You Can’t Put That On The Wall

There is a moment in almost every transformation program where the real problem reveals itself. It is rarely a technology problem. It is rarely a process problem. It is almost always a leadership problem. And it usually shows up when someone does exactly what the organisation said it wanted.

In 2019, I was invited to train the executive leadership team of a large insurance company on how to transform to an agile organisation. My colleague who was supposed to be running the session with me wasn’t feeling well. So I went off script.

I pulled up a chair at the front of the room and opened it up. “Ask me anything.”

The questions were good. The kind you only get when the agenda disappears and the room relaxes. Where does transformation go wrong? What actually stops a company from being agile?

My answer was straightforward.

As leaders, you need to embody what you want the organisation to become. If you want your teams to move fast and deliver often, you need to do the same. If you want people to be frugal, you need to stop flying business class. If you want teams to use visual systems and information radiators to make their work visible, you need to do it too.

They listened. That surprised me. Most rooms push back.

But listening in a room and changing behaviour in the organisation are two different things.

A colleague of mine, a fellow ThoughtWorker, was embedded in a different organisation doing exactly what I had described. She was building information radiators. Making the work visible. Putting numbers on the wall so the team could see where they stood, where the blockers were, and how the project was tracking.

Then she put the budget on the wall.

The response was swift.

“You can’t put that on the wall.”

“You can’t share the numbers.”

She pushed back. Why not?

This was an organisation that demanded full transparency from its staff. Teams were expected to show their work. Progress was tracked openly. Blockers were named in public forums. But when the budget appeared on the wall, the system rejected it immediately. Leadership wanted transparency flowing upward. They had no interest in it flowing in the other direction.

This is exactly the situation I had warned that insurance room about. The organisation becomes what its leaders model, not what they mandate.

Jim Collins spent five years studying what separated great companies from good ones. The pattern he found in every company that made the leap was a specific leadership behaviour he called the window and the mirror. When things go well, these leaders looked out the window, crediting their teams, their colleagues, external factors. When things went wrong, they looked in the mirror. The inverse — demanding accountability from others while exempting yourself — was the consistent pattern in the companies that didn’t make the leap.

That budget on the wall was a mirror test. My colleague wasn’t asking leadership to be vulnerable. She was asking them to apply their own standard to themselves.

Ray Dalio built Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, on a principle he called radical transparency. Every meeting recorded. Every decision documented. Employees encouraged to challenge each other openly, including the founder. The idea was to create a true meritocracy of ideas, where hierarchy couldn’t protect bad thinking.

It didn’t survive contact with human nature at scale. What started as intellectual honesty became, for many employees, a surveillance culture, with cameras throughout the offices and employees filing complaints about colleagues in an internal log. The principles are no longer mandatory for new hires. Dalio is no longer at the helm. The version of radical transparency that pointed outward, demanding honesty from everyone else, turned out to be easier to enforce than the version that pointed inward.

Amazon approached the same problem differently. One of their leadership principles is Dive Deep: leaders stay connected to the details. They can drop into a problem, understand what is actually happening, and then come back to their operating level. The key word is “back.” A leader who gets lost in the detail has a different problem. But a leader who can’t explain their own team’s numbers, their own delivery cadence, their own blockers, has already failed.

That budget on the wall was a Dive Deep test. My colleague wasn’t doing anything radical. She was applying their own standard back to them.

McKinsey’s research is unambiguous: roughly 70 percent of transformation efforts fail. The reasons McKinsey identifies are consistent across industries and geographies. Leaders fail to build genuine conviction within their teams. They don’t address the capability gaps. They don’t free up the right people to drive the change. What sits underneath all of it is the same thing my colleague ran into: leaders who set standards they don’t apply to themselves create organisations that quietly stop believing the standards mean anything.

McKinsey’s research also found that organisations whose leadership clearly defined roles, took responsibility, and communicated progress openly were as much as eight times more likely to succeed than their peers. Eight times. Not from a better methodology. Not from a better technology platform. From leaders who were willing to be visible about what they were doing and how it was going.

That is what the budget on the wall represents. Not a radical act. A leadership act.

Most transformation programs focus relentlessly on changing the behaviour of the people below the leadership line. New ways of working. New ceremonies. New tools. New metrics. All of it directed at teams who are, in most cases, perfectly capable of changing if the environment allows it.

The environment is set by the leaders.

Flying business class when you’ve asked everyone else to cut costs. Running a cascade briefing when you’ve told teams to use visual communication. Hiding the budget when you’ve asked teams to make everything visible. Each of these is a signal. The organisation reads every one of them.

Before your next transformation review, before you assess team velocity or delivery cadence or agile maturity scores, ask a simpler question.

What are you putting on the wall?

Your calendar. Your priorities. Your budget. Your blockers. The things you are accountable for and the current state of each of them.

If the answer is nothing, you already know where the transformation is stuck.

Bruce McLeod has spent 30 years inside the gap between how organisations say they work and how they actually do, from inside Microsoft, ThoughtWorks and Amazon Web Services. He advises senior leaders on operating model design, AI-augmented delivery, and the decisions that determine whether transformation actually sticks.

Everything in this article is his personal opinion based on publicly cited references, listed below. This is one practitioner’s view, offered in the spirit of understanding what makes something great, and what it takes to keep it that way.

References

1. Collins, J. (2001). *Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t.* HarperBusiness. The window and the mirror concept is developed in Chapter 2, on Level 5 Leadership https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/level-five-leadership.html

2. Dalio, R. (2017). *Principles: Life and Work.* Simon and Schuster. Radical transparency as a management philosophy is the central operating principle of Part III.

3. Robinson, H. (2019). Why do most transformations fail? McKinsey and Company.

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/transformation/our-insights/why-do-most-transformations-fail-a-conversation-with-harry-robinson

4. AIM Business School. (2025). Why 70% of change management initiatives fail.

https://www.aimbusinessschool.edu.au/why-abs/blog/why-70-of-change-management-initiatives-fail

5. Amazon Leadership Principles: Dive Deep.

https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles

6. Westport Journal. (2023). Book scrutinises culture of radical transparency at Bridgewater.

https://westportjournal.com/community/book-scrutinizes-culture-of-radical-transparency-at-bridgewater/