How I Would Approach Your Transformation
If you are considering hiring me for a transformation mandate: how it would actually work - and how it ends.
If you are considering hiring me for a transformation mandate, this is how it would actually work. It is written plainly on purpose. If it does not sit well, that is information for both of us.
Before day one
I don't want to start on day one. I want a conversation first - ideally several - before you have decided to hire me and before I have decided to be hired. I need to understand the entity: its shape, its people, its goals, the best shape it hopes to become, and - be straight with me - where the boundaries and limitations really are. I cannot help you go where you hope to go if I don't know what I might need to know. And I might not be what you need. If I'm not, I will tell you so, plainly, and save us both the year.
The long discovery
The way I have built every system that works began with what I call the long discovery, and I fully intend to bring it to your company. Give me access. Give me freedom. I learnt early that I cannot design from what management tells me alone; the truths that decide whether anything flows live in the day-to-day that never makes it into reports. So I will likely end up talking to everyone - possibly every single person, including maintenance, including your customers. I will sit in the lobby and in operations. I will take people to lunch and have dinner with them. The people are what make things happen; a workflow depends on people to, well, flow. And I will be looking for your hidden dragons - the people who are exceptional at what they do and invisible where they are. Every corporation has them: ideas offered and half-adopted, talent neglected by the current shape of the organisation. Some of my best design insight will come from them - and some of the transformation's future owners are already on your payroll. I will not tell you in advance whether we start with a division, a workflow, or the whole enterprise - deciding that before discovery would create false expectations, or false limits. What I can tell you is that when I propose, I will usually propose something small first, because small, real, and working beats large, planned, and imaginary.
What you will get - and what you won't
Don't ask me for updates or early ideas. If I tell you I am not ready, it is because I have ideas and they need more information than I have. What you will not get from me is theatre. What you will get, mostly, is questions - a great many of them. You will also get, within reason, what I am discovering: early and easy fixes where things can simply be changed now; the general shape of directions as they form; and my honest read on where your own idea will and won't work - please be receptive to that. Within weeks, you will likely get the first of the concrete lists: data-protection exposure, governance gaps, leakage, inefficiencies - reported as a checklist to be fixed, fortnightly or monthly, whichever we agree. One thing I will not be: a reporter or a hall monitor on the people I am discovering things from. I need to work on trust, and trust does not survive surveillance. Within reason - always within reason - what people tell me in the lobby stays in service of the design, not the disciplinary file.
The direction may surprise you
Do not be surprised if I ask you to go somewhere that was not in your initial vision. I will do my best to incorporate what you hoped for. But if I am part of your corporation, my goal is the best shape it can possibly become - and that best shape may be something you have not considered. It may not include something you love. One of the most consistent things I have seen sink companies is clinging to a legacy thing that is no longer what they really are - held onto long after it stopped serving them. If you are not comfortable with that - don't hire me.
The plans, and the people
When the plans come, they will not arrive as a deck to be endured. They will be interactive - built to be walked through, questioned, and understood by the people who must live inside them. They will incorporate your current workflows, because workflows imposed arbitrarily do not flow. Expect me to defend some of your people's shortcuts, too - people make shortcuts because a shortcut is often the most efficient path, and that is intelligence, not indiscipline. The ones that lose quality or skip validation get closed; the rest get designed into the system. They will be planned so the actual business keeps running - I will not overburden the very people who must make things happen. And they will be built for growth, day by day, step by step, toward where we agreed to go. Who executes depends on what discovery finds. Where a vendor is right, we use a vendor - I will justify it and make sure the right one is chosen; I have spent twelve years on the other side of that table. Where cost and efficiency justify building a team, I will propose it and tell you why. What I will need from the start is small: an EA and a trusted aide or two. I know that may be hard to grant on day one - which is exactly why granting it signals your commitment. And understand what I am not: I am not an executioner sent in to clear people out. I intend for the people already inside your business to grow, be empowered, and own what we build. Some people just need a second chance, a vision, and the right mentoring. The exception is gross incompetence paired with no will to improve - that, I will name.
On AI - a correction to what you might expect
I work with AI from day one; it is how I work now, and you will see it. What I am telling you not to expect is AI as the transformation. Most corporations today are not ready for AI - there is operational, systems, and data debt that must be dealt with first, and plugging AI into a broken workflow only breaks it faster. So: where it is feasible, I will build quick AI-assisted tools along the way - easy fixes, sometimes deliberate MVPs that teach us the shape of the real thing. But the debt comes first. That is not caution; that is sequence.
The commitment - and how this ends
Transformation - like with a person - takes time, is a process, and takes commitment. An overweight person must first decide to change, then hire a trainer, then commit, and then purposefully do the things that trim, build, and improve. I am the trainer. The decision and the commitment - the mandate, the budget within reason, the patience - are yours. And I will be honest about the two ways this ends. If I have done all I can, proposed all I can, and you or your organisation are not willing to change - I will tender my resignation. And if I have done all I can for your company - and part of that means having built the people who can own the transformation and carry the trajectory without me - then I will also move on. Either way, you will hear it from me first, plainly. The measure of my work has never been how indispensable I become. It is what keeps running - and who is running it - after I step out of the room.