Between vision and buy-in: why being right isn’t always enough

In the field of information management and digital transformation, a recurring pattern emerges: a vision that makes sense, is well grounded, and meets positive reception—yet never materializes. Not because of its content, but because of the system it enters. The context resists. Buy-in is absent. The organization isn’t ready.

It’s a frustrating truth: being right doesn’t mean something will happen. Especially in public institutions, where governance, risk aversion and deeply embedded habits often block meaningful change because external factors, always present in commercial companies, are lacking.

When strategy doesn't land

In a recent endevour, I helped develop a future-proof vision for information management. The strategy was clear, aligned with the organization’s mission, and pragmatically structured. Everyone nodded in agreement. Yet, the work didn’t move forward. Not because the direction was wrong—but because the system signaled: “not now.”

Take for instance a case where a team was tasked with implementing cross-organizational data governance. While the logic of the initiative was sound and aligned with broader strategic goals, decision-making consistently stalled. Stakeholders hesitated to assign ownership, and even basic pilot actions were quietly postponed or downgraded to the status-quo to be less threatening.

This paradox—agreement without movement—reveals something essential. That transformation is not a question of logic alone. It’s a question of energy, timing, and readiness.

Culture still eats strategy—timing too

Cultural tension often explains why forward-looking plans stall in traditional environments. A proposal rooted in innovation struggles when the prevailing mindset values stability and consensus. Even when people intellectually support change, deeper, often invisible assumptions can block it.

This isn't just organizational behavior—it's systemic. Visions fail when they are mismatched with the phase a system is in. Maturity models offer useful language here. When IT is still seen as a commodity or back-office support, attempts to position it as a strategic enabler or integrated partner are often rejected—not because they're wrong, but because they don't yet align with the current organizational phase.

Maturity models—whether digital capability maturity, service integration maturity, or organizational learning models—remind us that transformation must meet an organization where it is. Not below, not above—but at its edge of what’s possible.

Four signs your strategy is stalling

• Everyone agrees with your plan, but no decisions are made

• Mandates remain unclear despite stated alignment

• Pilots start, but no structural adoption follows

• The vision becomes "someone else’s responsibility"

The cycle of stalling: enthusiasm → hesitation → delegation → deferral → disengagement → back to the status quo.

Change demands more than a good idea

In transformation work, the idea is only part of the equation. What matters is how it's introduced, at what moment, and with which signals of support. Many organizations operate within single-loop patterns: tweaking systems without questioning the structures beneath. True innovation demands something deeper—a shift in those structures themselves. But without awareness, attempts to change them bounce off.

And here's the trap: if we as leaders aren’t vigilant, we end up adapting ourselves to the system in order to be 'effective'—thereby sustaining the very dynamics we aimed to disrupt.

The leader as translator—and disruptor

Leadership in transformation is not just about being smart or visionary. It's about being robust. Having the capacity to challenge, to translate, and to hold space for tension—without immediately resolving it. It’s about building coalitions before content, reading resistance not as sabotage but as signal.

That calls for integrative leadership. Not just deep expertise or wide influence, but the active choice to work across perspectives, across logics. And yes, sometimes across thresholds that feel uncomfortable.

One of the most effective leaders I’ve worked with made it a norm to invest time in understanding organizational hesitation—not to argue it away, but to map it. That habit helped them gradually unlock key blockers without escalating pressure prematurely.

What about you?

Are you solving—or are you stalling? Are you moving with integrity—or adapting to survive within the system you were trying to shift?

What conversations aren’t you having? What resistance are you avoiding that might actually be an invitation?

True leadership asks for reflection as much as action. It demands that we look not just outward, but inward. If your strategy isn’t landing, it may not be the vision that needs work—but the soil it’s trying to grow in.

What can you do, as a leader, to prepare that ground? To hold space longer? To challenge more deliberately? To make space for what really needs to emerge?

From maximum ambition to minimal viable transformation

In a BANI world—brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible—grand visions often collapse under their own weight. Instead of waiting for full readiness or perfect alignment, leaders can embrace the principle of minimal viable transformation: identifying the smallest meaningful step that shifts the system, opens a new space, or unlocks latent potential.

Minimal viable transformation doesn’t mean thinking small. It means starting real. Starting now. It respects complexity without being paralysed by it. It allows strategy to land gradually, but tangibly—so that change is felt, not just envisioned.

Transformation doesn’t happen because it makes sense. It happens because someone held the space long enough, loud enough, and honest enough—for others to step in.

What will you hold the space for next?

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