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?”