Small Wins Add Up
# The Project I Almost Killed, And What Five Years of Hindsight Taught Me About Momentum I still remember sitting across from my programme manager in month three, watching her make a genuinely reasonable case for why we should stop. She was not wrong on the facts: the project had no visible wins, the team was tired, and the internal stakeholders who had commissioned the work had already moved on to three other priorities. We were rebuilding a regulatory reporting framework for a business unit that had been quietly non-compliant for years, not dramatically, not dangerously, but consistently enough that someone senior had eventually noticed and handed me the problem, the kind of problem that arrives without fanfare and leaves without applause. She laid out the argument for pausing clearly, professionally, with a slide deck that made stopping look almost responsible. I nearly said yes, not because I believed it was the right call, but because I was tired too, and tired people find well-reasoned arguments more persuasive than they should. The Situation I was working on this project in 2019. The business unit had been operating on a patchwork of manual processes and institutional memory for the better part of a decade. Nobody had deliberately built a broken system: it had simply grown in the way most broken systems grow, one pragmatic workaround at a time, until the workarounds became the system. My job was to replace it with something that would actually hold under regulatory scrutiny. The challenge was that progress, in this kind of work, does not look like progress for a long time. I was not building features, I was excavating. Every week we found another process that existed only inside someone’s head, another data feed that connected to a spreadsheet no one had updated since 2016, another exception that had been handled manually so long it had stopped being seen as an exception at all. To anyone watching from outside the room, we appeared to be standing still. My programme manager’s case for pausing was rational: a pause, she argued, would give us time to regroup, re-engage stakeholders, and come back with a cleaner plan. The logic was sound, and that is precisely why it was dangerous. In complex rebuilds, “coming back with a cleaner plan” is usually a polite way of describing the moment a team loses its nerve and never quite recovers it. I had seen it before, the pause that becomes a pivot that becomes a quiet cancellation eighteen months later. What I said instead was this: we are not pausing, but we are going to do one thing differently. Every week, I would identify one thing that is measurably better than it was seven days ago, not a milestone, not a formal deliverable, just one thing, documented, visible, shared with the team. It sounds almost embarrassingly simple, that is, I suppose, the point. What the Next Five Years Taught Me The first insight is that momentum is not a feeling, it is a record. What changed from month three onwards was not the pace of work, it was the existence of evidence. Every Friday, there was something concrete to point to: a data feed validated, a manual step eliminated, a process documented for the first time. Individually, each item was unremarkable, collectively, they became the proof that the project was alive. And that proof did something I had not fully anticipated, it made the team stop measuring progress against the original plan and start measuring it against last week, that is a much more honest comparison, and a far more sustainable one. I have since watched organisations spend enormous energy on formal programme governance, traffic-light reports, steering committees, milestone reviews, while neglecting the simpler practice of recording what actually improved. The bureaucracy of progress is not the same as progress itself. The second insight is that stopping teaches something you cannot easily unteach. Had we paused in month three, the framework would probably have resumed eventually, projects like this rarely die entirely, they get restarted, rebranded, handed to someone new. But the team would have carried a piece of learning that I think is genuinely corrosive in professional environments: that when progress is hard to see, stopping is the appropriate response. That lesson travels, it shows up in the next project, and the one after that, as a lowered threshold for retreat. The damage of an unnecessary pause is rarely visible in the project itself, it is visible in the people. The third insight is the one that took longest to articulate clearly: consistency is not the slow path. Most senior people I know, and I include myself in this, with some embarrassment, are instinctively drawn to the bold intervention, the restructure, the strategic pivot, the announcement that signals decisive leadership. These things have their place, but I have watched more value created by sustained, unglamorous consistency than by any single bold move, and I have watched more value destroyed by the instinct to reach for drama when patience was actually what the situation required. The regulatory framework that is now running across three regions was not born from a brilliant insight in month three, it was built one documented improvement at a time, over two years, by a team that had decided to stay in the room. What This Means in Practice If I am leading a complex programme right now, a technology rebuild, a regulatory change, a cultural shift, and progress is invisible, the question worth asking is not whether to pause, it is whether I have created the conditions for small progress to be seen at all. Most organisations are reasonably good at celebrating the launch and catastrophically bad at recognising the incremental work that makes launches possible. The team that ships quietly, week after week, without a milestone in sight, is doing the most important work in the building, they are also the most likely to be told to pause. I build the record, I show
Small Steps, Big Progress: A Personal Leadership Story
