Most transformations should not be started

On the ribbon-cutting reflex, the dopamine of new initiatives, and why momentum is a skill most organisations do not have.

One belief I hold that few people in the value-creation business will say out loud: most transformation initiatives should never be started. They consume capital, attention, and goodwill, and a clear majority produce no measurable EBITDA result.

The numbers are not contested. McKinsey's transformation practice has been reporting a ~70 percent failure rate for more than two decades, and the figure has been replicated across BCG, KPMG, and Bain studies; Bain's 2024 work puts it at 88 percent for large-scale business transformations specifically (Bain & Company, 2024; Garcia, 2022; Kotter, 1995). The number has not moved. Decades of methodology, change-management frameworks, and consulting hours later, the failure rate is essentially what it was when Kotter first measured it in his ten-year study published in Harvard Business Review in 1995.

That stability is the interesting part. It suggests the problem is not insufficient knowledge. It is a problem of setup.

Most initiatives are not set up to succeed

When I look back at the transformation programmes I have seen not produce any considerable value, the pattern is almost monotonous. No clearly named metric to track along the way. No timeline with a defined end. No single name on the accountability line. Plenty of plans, decks, and directives, but as Kotter (1995) noted in his original study, "no clear and compelling statement of where all this was leading."

The ribbon-cutting moment is fully staffed. Then crickets.

This is the structural failure mode: the kickoff is a status event, and the follow-through is administrative work. Everybody wants to be in the launch photograph. After the launch, the same people are quietly moving onto the next initiative, because the next launch is where the visibility is.

Creative leaders are particularly exposed here. The same generative capacity that produces good ideas also produces too many of them. I have watched portco CEOs with, as the saying goes, enough ideas to kill their business, and watched several of them do exactly that, by starting six initiatives in year one of the hold period and finishing none.

What organisations are actually optimising for

If you watch the behaviour rather than the strategy decks, the pattern becomes hard to miss. Organisations that cannot finish initiatives are not lazy and not poorly led. They are optimising for the only dopamine the system reliably delivers: the launch.

Realising value is slow, unglamorous, and statistically invisible until quite late. The launch is fast, visible, and gives everyone involved an immediate status return. Given the choice (and absent a discipline that forces the other behaviour), most organisations will keep choosing the launch. They will start a seventh thing before they have finished the first three. They will rebrand a stalled programme rather than diagnose why it stalled. They will replace the leader rather than examine the operating cadence.

Jim Collins called this the Doom Loop in Good to Great: "they launch change programs with huge fanfare, hoping to enlist the troops. They start down one path, only to change direction. After years of lurching back and forth, these companies discover that they've failed to build any sustained momentum" (Collins, 2001).

The Doom Loop is not a failure of intention. It is a failure of momentum as a learned skill.

Momentum is a skill, and most organisations do not have it

I have developed a strong aversion to working with environments that cannot build momentum. Not because the people are wrong, but because momentum is the only mechanism by which transformation value gets compounded, and it is a discipline that has to be installed.

Collins's flywheel framing remains the cleanest articulation: "no matter how dramatic the end result, good-to-great transformations never happen in one fell swoop... Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond" (Collins, 2001). The flywheel image is well-worn now, but the underlying mechanism is precise: each turn makes the next turn cheaper. Value compounds because effort compounds. Skip the boring middle turns and the flywheel does not arrive at breakthrough. It stops.

The operational version of this, in PE terms, is what CVC's value-creation framework calls the "Golden Year": the first twelve months of the hold, where 50–80 percent of the total transformation target should be achievable on a run-rate basis if the plan is built right (CVC, 2026). The Golden Year is where momentum is either established or quietly forfeited. After year one, the activation energy required to install discipline rises sharply.

What this means for OPs

For Operating Partners, the implication is uncomfortable but actionable. The operative move is not in starting more initiatives. It is in starting fewer, and in installing the four conditions that distinguish a flywheel from a Doom Loop:

A named metric (financial, not activity-based) that the initiative is held to from week one. No metric means no initiative.

A defined end date. Not a launch date. An end date. "Until when do we have to be done?" is the single most-skipped question in PE transformation planning.

One owner. Not a steering committee. Not a working group. One name, with the calendar time to actually run it, and with the operational standing to make the trade-offs the initiative will require.

A review cadence designed for the boring middle, not the ribbon cutting. The eighteenth-month checkpoint matters more than the kickoff. McKinsey's research across 1,600+ transformations finds that organisations which embed transformation disciplines into business-as-usual operations are over twice as likely to deliver durable impact (McKinsey, 2025).

The harder discipline, before any of this, is the killing of initiatives that do not pass the test. Most VCPs are over-stuffed because saying yes is socially cheap and saying no is socially expensive. The OPs I have most respected in DACH are the ones who have made it the other way around: in their portcos, starting something is the expensive act, because it carries the explicit commitment to finish.

That is the operating environment in which the flywheel actually turns. The rest is ribbon-cutting.