“When you start pulling on the thread of how something actually works in practice, you very quickly see the gap between what’s intended and what’s actually happening, what’s real.”
Lisa Avon said that to me almost in passing, during our conversation on Whatever Next? Unplugged. She leads a business design practice at a large UK health insurer, and she wasn’t trying to make a point. She was describing what happens every time her team does discovery properly. Then she said the part that really mattered.
“You will always find things that only work because certain individuals have found a way of making it work, or because people are really, really compensating for something that just isn’t working in the system.”
Not sometimes. Always.
Every transformation plan I’ve worked on starts from the organisation as it was designed. The process maps, the org chart, the service as it looked on the day it launched. That’s the version that goes into the business case and the roadmap. But it isn’t the version that runs on a Monday morning.
The one that runs on a Monday morning has been patched, bent and propped up by people who saw a gap and quietly filled it. Nobody asked them to. Most of the time nobody knows they’re doing it. Lisa put it as the difference between “this is what the service was when we launched it” and “what has it turned into? How are people actually navigating it day to day?” Those two things drift apart over years, and the drift is made of people.
So when a transformation is built on the designed version, it isn’t just working from old information. It’s planning to change something without knowing what’s holding it up.
Lisa opened our conversation with an analogy one that many use when they talk about Enterprise Architecture and Target Operating Models. Operating model design, she said, is like renovating a house while you’re still living in it. (She has done this, and wouldn’t recommend it.) You need to know how you’ll sequence the work, which rooms will be out of action, where you’ll set up a kitchen in the garage. And you need to know what’s load bearing.
Put that next to the thread and it reads differently. The workarounds people have built are load-bearing walls nobody drew on the plan. Take one out without knowing, and something gives. Not always straight away. Often later, when the person who was quietly making it work has moved on, or been restructured, or simply stopped compensating because the new system told them they didn’t need to.
Part of the problem is how the work gets commissioned. Lisa described the brief we’ve all had, the one that arrives as “can you help me deliver this very specific solution” without being clear about why that solution is the right fit. A new technology. Or “an organisational structure change that someone is convinced is going to change everything.” When the brief already contains the answer, nobody pulls the thread. There’s no reason to. The plan has already decided what’s real.
What I noticed in Lisa’s answer was how matter of fact she was about all this. Her team doesn’t go in hunting for problems. “It’s not about calling anything out. It’s just about exposing it.” This is what we found. This is what we’re working with. And then the warning: “You can choose to ignore that stuff. Of course you can… but it does catch up with you later on.”
I said to Lisa during the conversation that too many transformations rush into delivery. Discovery gets squeezed because it doesn’t produce anything you can put in a highlight report. And then the uncomfortable truths it would have surfaced early, in a safe way, turn up anyway. Later. As amber and red on the RAG report.
But she wasn’t arguing for a perfect picture. She was arguing for an honest one. Once you’ve seen what’s really there, you make conscious decisions about “what you do fix, what you live with, what you work around”, because you can’t fix everything. Better outcomes come, in her words, “not because everything’s perfect, but because you’ve been really honest and intentional about it.”
That’s a different standard from the one most programmes are measured against. Not “did we deliver the plan?” but “did we know what we were changing?”
It also changes how the change lands. Lisa’s point was that when people can see that what they told you shaped the solution, they’re much more likely to sit with it, and to tell you honestly which parts aren’t working. The person who has been quietly holding the system together is the person who can tell you where it will break. They are the thread. If you never talk to them, you end up designing around them.
Near the end, Lisa said something about business design that applies just as well here. It “exists whether you intentionally create it or not.” The real operating model is the same. It’s already there, running, whether or not anyone has looked at it. The only choice is whether you change it knowingly.
Somewhere in your organisation, someone is compensating for something today. The plan doesn’t have their name on it. You’ll find out what they were holding up either way. The question is whether you find out before go-live, or after.
Whatever next?
Hear the full conversation with Lisa Avon on Whatever Next? Unplugged:
