Why transformations stall at the top: the Intention Gap.

Green dashboards, a culture in freefall

A while ago I worked with the leadership team of a financial services company that was rolling AI out across its operations. On paper it was going brilliantly. Efficiency was up and costs were down. Every metric on the dashboard was moving the right way.

The culture was collapsing. People had switched off, and the best of them were updating their LinkedIn profiles. Trust was draining out of the place faster than anyone could deal with it.

Nobody on that team lacked intelligence or a plan. What nobody had done was the human work. So for three months we didn't talk about AI strategy at all. We slowed them down and talked about identity, about what makes work meaningful, and about how to lead through uncertainty without pretending to have all the answers. Once that foundation was in, the implementation worked, culturally as well as technically. (I told this story on the podcast.)

I've led transformation programmes that delivered more than $1bn for clients, and I've seen that pattern far more often than I've seen a bad strategy sink one.

The strategy is rarely what breaks

You'll have heard that around 70% of transformations fail. McKinsey's Harry Robinson put it plainly: "The academic research is really clear that when corporations launch transformations, roughly 70 percent fail" (McKinsey). The exact figure is argued over. The part nobody seriously disputes is where the failures come from. Robinson's list starts with the CEO not setting a high enough aspiration and the leadership team not building the skills the change needs. Those are failures of leadership behaviour, not of the plan on the slide.

Harvard Business School's Michael Beer reached a similar conclusion about leadership training. American companies spent about $162 billion on corporate training in 2012, and Beer and his colleagues found that people came back from it and changed very little (HBS Working Knowledge). His explanation is the one I'd put in front of every executive team: "The system of organizing and managing is so powerful that individuals and teams returning from training will not be able to be more effective unless the system enables them to apply their learning."

In a transformation, the most powerful part of that system is the senior team's behaviour on an ordinary Tuesday.

What the Intention Gap is

Knowing what to do and doing it are not the same thing. The Intention Gap is the space between what you say you want and what your patterns keep producing (watch the one-minute version). Leading a transformation, it tends to sound like this.

• You say you want people to take more ownership, but every important decision still comes through you.
• You say you need more time to think strategically, but operational work gets first claim on every free hour.
• You say the business has to become less dependent on you, but you keep building processes around your involvement.
• You say you want the organisation to be more agile, but the leadership meeting still runs the way it did five years ago.

Everyone in the organisation can see this gap long before the leader can. They watch what you do, not what's on the change deck, and they adjust to that.

I'm not pointing this out so leaders can beat themselves up. You look at the gap so you can understand it, because once you can see the pattern you can challenge it.

Under pressure, you lose access to what you know

Last year I started working with a chief people officer in fashion and luxury. Very talented, the kind of leader every company wants. She told me she had believed she needed to shed parts of herself to succeed at each level, so she left pieces of herself at every promotion. Then she said the thing I hear, in one form or another, from most senior leaders I work with. She knew what good leadership looked like. She could coach her team through it and explain it perfectly in a board meeting. But when the decision was hers, in the moment, she couldn't access any of it. She just reacted.

There's biology behind that. The Yale neuroscientist Amy Arnsten has shown that even quite mild, uncontrollable stress can cause a rapid and dramatic loss of the prefrontal abilities we rely on for judgement, planning and self-control, with control shifting to older, more habitual brain circuits (Arnsten, *Nature Reviews Neuroscience*, 2009). A transformation is months of exactly that kind of stress for the people at the top. The leader you are on a calm Friday afternoon is not the one who turns up when the quarterly numbers slip.

Think about Simone Biles at the Tokyo Olympics. The most decorated gymnast in history, someone who had performed under unimaginable pressure her whole life, and in the biggest moment her body wouldn't do what her mind knew how to do. She called it the twisties. What made her story powerful was that she recognised the gap and stepped back instead of trying to perform her way out of it (I talk about her on the Intention Gap episode). When the gap is that wide, pushing harder widens it.

Most leaders aren't on a world stage. They're in boardrooms, one-to-ones and decisions that affect people's livelihoods. The gap shows up there as the decision made from fear, the conversation controlled instead of opened up, and the version of yourself you perform instead of the person you are.

Knowing the stakes doesn't close it

If information changed behaviour, this would be easy. Lisa Lahey, the Harvard researcher who co-wrote Immunity to Change with Robert Kegan, has said that when doctors tell heart patients they will die unless they change ingrained habits, only about one in seven manage it (CNBC). If the threat of death doesn't do it, a compelling change narrative from the CEO won't either.

That's why so many transformation programmes add more and get less. More frameworks, more town halls, more training modules. You're trying to solve a mindset problem with a tactical solution, which is like fixing a broken operating system by downloading more apps. The apps aren't the problem. The system running them is.

The transformation nobody budgets for

Here's what most leadership teams get wrong about AI in particular. They think the challenge is technical. Upskill the team, pick the right platforms, put the right processes in and you'll be fine.

The challenge is identity. When someone has done their job a certain way for ten years and a tool can suddenly do much of it in seconds, that isn't a skills gap. It's an identity crisis. If AI can do what I do, who am I? If you aren't prepared to work through that question with your people, you will lose some of them, and not because they can't learn the tools. They won't have a way to rebuild their sense of their own value.

The same question lands on the executive team first. The CEO whose value has always been having the answer. The operations chief whose reputation rests on knowing every process by heart. Reskilling isn't just training. It's helping people redesign their relationship with their work. Role redesign isn't just a new org chart. It's keeping trust while everything shifts. You can't lead either of those if your own mindset is stuck in fear or resistance. You can't create psychological safety for your team if you don't feel safe within yourself.

How leaders close the gap

You don't close the Intention Gap by adding more. You close it by removing what no longer serves you. At MindsetShift we work in three steps: unlearn, unlock, unleash. In a transformation it looks like this.

Unlearn the patterns that got the senior team here. Most executives were promoted for reacting fast, having the answer and putting out the most fires. Those habits will run the transformation unless someone names them. I worked with a tech executive whose team brought him decisions he'd already made before they finished speaking. He called it being decisive. His team called it steamrolling, and three of his best people left within six months.

Unlock what the leaders actually want from the change, not what the board deck says. When my own coach asked me what I wanted from a big transformation project I was leading, I went blank. I could tell her what the stakeholders wanted and what would make me look good. Finding the real answer changed how I ran every meeting after that.

Unleash it in the moments that count. Before the steering committee, the restructuring conversation or the board update, ask one question: what's my intention for this conversation? Not the agenda. Your intention. To control the outcome or to make space for clarity? To look competent or to be present?

Then measure the change by behaviour, not activity. Are decisions being made below the executive team that used to come up to it? Are the people closest to the change telling you the truth earlier? Is your best talent staying? Those tell you more than any completion rate.

Questions for your next leadership meeting

I've trained more than 2,000 leaders across different companies and countries, and these are the questions I'd want a senior team to answer honestly before the next milestone.

• What are we asking the organisation to do that we aren't doing ourselves?
• Which decisions still come up to us that the change was supposed to move down?
• When this programme hits pressure, which of our old habits will we reach for first?
• Have we done our own identity work on what this change means for our roles, or are we asking everyone else to go first?
• If our people judged the transformation only by how we behave in meetings, what would they conclude?

The strategy is usually the easy part. The hard part is whether the people at the top can do, under pressure, what they already know. That's where a transformation is won or lost, and it's work you can start in your next meeting.