The missing middle of transformation: is your business set up to absorb change?
Transformation starts with strategy, but succeeds through execution. Learn how the missing middle helps organisations turn change into business value.
Transformation is one of those words that can quickly become too broad to be useful. It starts when a business decides that the current way of working is no longer enough: whether the pressure comes from growth, cost, customer experience, operational complexity or a platform that no longer supports the business properly. The label may vary: digital transformation, business transformation, AI transformation, operations transformation…but the starting point is usually the same: a business goal has been set, and something needs to change to achieve it.
The challenge is that transformation does not happen in the plan, it happens inside the organisation. It shows up in how teams work, how decisions are made, how processes run, how systems connect and whether people understand the reason for change. This is where many transformations start to struggle: leadership may know what needs to improve, the roadmap may be clear and the technology decisions may be made. But the harder question is whether the business is actually set up to make the change happen.
That means looking beyond the roadmap: have the right stakeholders been involved early enough? Are the dependencies clear? Does the operating model support the future state? Do people understand what will change? And how will the organisation know whether it is working? This is the missing middle of transformation: the work required to make sure the organisation can absorb and adapt to change.
Where transformation gets stuck
A transformation usually begins with a strategic objective, but it won’t happen in a strategy deck. It happens in day-to-day work: how people make decisions, follow processes, use data, collaborate and serve customers, and this is usually where ambition starts to meet friction. That friction is often practical rather than strategic: unclear ownership between teams, processes that do not fit how work actually happens, unstructured data people do not trust, or platforms that go live while spreadsheets and side processes continue underneath. These are not small implementation details, they are often the difference between delivering a project and changing the business.
Most organisations can define ambition and mobilise delivery. The harder part is translating that ambition into the operating choices that make change absorbable: what needs to change, who is affected, where ownership sits and which dependencies matter.Without that layer, the roadmap may move forward while the business stays largely the same.
People and the operating model cannot be added later
The people side of transformation is often underestimated. Too often, people are treated as the final step: the strategy is agreed, the solution is designed, the timeline is set and then employees are informed, trained or asked to adopt the change. By that point, many of the decisions that shape their day-to-day work have already been made. People may not understand why the change matters, what it means for their work or how it connects to their priorities, and they may also spot practical issues that were missed in design.
Bringing people along does not mean asking everyone to agree with every decision. It means involving the right stakeholders early enough to understand how the change will land in reality. The teams closest to the work often know where the current process breaks, which exceptions matter and which informal steps never appear in a process map.
Meanwhile, change management cannot just be a communications layer added at the end. If people are expected to work differently, they need to understand the journey before the design is finished. The same is true for the operating model, because a meaningful transformation rarely stays inside one function, process or system. A change in customer service can affect sales, operations, data and reporting, also a new platform can create new requirements for governance, roles and support. When these ripple effects are not managed, the impact shows up later: duplicated work, unclear ownership, inconsistent adoption and workarounds that pull teams back into the old way of working. That is why transformation needs to be treated as connected business change, not a standalone project.
Making transformation executable, adoptable and measurable
Making transformation work does not mean adding more theory or slowing delivery down unnecessarily. It means making change practical enough to execute, easy enough to adopt and clear enough to measure. In practice, this means being clear on the outcome, the teams affected, the operating model changes required, the decisions that need ownership and the measures that will prove whether the change is working well.
Transformation does not fail only because the idea was wrong. More often, it fails because the business was not set up to absorb the change. The missing middle is where that readiness is built: through clear ownership, engaged stakeholders, practical operating design and a clear link between delivery and value. That is the part organisations cannot afford to treat as an afterthought. Want to know why transformation can lose momentum? Rutger van Gennep explores this in his article on overcoming transformation fatigue. Read it by clicking here.
