mission statement doesn't match the pricing strategy. The pricing strategy doesn't match the distribution model. The org chart doesn't match the P&L. The tools don't match the workflows. Nothing connects. Everything contradicts.

And everyone inside knows it.

The Denial Is the Disease

Here's what makes this so bizarre. The sludge is obvious. People feel it in every meeting, every cross-functional email chain, every strategy document that contradicts the last one. McKinsey's own research puts the transformation failure rate at 70%.¹ Bain's 2024 analysis pushed that number to 88% of business transformations failing to achieve their original ambitions.² These aren't edge cases. This is the norm. But say it out loud? Point at the elephant standing in the middle of the room?

Somehow that's considered disloyal.

The assumption is that acknowledging the mess means blaming the people who made it. That honesty triggers a witch hunt. So everyone performs a strange, collective theatre where the real problems are treated as unspeakable and the conversation drifts toward palatable trivialities.

People bury themselves in dashboards. They obsess over metrics that measure motion, not progress. They build elaborate plans on top of foundations they know are cracked. Kahneman and Tversky gave this a name decades ago. Prospect Theory. Loss aversion. The sunk cost effect.³ We are biologically wired to protect past investments, even failing ones, because abandoning them feels like admitting the loss is real. Research from Arkes and Blumer showed that people who'd already sunk resources into something consistently inflated their estimates of its likelihood to succeed.⁴ The deeper you're in, the harder it becomes to see clearly.

Organisations do this at industrial scale.

The Counter-Argument (And Why It Doesn't Hold)

The defence of corporate denial is understandable if you're being generous. Stability matters. Constant upheaval is expensive and exhausting. Acknowledging failure publicly can damage share price, talent acquisition, and customer confidence. There's a reason boards don't hold quarterly press conferences titled "Here's Everything We Got Wrong."

And there's something to that. Not every mistake needs a public reckoning. Not every failed initiative warrants a post-mortem broadcast to investors. Organisational psychology tells us that cultures need psychological safety, and a constant drumbeat of "we were wrong" can erode that safety rather than build it.

Fair enough.

But there's a vast, destructive space between a public mea culpa and the silent pretending that goes on inside most large organisations. I'm talking about what happens behind closed doors. Whether a leadership team can sit in a room together and say: this isn't working, it hasn't been working, and here's what we're going to do about it.

Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975. Their own engineer, Steven Sasson, built the prototype. They buried it for twenty years because it conflicted with their film business.⁵ By the time they were forced into the digital market, Canon and Sony had built entire ecosystems around them. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. They had the innovation. They just couldn't accept what it was telling them.

The Therapy Trap

What happens instead of honest reckoning is fascinating and depressing in equal measure.

Companies bring in consultants. The consultants produce beautiful decks that describe the problem in language just diplomatic enough to avoid triggering anyone. The decks get filed. Nothing changes. Or a new initiative launches, built on top of the same broken foundations, and everyone pretends this time it'll be different.

Meanwhile, the best people inside the organisation, the ones who actually see the problems clearly, become exhausted. They stop fighting for change. They either leave or retreat into cynicism. And the people tasked with driving transformation, people like me, end up spending most of their energy not on the big strategic challenges but as therapists to talented humans dying of frustration.

That's the real cost. Not the failed restructure. Not the bad acquisition write-down. The slow bleeding of belief from the people who could actually fix things, if someone would just let them name the problem.

What Actually Works

The companies I've seen genuinely transform share one thing. They found a way to separate accountability from blame.

They created the conditions where a leader could say: "We made these decisions with the best information we had. Some of them were wrong. Here's what we're going to build now." No witch hunt. No public flagellation. Just an honest, clear-eyed assessment of reality followed by decisive action.

McKinsey's own research found that organisations investing heavily in cultural honesty see 5.3 times higher transformation success rates than those focused only on technology or process.⁶ Five point three times. The single biggest predictor of whether a transformation succeeds or fails is whether the people inside can talk honestly about what's broken.

Strip away the soft language and what you're looking at is a strategic multiplier. Pure and simple.

The Splinter

Most large companies I've consulted with look impressive from a distance. The brand, the revenue, the office, the org chart. Get close and you find the adhesions. Layers of well-intentioned scar tissue binding everything together in ways that prevent movement.

No restructure will fix this. No consultancy engagement. No initiative layered on top of the mess.

The only thing that works is the conversation nobody wants to have.

And until someone has the courage to start it, you're just adding more scar tissue.

Sources ¹ McKinsey & Company, "Why do most transformations fail? A conversation with Harry Robinson" (2019). Robinson cites academic research consistently showing roughly 70% of corporate transformations fail. ² Bain & Company, Business Transformation Study (2024). Found 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions. ³ Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A., "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk," Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291 (1979). The foundational paper on loss aversion and how humans systematically deviate from rational decision-making. Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for this work. ⁴ Arkes, H.R. & Blumer, C., "The Psychology of Sunk Cost," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35(1), 124–140 (1985). Demonstrated that individuals who had incurred a sunk cost inflated their estimates of a project's likelihood of success compared to those who had not. ⁵ Kodak engineer Steven Sasson developed the first digital camera prototype in 1975. The company suppressed the technology for two decades to protect its film business. When Kodak finally entered the digital market in the early 2000s, competitors including Canon and Sony had already established dominant positions. Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2012. ⁶ McKinsey & Company, Digital Transformation research. Found that organisations investing in culture change see 5.3x higher success rates than those focused only on technology implementation.