The Particular Silence of a Programme That Has Learned to Perform Momentum I recall a specific kind of organisational stillness that does not announce itself, no alarm, no escalation call, no red flag on the RAG status. Just the quiet hum of meetings that end with actions nobody completes, decks that get refined rather than decided upon, and governance forums that produce minutes instead of movement. If you have ever sat inside this silence, you will recognise it immediately. If you have not yet encountered it, you will, and you will almost certainly mistake it for progress, because it has learned to dress that way. Stalled is not stopped. Stopped is visible. Stopped has a reason, a postmortem, a recovery plan. Stalled is insidious precisely because it looks, from a distance, like careful deliberation. The calendar is full. The stakeholders are engaged. The strategy deck has been updated to version fourteen. And yet the organisation has not moved, not really, in months. I spent the better part of a year inside exactly this situation, and the most uncomfortable thing I can tell you is that I did not see it clearly until much later. Not because I was not paying attention. Because the absence of crisis can be its own kind of blindfold. Eighteen Months In I was mid-programme, the dangerous middle, where the initial energy has long since dissipated and the end is still too far away to generate any fresh urgency, when I finally sat with the numbers and let them tell me something I had been avoiding. We were eighteen months into a cross-regional data transformation. The kind of programme that involves multiple geographies, legacy infrastructure that predates most of the team, regulatory considerations across jurisdictions, and the careful, painstaking work of getting organisations that have operated independently to agree on something as fundamental as how data should be classified. I had the governance forums. I had the steering committee. I had a transformation office and a methodology and a set of principles that had been workshopped, reviewed, socialised and signed off. What I did not have, when I sat down and looked at it honestly, was a single team that had completed a full migration and was operating differently as a result. I remember the specific meeting where this registered. Not a crisis point, there was no shouting, no failed deadline, no public moment of reckoning. Just a quiet conversation with two of my leads in which we tried to articulate what had actually changed in the last quarter, and found ourselves talking mainly about what we had prepared rather than what we had done. The decks were excellent. The readiness assessments were thorough. The roadmaps were beautifully structured. I had spent months building a perfect runway and had not yet taken off. The dry version of this is: I had optimised for planning and confused it with progress. The honest version is: I had let the programme learn to perform momentum, and I had not noticed quickly enough. What Actually Shifted The first insight sounds almost embarrassingly simple in retrospect, which is usually a sign that it is genuine. I stopped measuring against the destination and started measuring against last Thursday. Not last quarter. Not the original programme plan. Last week. The question I began asking in every team check-in was not “where are we relative to where we need to be?” but “what is different today that was not true seven days ago?” This change in reference point sounds minor. It is not. Measuring against a distant destination in a multi-year enterprise programme is a near-perfect mechanism for generating demoralisation, because the gap never closes fast enough to feel real. Measuring against last week creates a completely different relationship with forward motion, because even the smallest genuine movement becomes visible, and visible movement compounds. The second shift came from a single word, and I want to be precise about this because the word itself matters. The word was adjacent. Not “forward.” Not “progress”, a word so large it had become meaningless in our conversations. Adjacent: the next thing that is close enough to reach without requiring the organisation to believe again in the entirety of the vision. In practical terms, this meant I stopped trying to create conditions for the whole programme to move simultaneously and started identifying one data domain, one team, one geography where the conditions were already nearly right. I migrated that domain. I made it real, visible, and unremarkable, not a pilot, not an experiment, just the way that team now worked. Then I waited. Within a few weeks, the team running that domain had begun talking informally to the next team along. A regional lead asked to replicate the approach. The conversation changed from “why should we do this” to “how did you do that.” This is not a new insight about change management. But experiencing it at enterprise scale, after months of stalled momentum, makes it feel like a discovery every time. The third insight is the most counter-intuitive, and it is the one I am most confident about after everything I have seen in large institutions: small steps are not a compromise. They are not what I do when I cannot get organisational permission for the real approach. They are the only mechanism that actually works at enterprise scale, because enterprise scale means I cannot ask the entire organisation to believe in something it has not yet experienced. I can only ask a small part of it to take a step small enough to be genuinely reversible, and then let the evidence of that step do the work that no vision document ever could. What This Means for Your Programme If any of this is familiar, the full calendar, the unremarkable governance forums, the strategy deck on its fourteenth iteration, the question worth sitting with is not “what is wrong with our approach?” but “what is the one thing that could be different by next Thursday?”