Who Does the Timeline Serve?

Recently I was with a leadership team that had been told, by a firm with a very good reputation, that changing how they worked together would take eighteen months. We did the core of it in two days. Not the whole journey, and I want to be honest about that distinction, but the part everyone insists is impossible to compress: the team elevated their ambition, agreed what they were building, confronted the habits that were slowing them down, and left the session with decisions that had owners and dates attached. The consultant's eighteen-month plan had allocated a full quarter to "alignment workshops".

So here is the question I want to put in front of you, because almost nobody asks it out loud (but you're almost certainly thinking it):

Why does everyone believe change has to take a long time?

This belief has been around seemingly forever, and it survives because the people selling the change services are paid by the month. That is not an accusation of bad faith; it is a plain observation from organisational economics. Economists call it the principal-agent problem: whenever you hire an agent whose incentives differ from yours, you should expect the advice to drift, sometimes imperceptibly, toward what pays the agent. So it stands to reason that a consulting firm that earns fees on duration will sincerely believe in long engagements, and the belief will be genuine precisely because it is profitable. Nobody has to lie for the timeline to inflate. Furthermore the "thought leadership" from the firms will validate their months-long methodology, and the "benchmarks" will reinforce the approach. The economics do the work quietly.

I say this as someone who spent more than a decade inside one of the world's great consulting firms and then years running the consulting business built on the world's best-known change methodology. I have enormous respect for that work, and I have also seen the incentive structure from the inside. The long engagement is not a conspiracy. It is a clever market dynamic, and market dynamics generally don't break until the buyer starts asking better questions.

What makes this worth asking right now is that the evidence for the long approach to achieving change is actually quite thin - thinner than the consultants' confidence suggests. McKinsey has surveyed executives who were part of transformations in the previous five years, and fewer than one third say their companies' transformations succeeded at both improving performance and sustaining those improvements. Read that carefully: the slow, comprehensive, expensive orthodoxy - the approach behind most of these transformations - did not deliver the outcome. In reality, the long extended duration only favours one party.

What actually slows a good team down?

It is almost never capability. Every organisation I work with is full of good people who genuinely want to do good work. The leaders are smart and incentivised to do more of what makes them money. The constraint sits somewhere more awkward: it is in the accumulated habits that almost nobody in the room feels they can challenge, because everyone inside the room owns a piece of it. The reporting cadence exists because the CFO built it. The approval chain exists because something went wrong in 2019 and the COO fixed it. Every process has a parent, and criticising the process means criticising the parent in front of their peers.

Organisational economics has a name for what this produces: influence costs, the energy an organisation burns as people defend positions and protect turf instead of doing the work. And behavioural science explains why the habits are so sticky. Robert Cialdini's research on commitment and consistency shows that once we have publicly backed a position, we are powerfully driven to keep behaving in ways that confirm it, even when the evidence has moved on. A leadership team is essentially full of public commitments. And of course it will inherently struggle to unwind its own commitments and positions.

This is why the frustration is so widespread at the moment. Jamie Dimon told an investor conference this year that "bureaucracy, complacency, and arrogance will take down a company" faster than any competitor. Andy Jassy asked Amazon's people to send him examples of bureaucracy directly, received nearly a thousand emails, and has already made hundreds of changes off the back of them. The most demanding chief executives in the world have concluded that the drag is internal and that removing it is urgent. And it is worth highlighting that neither of them is proposing an eighteen-month programme to do it.

What can an outsider do that the team cannot?

An outsider with no ownership bias can put the unchallengeable habits on the table in hours. When I work with a team, I did not build any of the habits and I do not need any of them to survive. That is the whole trick, and it is less mystical than the change industry makes it sound. When I name the approval chain as a problem, nobody's standing is threatened, no career is implicated, and the conversation can be about the thing rather than about the person. The team could not have that conversation alone at any speed. The constraint was never time - it is detachment and objectivity (and a fairly healthy dose of skill). Given any year, the same ownership bias produces the ongoing silence. The constraint is objectivity, and objectivity does not take months to resolve. It takes a well-designed room.

The behavioural science then explains why accelerated change is possible. My friend Steve Martin, who has spent his career studying what actually changes behaviour, makes the point that the durable commitments are the ones people make actively, publicly, and in their own words. That is exactly what two well-designed days produce. The same consistency principle that protected the old habits now protects the new decisions, because each one was made by its owner, out loud, in front of the people whose opinion matters most. Compare that with the long programme, where recommendations arrive in a deck, ownership is diffuse, and the energy drains within hours of the consultants leaving. When offsites fail, and plenty do, this is why: nothing about how the team works was decided and owned. The failure is a design flaw, not a duration problem.

What should you demand from your consultant?

If you're looking to get results faster you absolutely should be asking for a higher standard than the market currently delivers: the smallest necessary work for the largest meaningful result. You may have seen boards are already applying that standard to chief executives; in Leadership IQ's study of board members explaining why they had removed a CEO, 31% pointed not to bad judgment but to slow judgment. It is only a matter of time before leaders apply the same test to their advisors. I'm surprised more leaders aren't already doing this.

So before you sign the next proposal, ask three questions:

1. What result will exist at the end of the first month, and who inside my team will own it?
2. Which parts of this timeline reflect the difficulty of the work, and which reflect your delivery model?
3. If the core decisions can be made in days, what exactly is the remaining time for?

A serious advisor will welcome all three, and the answers will tell you quickly whether you are buying a result or funding a template-based methodology. Demand more from your consultant, and challenge the dogma.

Your new way of working does not have to take a long time.

FAQ

How long should it take a leadership team to change how it works?

The core decisions take days, not months, when the session is designed properly: the real issues surfaced in advance, the right people facilitate conversations (they don't "present"), you get rid of all but the most essential "content" (i.e. no decks) and decisions are made with an owner and a date. What takes longer is living the new commitments, and that is the work of the team, not a consulting engagement.

Why do most change programmes take so long?

Partly because the work is genuinely hard, and partly because the firms selling the programmes are paid by the month. The principal-agent problem means timelines drift toward what serves the provider, without anyone acting in bad faith. Unless you really know what you're doing it is hard to know that this can be done quickly - so you're committing to and paying for the doubt and the uncertainty.

Can a team really change in two days?

100% they can. I have done this more times than I can count now. A team can make and own the decisions that change how it works in two days. What it cannot do in two days is pretend the follow-through has happened. The honest claim is that the expensive, slow part of most programmes (the alignment and the deciding) compresses dramatically when ownership bias is removed from the room.

What should I ask a consultant who proposes a long engagement?

Ask what results will exist at the end of month one (and who owns those results). Also ask which parts of the timeline reflect the work versus their delivery model, and what the remaining time is for once the core decisions are made. How much of what you're paying for is a result you will see, versus their activity. And in case you're not sure, you should not be paying for activity.