The missing layer in your 2026 plan
Welcome to another edition of the Transformation Leadership LinkedIn Newsletter
Ask any surgeon: the most critical work in a surgery often happens before and outside the theatre: diagnosis, consent, the team brief, the full design of all the scenarios, readiness, and the step-by-step recovery plan. This is what reduces the risks, gives a solid way forward, and predicts progress with confidence.
Transformation works the same way. Outcomes come from the conditions you set before kickoff and maintain throughout the process. I call this the Conditions of Success Runway: alignment, clear business capabilities, change enablement, leadership norms, culture parameters, workforce planning with capacity made real, simple ways of working, Success 360 indicators, honest views of team capacity and capability, and a designed internal-and-external experience.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
The 10 Components of the Runway
1. Alignment
How aligned are we with the strategy? Choices? No-Gos? Are we maintaining our brand identity and market perception (or evolving them)? Are we on the same page with a definition of success and “done,” scope guardrails, decision rights, and escalation paths? Sponsors and leads show up on a set cadence with clear commitments and clear design principles. So, if I ask you, your sponsor and the CEO about what the future looks like after this transformation, what answers will I get?
2. Business capability identification
Name the 3–5 capabilities you’re building, elevating, protecting, or retiring (e.g., marketing intelligence, pricing agility, service recovery, partner onboarding). Every work package in your plan maps to a capability and an outcome, not just a project or deliverable.
3. Change enablement
Adoption is designed in from day one: who must do what differently, how can we enable the teams to do what they do best, communicating effectively and with the right level of personalisation, the support they’ll get, and how you’ll hear resistance early.
4. Leadership traits & norms
How will we show up as leaders to guard this transformation? The few behaviours you’ll reward and refuse: decide in the room, say the hard thing early, protect focus, close loops. Use the norms to run meetings, make trade-offs, and acknowledge when the team slips.
5. Culture parameters
Choose what to elevate (candour, cadence, behaviours, learning, accountability) and what to stop. Add healthy rituals that make it real. This also includes team forming and norming. Team values and how this translates to cognitive and emotional culture.
6. Workforce planning
Roles, skills, reporting lines, work arrangement, dynamics, capacity, expectations and the capacity & capability. There will be trade-offs, handovers, settling into ways of working and role expectations, boundaries and personal development and growth.
7. Ways of working
Business processes, business rules, supporting data, unsaid expectations, documentation, workflows, decision-making, and expectations. Ways of working do not exist in isolation; they need data, systems, communication, KPIs, etc.
8. Success 360
Do you have an integrated view of success? Not just financial performance. Success needs to be across 10 lenses, for example: customer experience, scalability, simplification, risk appetite, etc. What does the process look like? Every team will have their own definition of progress.
9. Team capacity & capability
Workload and real capacity (mental and cognitive) - probably the most-ignored area in transformation planning. What does each need to become more engaged, receptive, and own the change? Do they need coaching, pause current work, better remuneration, resolution of dynamics and toxic interventions, or reskilling?
10. Experience: internal & external
The lived experience for employees, customers, and partners. Walk the end-to-end journey and design for friction removal and delight moment elevation, or at least maintain that.
*Note #1: If component 1 (the highest priority) is not well defined, there is no point going any further. Followed by components 2,5,8 as the following priority.
*Note #2: The above components are not meant to be read as this is all the work you need to do before delivery. These are the components you absolutely need to design for and account for with clarity in your delivery work. Some elements would require more design and thinking time than others.
So....
The most common issues with the above are:
1- Conceptually agreeable, but on the ground, it is not clear what those actually look like
2- They are assumed to be considered or integrated into the delivery when we get there. Well, they won't (maybe only 40%). Because delivery has a different speed, pace, and vibe, there are shaping and design phases before delivery. This is where those components need to live. What comes out of those components will help shape, design, and ground the delivery.
3- We assume it is someone else's job. The CEO, the executive team, the consultant, the business lead, the BAU team, the change team, the business partners .....
Most deliveries are weighed down by so much additional pressure and baggage. Because we are simply trying to diagnose, adapt, understand, make sense, get ready and deliver ALL AT THE SAME TIME.
If you skip shaping and designing phases, you are not saving time; you are costing yourself and the organisation so much more time, lost opportunities, and a lot of pressure, which affects quality and overall organisational health (and personal health, too)
Runway Scorecard
Self-Check (10 questions, 15 minutes)
Tick a box only if the answer is a clear “yes”
1. Alignment
□ Can every leader give the exact 30-second definition of success and “done” and name who decides what and when?
