Most corporate transformations fail because executives never truly agree on a plan. The fix is forcing disagreement into the open before executing
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In the spring of 2019, Alexander Lacik arrived as CEO of Pandora to find a transformation already underway. The plan, called Programme Now, included a cost-reduction program, a brand relaunch, a digital marketing rebuild, and a go-to-market overhaul.
It looked complete. What it lacked was agreement.
When Lacik surveyed what his management team was actually working on, he found 46 priorities. A typical management team can execute three or four well. He convened a two-day off-site and cut the list to 12. For the first time, everyone was working toward the same thing.
For decades, the odds of a successful organizational transformation have remained stubbornly low. Boston Consulting Group studied nearly 2,000 public companies that tried to turn around declining performance and found that most failed to outperform their industry peers not only in the year after the downturn but over the next five. McKinsey's Global Survey told the same story from inside organizations: fewer than one in three respondents whose companies had been through a transformation said it succeeded at both improving performance and holding those gains. In an era when organizations digitized entire economies and mapped the human genome, no one found a way to make large-scale change work.
Julia Dhar, a managing director at BCG and founder of its Behavioral Science Lab, spent years trying to understand why. Her answer, developed with co-authors Kristy Ellmer and Philip Jameson in Harvard Business Review, is that the failure is less a strategy or execution problem and more a behavioral one. The specific behavior is false alignment.
False alignment is what happens when executive teams act as if they agree on things when they really don't. Executive teams regularly launch transformations while holding fundamentally different understandings of why the change is happening, what will be different, and how the work will get done. Dhar distinguishes it sharply from true agreement. Alignment means not obstructing each other. True agreement means every leader on the team could write down the same what and the same how on a piece of paper, and the answers would match.
The causes are partly cognitive. Psychologists call the relevant mechanism the false consensus effect, which occurs when people systematically overestimate how widely their own views are shared. Julia Minson, a Harvard professor who studies decision-making, offered Dhar a vivid illustration. "If I love vanilla ice cream," Minson said, "I will persistently overestimate the proportion of the population that also loves vanilla ice cream."
In a corporate context, an executive who is enthusiastic about a transformation tends to assume colleagues share both the enthusiasm and the reasoning. That assumption goes untested because the conversations stay at the level of broad goals. Even if two executives agree on the need to improve margins, one may want to raise prices, while the other may view cost-cutting as the right way to go. Months can go by without either knowing they disagree more than they see eye to eye.
The problem is also partly social. Humans tend to anticipate that disagreement will be more unpleasant than it is. Research by Minson and her Harvard colleagues found that people consistently predicted more conflict with a senator from an opposing political party than they actually experienced after watching one speak. Executives who expect disagreement to be worse than it is tend to stay quiet rather than voice their real objections.
The third cause is schedule pressure. Dhar has heard the same set of justifications from executive teams across industries. "We don't have time to debate this further." "We'll sort out the details later." "Something is better than nothing." The reasoning isn't irrational. There are times in business when starting, no matter how imperfectly, is all that matters. But large-scale organizational change isn't one of them. When premises are vague or contradictory, they don't get resolved on their own. They compound. Teams below receive conflicting signals. Some freeze. Some scatter their effort across every priority at once. Some make good progress on the wrong thing.
McKinsey research found that transformations start losing value before they begin. Leaders who haven't truly agreed on what they're trying to achieve set targets that reflect that ambiguity. About a quarter of the financial benefit disappears during target-setting, before implementation starts. Even companies whose transformations succeed capture only around two-thirds of what was possible. Those that fail capture barely more than a third.
Dhar's fix isn't simply patience. It's a structured five-step process designed to surface real disagreement before it derails execution. Leaders begin by setting ground rules, and then gather dissent in writing before any group discussion. Debate runs through one-on-one conversations rather than meetings, giving each executive time to understand the proposal on their own terms and identify where they can compromise. Each leader then commits individually at a formal sign-off, and a single unified message goes to the entire organization at once.
Each step has a specific behavioral purpose. Written positions gathered independently reduce groupthink before it forms. Individual sign-off, rather than general assent, removes the cover that passive resistance depends on. Simultaneous broadcast across the organization blocks the version-drift that occurs when each executive briefs their own team separately.
At Pandora, Lacik used the process in full, bringing his management team back to a single premise: that the company existed to help customers commemorate moments in their lives. Everything else derived from that. The slogan "Moments First" went to every store. Products outside the campaign came out of shop windows and bracelets went in. Lacik set a daily sales target for bracelets in every location to make the priority legible rather than aspirational.
Pandora stabilized, rebuilt its brand, and grew through the remainder of Lacik's tenure. The company that had cycled through four CEOs in seven years found its footing.
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