2026-06-18 · Governance

I have learned to distrust meetings that end with everyone agreeing.

Not because disagreement is always useful. Quite often it is not. But in large industrial programmes, fast agreement can be a warning sign. It may mean that the room has understood the problem. It may also mean that nobody has yet touched the part where the problem becomes expensive.

I remember a review where the facts were unusually clear. Lead times were drifting, inventory was accumulating in the wrong places, and the same process deviations kept reappearing under slightly different names. The analysis was accepted. Nobody seriously challenged the diagnosis. For a moment, that felt like progress.

Then the discussion moved from recognition to consequence. The issue sat between functions, systems and incentives. Production saw one part of it, planning another, quality a third, finance the effect, and IT the representation of all of it. Everyone was close enough to the truth to defend their position. No one was close enough to the whole problem to own the correction.

That is where many programmes slow down. Not dramatically. No one refuses responsibility outright. The conversation simply becomes careful. Process changes require site alignment. Control changes affect reporting. Reporting changes affect targets. Targets affect commitments. And commitments, as usual, have already developed a social life of their own.

A few actions are documented, follow-ups are scheduled, and from a governance perspective the programme continues to look controlled. But the operating model that keeps producing the deviation remains largely intact.

A few weeks later, the same pattern returns. Not as the same issue, of course. Organisations are very good at renaming recurring problems just enough to keep them administratively fresh.

That is one of the quieter failure modes in transformation.

Programmes do not always stall because people disagree. They often stall after people agree, because agreement is mistaken for alignment and alignment is mistaken for commitment to change.

This is why I pay close attention to what happens in the ten minutes after consensus appears.

Who accepts the operational consequence? Who changes the control? Who owns the KPI when the correction hurts another KPI? Who verifies, weeks later, whether the intervention actually worked?

Insight makes a programme more informed. Consequence makes it move.

The gap between the two is where a surprising amount of transformation value disappears.

Originally published as a LinkedIn note. Edited for Industrial Notes.