Dr Stefan Cousquer
March 11, 2025
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It’s a common misconception that transformation fails because organizations lack strategy. But in today’s environment, transformation fails when leadership teams are not equipped to steward the tensions that strategy creates.
In our disruptive times, organizations continue to invest in transformation programs, operating-model redesigns, and execution-focused project management offices. But despite these expensive, consulting intensive solutions, results remain inconsistent. Initiatives stall, alignment decays under pressure, and momentum quietly dissipates.
Consultants produce literature about “the most common pitfalls that undermine success”, in response to the oft-quoted finding that 70% of transformations fail (Mckinsey, 2022).
At Hult Ashridge, we hear from organizations that these insights can help, but they’re not enough in isolation. There is something else much more fundamental going on that determines success in transformation.
We recently conducted a systematic review of the latest academic research into why strategy and transformations fail and discovered an underlying pattern:
Transformation breaks down when leadership teams are unable to collectively steward a small number of unavoidable strategic tensions – over time, under pressure, and in uncertainty.
What is often labelled an execution problem is actually, at its core, a team capability problem – largely at the top of the system. It requires continuous sensemaking, trade-off, and adaptation at the executive level – not leadership outsourcing.
The five tensions that determine transformation success
It’s important to emphasize that these tensions are not problems to solve once. They are conditions to be stewarded continuously.
The tensions are expressed as polarities, the balance of which depends on context.
1. Performance ↔ Transformation
Delivering today vs. building tomorrow
Short-term performance pressures are legitimate. So is the need to evolve the organization. Using the Three Horizons Framework to understand this, we can see that transformation fails when Horizon 1 (business as usual) logic consistently crowds out Horizon 2 (innovation and change) and Horizon 3 (future aspiration/operating model) work.
Where this breaks down: Conversations about the future are perpetually deferred in favor of quarterly results pressure which in turn reduces short-term results, keeping the organization in a temporal trap.
Executive reflection: How do we allocate time and resources as a team across each horizon? What have we stopped, slowed, or deprioritized to create space for transformation? Do we discuss the underlying power tensions between horizons?
2. Linear ↔ Dynamic
Predictable execution vs. adaptive learning
Plans, targets, and discipline are essential. But over-reliance on linear execution suppresses learning and adaptation.
Where this breaks down: Organizations execute the original plan flawlessly – but don’t adapt to opportunities and learning along the way.
Executive reflection: When did new information last change a strategic priority or commitment? Does the team collaborate on adapting your strategic pathway, learning at pace vs. stick rigidly to a yearly strategic plan?
3. Efficient ↔ Participative
Speed and control vs. sensemaking and engagement
Efficiency is critical for simple work. Transformation is complex. Treating complex change as a technical roll-out creates blind spots and resistance – which prevents unlocking value at pace.
Where this breaks down: Compliance is mistaken for alignment. Employees complain the strategy is not clear and engagement scores are low. New value creation is slow.
Executive reflection: Do we tell employees what the strategy is, or do we learn with them how to unlock value at pace? Which of our biggest changes are we under-involving people in – in the name of speed?
4. Individual ↔ Team
Strong leaders vs. strong team practices
Leadership development and strategic change problem-solving often focuses on individuals’ skills. But transformation lives or dies in how the executive team works together – their team practices.
Where this breaks down: Hero leadership masks weak team capability. Leaders develop individuals instead of team practices.
Executive reflection: Do our team practices enable conversations on the right strategic topics with impact? Would the organization describe us as a team – or a group of strong individuals?
5. Internal Coherence ↔ External Fit
Alignment inside vs. relevance outside
Executive teams can become highly aligned internally while gradually losing touch with customers, markets, technologies, and society.
Where this breaks down: The organization becomes internally busy but externally mis-fit.
Executive reflection: How much time do we spend on external relationships and creating value for external stakeholders at pace? Which external shifts and customer needs are we acknowledging – but not allowing to influence real decisions?
What does “relational stewardship” of strategic tensions look like?
This is the executive team’s collective ability to:
Surface competing logics and power plays early and across different time horizons
Surface personal and collective agendas and fears
Stay in conversation when stakes are high
Make trade-offs and power plays explicit rather than implicit
Revisit decisions as conditions change
Avoid defaulting toward certainty, efficiency, and short-term performance – which creates false resolution
Remain coherent internally as one team while staying responsive externally.
When relational capability is weak, regardless of stated intent, the five strategic tensions, consciously and unconsciously, disappear from view. Usually (but not always) this results in the dominant logic falling back to linear, performance, efficient, individual, and internal.
Transformation places a new burden on the executive team – not as individual leaders, but as a relational system.
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Future-ready executive team practices (Stefan Cousquer and Mark Lancelott, Hult Ashridge Executive Education 2026)
Among executive teams who are able to steward these five tensions, we see six future-ready team capabilities in practice:
1. Foresight & sensing – holding multiple time horizons and allowing the future to influence present decisions
2. Strategic pathways & portfolio choices – governing the transition from today to tomorrow deliberately
3. Operating model reconfiguration – evolving structures, decision rights, and capabilities at the requisite pace
4. Stakeholder & culture engagement – building coalitions and shared meaning across boundaries
5. Ambidextrous executive team practices – enabling performance while enabling transformation
6. Transformation governance & learning – adapting through learning, not control
These practices do not stand alone. They are expressions of the same central relational capability, applied to different strategic questions.
What this means for the C-suite
The role of the executive team has fundamentally shifted. It is no longer enough to approve strategy, allocate resources, and oversee execution.
The executive team must steward the conditions that allow the organization to remain coherent and adaptive over time. That capability lives in the relationships, practices, and conversations of the team itself.
It means senior leadership teams must develop the relational capabilities to steward the tensions that determine strategic success. Because strategy rarely fails in the plan; it succeeds or fails in leadership teams.
What can organizations do to develop future-ready teams?
1. Identify where you are now:
If you are navigating strategic change or transformation and want a clear, evidence-based view of your executive team’s readiness, diagnostics offer a powerful starting point.
2. Develop their relational capabilities:
Foster your executive team’s relational stewardship of strategic tensions through team coaching interventions.
3. Hold a Three Horizons conversation audit:
Asking just three questions is a simple but effective tool to help your teams understand where they are spending their time and steward the tension of performance and transformation.
4. Bring the outside in:
Transformation cannot be solved internally. Avoid external misfit by systematically engaging customers, partners, and regulators.
Meet the expert
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Dr Stefan Cousquer
Professor of Strategy and Leadership at Hult International Business School
Stefan works with leadership teams in the areas of strategic transformation, system change and top team effectiveness. He also works with executive education programs in the areas of strategic leadership, sustainability, organizational development and collaborative innovation.
Previous senior leadership roles in strategy consulting and the energy sector have provided Stefan with the practical experience required to support clients lead change in leadership and business models. His current research focuses on the role of top management teams in enabling organizational transformation and humanizing leadership.
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