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 market shift.
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 strategic resets that follow flatlining sales, the high-stakes work of preparing for investment. These are the shifts that grab attention and often the catalyst that kicks off consulting projects. 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 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 have something in common. Forced transitions often fail because the new strategy is simply added to the old one. Old assumptions, systems and measures are carried forward without being questioned. The transitions that never happen are often held back by the same kind of accumulated baggage. In both cases, the problem is strategic inertia. Past decisions quietly shaping what the business thinks it can do today.
This is the territory of our new working paper. 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 tool 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.
The version of your business that could exist is sitting inside the version that does exist. The question is whether the catalyst for finding it is one you create, or one that arrives from outside. .