How Klarity Works

Transformation Series Part 1: Transformation is Dead

By John Doe

Nov 17, 2025

I have spent the past fifteen years of my life helping companies from fintech to private equity run more efficiently. After many hard lessons, there is one thing I can say with confidence: the traditional way of doing transformation is dead.

That doesn’t mean companies don’t need to change. Companies like Stripe never slow down. Our goal was always continuous improvement: increase revenue, keep costs flat, and reduce risk. Rinse and repeat.

Many of the companies I’ve worked with had taken a flyer on a Big 3 consultant for a 12-24 month transformation project before I arrived. Often that resulted in a big mess and I was called in as a Six Sigma black belt to help clean it up.

So, when I read that only 30% of transformation projects succeed, I was not at all surprised. And when I think about why we’ve reached this sorry state of affairs, it boils down to this: Transformation fails because we treat it as a process problem when it's actually a human problem.

The real problem with transformation

Leaders think transformation follows a playbook:

Hire consultants
Get a deck of recommendations
Implement changes

But that’s not how org change works. People fear the unknown. They worry about losing their jobs. They resist being studied, measured, and told to work differently. When transformation projects drag on for years, that fear calcifies into resentment. I have spent more time managing human emotions than I have analyzing processes.

Here's what I've learned about the human aspect of transformation:

‍Processes you captured on month one are out-of-date by month twelve. But the real problem isn't the documentation—it's that people have already moved on emotionally. They're exhausted from the disruption.‍
The strategic goals you started with aren't the same goals you have a year or two later. Leaders lose patience. Board pressure mounts. The person who sponsored your project leaves.‍
Transformation fatigue sets in as the project drags on. People stop believing change will actually happen. They go through the motions in your workshops while privately planning workarounds.‍
By implementation time, your best recommendations are obsolete and people have checked out. You've spent their goodwill, their trust, and their attention. Even brilliant solutions fail when people won't implement them.

I’ve spent more time managing human emotions than I have analyzing processes.

The common thread? Every one of these is a human problem, not a process problem. We've been trying to solve transformation with better methodologies and smarter consultants. What we actually needed was a way to make change continuous, fast, and owned by the people doing the work.

I’ve spent more time managing human emotions than I have analyzing processes.

Emmanuel Aouad

Director of Transformation & Operational Excellence

Years ago, I walked into a war room at a large U.S. insurer. Six Accenture consultants sat surrounded by months of documentation. They were explaining their staffing model calculations to me—I was 25, fresh on the job, and tasked with taking over their work.

I looked at the math. It didn't add up.

They’d projected that switching from a zone-led to an enterprise-led structure would unlock efficiencies. Instead, the company was going from 28,000 employees to 32,000. When leadership asked why, the consultants scrambled: “Stabilization needs to happen first, then you'll see the efficiency gains and drop below 28,000.”

Two and a half years. Millions of dollars. And the fundamental math was wrong!

I was hired as part of a 25-person enterprise claims process engineering team—all of us trained in Six Sigma, a data-driven approach to making things work better where you measure everything, analyze the root causes of problems, and design solutions based on evidence rather than gut feeling.

The certification system borrows from martial arts—Yellow Belts understand the basics, Green Belts can lead small projects, and Black Belts like me are full-time process improvement experts. We’re the ones who conduct time studies, build statistical models, and lead transformation projects.

My team spent the next four years conducting thousands of time studies, flying city to city, sitting with claims adjusters, documenting every step. We eventually got the models right.

But here’s what haunts me: people were dodging me in the hallways. They thought I was there to kill their jobs. One week I showed up at 7:30 AM to the office where I’d scheduled time studies with the local process engineering team. The lights were off. The people I’d been emailing had deliberately avoided telling their colleagues I was coming. I was an enemy of the people. This is what transformation actually looks like: not a process problem, but a human problem.

Math is fixable, fear of change management less so.

This is the version of transformation that I’ve seen over and over again: a slow, inefficient, expensive process with a high likelihood of failure.

But AI has made it possible to resurrect a highly effective approach to change that dates back to the 1950s. It’s called kaizen.

In my next piece, I’ll explain why I believe kaizen is the most effective approach to lasting change.

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