Over the past decade, organisations have invested heavily in frameworks intended to improve how work is organised and how value is delivered. Agile methods, product operating models, OKRs, scaling frameworks, and more recently AI-driven operating approaches have become familiar elements of transformation programmes across industries. Many of these frameworks are thoughtfully designed, grounded in research, and informed by real-world practice. They provide useful language and structure for navigating increasingly complex environments.
Yet despite widespread adoption, the outcomes are often disappointing. Delivery becomes slower rather than more responsive. Decision-making remains constrained rather than distributed. Teams follow new processes without materially changing how they think, collaborate, or prioritise. Leaders grow frustrated, not because they lack intent, but because the promised benefits of transformation never quite materialise in practice.
At this point, attention usually turns to execution. The framework was applied incorrectly. The organisation was not mature enough. The change was resisted. Culture was the problem. Sometimes the framework itself is quietly set aside in favour of the next one.
What receives far less scrutiny is the human system into which the framework was introduced.
Frameworks as Mirrors Rather Than Solutions
One of the least recognised qualities of modern frameworks is their diagnostic nature. When applied seriously, they tend to surface existing constraints rather than resolve them. They reveal unclear decision rights, weak prioritisation, brittle trust, overloaded teams, and leadership habits that do not translate well into complex environments.
Some organisations understand this, even if they find it uncomfortable. Others do not. In many cases, frameworks are adopted with the implicit belief that implementation itself will produce results, as though structure and terminology could replace learning. When outcomes fail to improve, the conclusion is often that the framework was poorly executed, rather than that it has exposed limitations the organisation was unprepared to confront.
Frameworks do not create human problems. They make existing ones visible.
The Gap Between Understanding and Action
Most people involved in transformation work can describe what good practice looks like. They understand the language of empowered teams, outcome-oriented planning, fast feedback loops, and adaptive leadership. The difficulty arises when those ideas must be enacted under real conditions, with real trade-offs and real consequences.
The gap between understanding and action is frequently misinterpreted. Leaders may assume inconsistency, disengagement, or a lack of commitment. In practice, what is often being revealed is a mismatch between the behaviours people are expected to demonstrate and the capabilities they have been supported to develop.
Without recognising this gap, organisations default to judgement where development would be more effective.
Capability
Capability is the sustained ability to apply skills, judgement, and behaviour effectively in a specific context, under real conditions, over time.
This definition is intentionally precise. Capability is not the same as knowledge, motivation, or intelligence. It is contextual rather than abstract, shaped by environment, incentives, psychological safety, and lived experience. Someone can appear highly capable in one system and struggle significantly in another where expectations, uncertainty, or power dynamics are different.
When organisations fail to recognise this, they often label developmental gaps as personal shortcomings, rather than signals about the system itself.
What Frameworks Quietly Assume About People
Most modern frameworks assume a level of human capability that many organisations have never deliberately built. In practice, they assume that people can:
- Hold multiple competing priorities simultaneously without becoming overwhelmed, such as balancing delivery pressure, stakeholder demands, and longer-term outcomes, even when these pull in different directions.
- Make decisions with incomplete or ambiguous information, often in environments where data is imperfect, context is shifting, and accountability is diffuse.
- Navigate conflict without damaging relationships, including disagreements shaped by hierarchy, performance pressure, or cultural differences.
- Communicate clearly across disciplinary and organisational boundaries, translating intent between technical, commercial, and human concerns without distortion.
- Continue learning while delivering at pace, absorbing new ways of working without the time or slack that learning typically requires.
These assumptions are not unreasonable, but they are rarely acknowledged explicitly. When people struggle to meet them, the organisational response often shifts toward explanation rather than enquiry. Leaders begin to talk about resistance to change, question accountability, or frame the issue as one of performance or culture. While these labels may feel intuitive, they tend to close down the very conversations needed to understand what is actually happening.
Scaling and the Limits of Human Systems
At small scale, many of these gaps remain manageable. Informal relationships compensate for ambiguity. Individual effort absorbs overload. Leaders remain close enough to context to intervene directly. As organisations grow, those buffers disappear.
Scaling introduces coordination costs, dependency chains, and cognitive demands that exceed what informal practices can sustain. Decision-making moves further from the point of action. Misalignment travels faster. Emotional load increases, even when it remains unspoken. In these conditions, people do not rise to the level of the framework. They revert to the level of their practiced capability.
This is why transformation efforts often lose momentum precisely when they reach enterprise scale. The framework has not failed. The human system has reached its current limits.
Leadership Development and Organisational Reality
Leadership sits at the centre of this dynamic. Many leaders have been developed in environments that rewarded certainty, control, and optimisation. They were promoted for technical competence or delivery success, not for sensemaking, emotional intelligence, or leading through ambiguity. When faced with complexity, they often fall back on familiar habits, increasing control, adding process, or centralising decisions.
From the leader’s perspective, these actions feel responsible. From the system’s perspective, they often reduce autonomy, slow learning, and amplify fragility. This tension reflects a developmental gap rather than a moral failure.
As Ronald Heifetz has argued in his work on adaptive leadership, the challenge is not technical execution, but helping people face and learn their way through difficult change. That work is rarely supported with the same seriousness as operational delivery.
Incentives, Talent, and a Persistent Blind Spot
Some organisations recognise that incentives, performance systems, and development practices must evolve alongside new ways of working. Many do not. Talent and capability development are frequently treated as parallel concerns, delegated to learning functions, rather than recognised as integral to transformation itself.
As a result, people are asked to behave differently without corresponding changes to how success is measured, how risk is managed, or how learning is supported. Over time, this creates quiet fatigue. Capable people disengage, not because they lack commitment, but because the system makes sustained change untenable.
A More Humane Starting Point for Transformation
If frameworks are understood as mirrors rather than solutions, the starting point for transformation shifts. Instead of asking which model to adopt, a more useful question becomes: What capabilities does our system need in order for this model to work in practice?
Alongside this, it is equally important to ask what capabilities already exist within the system. Which aspects of the framework align naturally with how people already think, decide, and work together, and where might that alignment reduce the amount of change required?
Together, these questions move the conversation away from deficit and towards understanding. They encourage leaders to adapt frameworks to their organisations, rather than forcing organisations to contort themselves around frameworks.
Transformation, at its core, is a learning challenge. It succeeds when people are helped to think more clearly, decide more honestly, and grow into the complexity they are facing. Frameworks can support this work, but only when the human system is given equal attention.
Frameworks rarely fail on their own. What fails, repeatedly and predictably, is our willingness to invest in the human capabilities that make them viable.
A few reflections to sit with
Before moving on to the next framework, initiative, or operating model, it may be worth pausing to reflect on the human system you are working within.
- How well is your organisation’s current system aligned with the behaviours it expects from people, particularly under pressure and uncertainty?
- Which capabilities already present in the system support the chosen framework, and how might those strengths be amplified?
- Where are gaps being surfaced but not yet acknowledged, and what language is being used to describe them?
- In what ways are capability gaps being treated as individual performance issues rather than signals about the system itself?
- How much space is genuinely available for learning, sensemaking, and development alongside delivery expectations?
These questions do not require immediate answers. Their value lies in what they help you notice.
More to come. Until the next one.
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