Transformations don't fail because of technology. They fail upstream — where strategy and communication part ways

On paper, it was a perfect operation. A sensible acquisition, the kind that defends itself in the documents: two businesses complementary in most areas, overlapping in a few, obvious synergies, incredible potential. And the best intentions, sincere, on both sides, to make it work.

I lived through that integration up close, standing in the middle between the side that was selling and the side that was buying. I listened to perspectives and points of view, experienced both approaches. I’m a Libra: I love looking for the truth, even when there’s more than one. And in this case the truths are many, many people are right, and — as often happens — there’s a grain of truth, paradoxically, in everything and in its opposite. But I saw where it cracked. Not in the systems, though integrating them was no joke. Not in the numbers, not in the written strategy. It cracked on one sentence, repeated in a thousand variations in corridors and meetings: «this is how we do it — it’s worked before».

It’s the most expensive lesson I’ve learned in fifteen years inside multinationals, and I’ll state it upfront because it’s the thesis of this piece: transformations almost never fail (only) on the technical side. It is, conceptually, like believing you won’t drown because you’ve read books on how to swim: you can know the theory perfectly, but if you can’t put it into practice, tragedy is around the corner. Transformations fail for lack of a holistic method, for short-sightedness — and, as a consequence, for communication that starts to creak.

Careful, though, about what I mean. Not that the messages were badly written: on engaging people we did serious work, work I’m proud of to this day — even through brutally hard passages that no communication can make painless. The point is another one: what was missing was a real overall vision — cohesive, and coherent with the market — from those setting the direction. A communicator can bend over backwards to reach the goal of a “perfect integration”, but if the ideas upstream are confused, discordant, misaligned with the market, communication will creak no matter what. Could you ever bake “the world’s best apple pie” if whoever does the shopping hands you pizza-dough ingredients and a couple of apples? Communication is not the megaphone for announcements, nor a magic medicine. It’s what holds things together, builds trust, provides clarity — and to do that, it needs the things it’s meant to hold together to actually exist.

Chronicle of a crack

How it went, at the level I can tell: the acquiring side had models that worked extremely well in one geography. And it decided to apply them, almost unchanged, almost everywhere. Not out of gratuitous arrogance — out of trust in tools that had already performed. But a model that works in one place carries with it, invisibly, the conditions of that place: the culture, the way people inside the company think, the habits of consumers outside, the weight of politics and institutions. Transplant it without adapting it, and those conditions don’t follow. It’s like reforestation: if you want to “make the world greener”, you need native species and suitable ground. Palm trees grow in tropical climates, in rich, fertile, well-drained soil: they will never grow on the steppe — however hot it gets there in certain months. The conditions you can’t see are missing.

In short: instead of taking the best of both worlds, the idea prevailed that everything could be standardised. And that’s where the chain reaction started — the one I’ve seen repeat itself, identical, in every badly governed transformation.

First link: suspicion. Every change is met with wariness and fear, always — it’s human. But there’s an enormous difference between those who watch a change with prudence and those who root for it to fail. When people — starting with management — don’t feel part of the design, they stop hoping it will work and start looking for confirmation of their suspicions. And those who look for confirmation, find it.

Second link: the exodus. Talent leaves — and with it goes the company’s historical memory. It’s not just human capital: it’s strategic know-how, the knowledge of why things are done a certain way, of what has already been tried and didn’t work. It’s the kind of loss that shows up in no quarterly report, and you pay for it for years.

Third link: the business starts to creak. Over the medium-long term, the numbers begin to tell what people had sensed much earlier — that gut feeling that something wasn’t going the right way.

And here’s what makes all this a tragedy, not a fault: nobody wanted to destroy anything. Management wanted to do well, to build. The intentions were good. What was missing was the method — and the method, in a transformation, calls for strategically conscious communication: not downstream of decisions, but inside them.

The plan that stops halfway

There’s a detail of that story I consider the lesson within the lesson, because it dismantles the most common mistake made by those leading change.

Engagement at the base was there: people, operationally, had been involved, through serious work. What was missing was a plan above: the old decision-making layer — the senior leaders — didn’t agree, and didn’t feel part of the new course. And here organisational physics is unforgiving: if senior leaders don’t believe in it, their scepticism cascades down to managers, from managers to teams, from teams to customers. You can communicate perfectly downwards: if the layer in between transmits a different message with its tone of voice, its pauses, its eyes rolling in closed-door meetings — that message wins.

Engagement can’t be delegated and can’t be skipped: either it crosses every level, or it stops at the level where you stopped doing it for real.

The three moments when communication is decisive

From that experience — and from the ones that came after — I’ve distilled three moments when a transformation plays out its game, and in all three the decisive tool is the same.

Before: when the change is being designed. Communication here must not only announce — it must, above all, listen. Understand what works in the world you’re about to change, what people consider valuable, what the current identity is and what the future one should be, and what people consider a burden. The buyer’s «this is how we do it» and the acquired company’s «this is how it’s always been done here» are the same sentence spoken from two sides of the table: if nobody translates one to the other, they remain two monologues. They may even both be right — but the goal is finding common ground. Like in couples: it’s not an arm-wrestle over who’s more right. It should be a daily construction of something third, stronger, at the intersection of the two who compose it.

During: when things actually change. The temptation here is generic reassurance — and people smell it a mile away. What holds is the honest sequence: what changes, what doesn’t, what we don’t know yet. Said and repeated, at every level, by voices that believe it — because they understand, and see with their own eyes that the proof is there. Not manipulation: clarity.

When things go wrong: because at some point they can, in every transformation. That’s the moment you see whether strategy and communication have worked well together. If one of the two was creaking, the other can only have limped.

Without destroying what works

There’s a question I’ve carried with me since then, and it has become the thread of everything I do: how do you change without destroying what works? Without losing value?

Because the point is not that standardisation is wrong, that acquisitions are doomed, or that change must always be tragic. The point is that every organisation carries things that work for reasons written down nowhere — they live in people, in relationships, in memory. A transformation that doesn’t see them, runs them over. And discovers only later, from the numbers, how much they were worth.

Communication — the real kind, the kind that listens before speaking and engages every level instead of skipping them — is the tool that makes those invisible things visible. It’s not the department that packages the announcements: it’s the function that holds the pact together while everything changes.

The successful transformations I’ve seen didn’t have the budget in common, nor the technology, nor the right consultant. They had in common the whole of all those things, plus one: people — all of them, at every level — could answer a simple question. Why are we doing this, how do we create value for the people we serve, and where do I fit in?

When that answer is missing, no industrial plan can substitute for it. When it’s there, it survives even the mistakes.