2. Capabilities
□ Have we named the 3–5 business capabilities (not deliverables, not systems) we’re building, and can map the transformation work packages to clear outcomes?
3. Change enablement
□ For each impacted group, have we named the behaviour change and the support system needed?
4. Leadership norms
□ Are norms identified, visible, and used in meetings and decisions (not high-level talk)? Can we show one example from this week? Example: if we say we value our employees, what evidence do we have? If we claim to have high psychological safety, can we prove that? What are we doing on a regular cadence to bring it in and enforce it?
5. Culture parameters
□ Are we clear on the target culture that will support the transformation and allow all the work to live and flourish? What values, mindsets, and norms have we mapped?
6. Workforce planning
□ Do we have a living workforce plan that covers roles, skills, reporting lines, work arrangements, team dynamics, and real capacity with explicit trade-offs, handovers, role boundaries, and individual development paths?
7. Ways of working
□ Are our ways of working defined end-to-end: processes, business rules, supporting data and owners, documentation, workflows, decision rights, and are the dependencies to systems, communications, and KPIs made explicit (no “unsaid expectations”)?
8. Success 360
□ Do we run an integrated view of success across multiple lenses (e.g., customer experience, scalability, simplification, risk appetite, financials), with clear leading/lagging measures, a review cadence, and team-level definitions of progress that roll up cleanly?
9. Team capacity & capability
□ Have we mapped workload vs real (mental and cognitive) capacity by team and agreed on the support each needs: coach, pause current work, remuneration adjustments, resolve toxic dynamics, or reskilling so pace is sustainable and ownership increases?
10. Experience: internal & external
□ Have we walked the end-to-end journeys for employees, customers, and partners, and do we have a backlog that removes friction and elevates “delight” moments—committing to at least one friction removed or one moment strengthened each week?
How to use it: Anything unchecked becomes this week’s/month's focus. One owner per box, one visible move before year-end.
Insights:
This week, I am noticing the following from my various conversations, which has got me thinking.
The traditional HR function needs to evolve to catch up to its valuable role to support the change (beyond the conventional business partnership model)
The Role of People & culture needs to evolve to support organisational change big time.
No change will ever live and truly elevate the organisation without a serious look at the two disciplines of Organisational Design and Learning & Development.
Transformation & Change Teams need clarity too!
Through a couple of conversations the past few weeks, it became apparent that while change and transformation teams are busy working for the rest of the business, they are also providing support and clarity. The change and transformation teams themselves need clarity and team cohesion to be able to function at their best
📍That's why I have now developed a series of workshops for corporate change and transformation teams.
📍The One-Team Workshop. A 1-day workshop to help the team understand their purpose, their strengths, how they internally operate and how they want to optimise their performance. At the end of the workshop, we would have a clear Team charter. This workshop is suitable for newly formed teams, too.
📍Energise & Elevate Workshop: A 1-day workshop that works best for overly busy and tired teams. Those teams are good at what they do, but they might have varying levels of capability and personality and sometimes hidden factions. This workshop addresses the team's emotional and cognitive culture, helping iron out frictions and elevate their strengths to create a healthier team cadence.
📍High-Performing Team Workshop: A workshop that is custom-tailored to change or transformation teams (as they have different needs). This workshop addresses what services we offer to the business, how we show up, how we sell our value and showcase it, how to structure the back of house to provide the right level of service, identify capability gaps, and how we keep the team engaged and with a healthy level of busyness and healthy tension to keep growing.
📩 Reach out if you want to explore any of those workshops for your team and lock it in for 2026. Reply to this email, and I will send you the details and have a confidential chat to answer any questions.
Is your transformation work creating the results you expect?
So many organisations are still wrestling with noise, misalignment, and unclear pathways.
And that’s exactly what I unpacked in my latest Transformation Talks interview with edison365.
This conversation with Ivan Lloyd goes deep into the real, often-ignored layers of transformation and change.
We explored what it actually takes to lead meaningful shifts in complex environments and why so many teams get stuck.
Here’s what you’ll take away:
✔️ The conditions that make transformation succeed
✔️ What strong transformation leadership really looks like
✔️ Lessons you can avoid with the right approach
✔️ A forward look at the future of business transformation
It was a rich, honest conversation and I am glad we opened up these areas that rarely get discussed properly.
🎥 Watch the full interview on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/eDaD8YHt
Presented as part of Transformation Talks by edison365.
Join the conversation and dive into what truly moves transformation forward.
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Thanks for your time. Till next time,
Jess Tayel
Founder of the Transformation Leadership Institute and People of Transformation membership & community.
Enable organisations to become future-fit through their Transformations & Change efforts.
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