Before you have to
Most strategic transitions happen for one of two reasons.
The business is forced into one: by an acquisition, a leadership change, flatlining performance, a strategic reset it didn't ask for.
The business chooses one: deciding, deliberately, to move on from what's working today before it stops working.
The first kind gets most of the attention in strategy thinking. The dramas of acquisition integration, the urgent strategic resets that follow flatlining sales, the high-stakes work of preparing for investment. These are the moments that make the headlines, and often the moments consulting work is built around. Bain's 2023 research found that only 12 per cent of attempted business transformations achieve their original ambition. Roughly nine out of ten attempts at significant strategic change fall short of what they were supposed to deliver.
The second kind, the chosen transition, is rarer, harder, and much less discussed. It's also where the most economically significant strategic activity actually sits. Most businesses don't fail visibly. They just don't become what they could have been. The transition that was available to them never quite happened. There was never a catalyst urgent enough to force it. The current model was working well enough. And by the time anyone realised the opportunity had quietly compounded into a what might have been, it was either too late or too expensive to recover.
Both patterns share a common cause. The forced transitions that fail usually do so because the new strategy gets layered on top of the old one rather than replacing it. Old assumptions, old systems, old metrics all carried forward unexamined. The chosen transitions that never happen are usually held in place by the same kinds of accumulated inheritance, in a different form. Either way, the underlying issue is strategic inertia, a gradual accumulation of past decisions that quietly determine what's possible to do now.
This is the territory of a new working paper from Become. Before You Have To is a structured guide to recognising the transitions your business needs to make. Both the ones that have been forced on you, and the ones that haven't quite become urgent yet. It includes a diagnostic to help you locate which kind of transition you're in, two methodological sections (one for handling forced transitions well, one for building the internal case for chosen ones), an exercise for mapping the sources of strategic inertia in your own business, and reflections drawing on the work of Donald Sull and Marshall Goldsmith on why successful businesses become trapped by the patterns that built them.
It's around twenty-five minutes to read, and free to download. We'd suggest doing the diagnostic at the front before going further. It points you to the parts of the document most relevant to your situation.
The version of your business that could exist is sitting inside the version that does exist. The question is whether you'll find your way to it before something forces you, or only after.