The Story Sounds Right. That’s the Problem.
Narratives are great. We feel connected to them, we relate, we draw a conclusion, and we move on. That’s the whole appeal — a good story lets you stop thinking.
It’s also why sponsors get blindsided.
You are not paid to feel good about the story. You’re paid to know what’s actually happening. Those are not the same job, and the difference between them is where most ERP programs quietly go wrong.
The vendor demo is a narrative.
Every demo you’ve sat through was built by someone whose job is to make you feel confident before you sign. The workflow runs cleanly, the data is pre-loaded, the edge cases never appear. You leave the room believing the system does what your organisation needs. What you actually watched was a story engineered to reduce your uncertainty — not evidence that it will work with your data, your processes, your staff. The demo isn’t lying. It’s just not the whole story, and it was never meant to be.
The steering committee update is a narrative.
“On track. Green. No blockers this month.” It’s a good story — clean, reassuring, easy to relate to and move on from. What it doesn’t tell you is that the project team has stopped raising issues because the last three were waved off, or that testing is behind and everyone’s hoping it resolves itself before go-live. The report isn’t false. It’s curated. And curated is exactly what a narrative is.
The “successful go-live” is a narrative.
Six months in, someone tells you the go-live was a success. Meanwhile, three teams have quietly built shadow spreadsheets because the system doesn’t do what they were promised, and nobody has told you because the story of a successful go-live is easier to maintain than the truth of an unfinished one.
None of these people are lying to you. Influencers, vendors, project managers — they’re trained, whether they know it or not, at telling a story that works in their favour. Your job as sponsor is not to catch them out. Your job is to not fall for the story, and to find the real story underneath the one being told.
That takes more than reading the report. It requires being fully present in the room — listening not just to what’s said, but to what isn’t. The pause before someone answers a testing question. The status update that hasn’t changed wording in three months. The steering committee member who’s gone quiet when they used to push back. These are the subtle cues that tell you more than the slide does.
Remember: stories can be interesting without being true. A narrative that makes you feel good about your program is not the same as a program that is actually good. As a sponsor, your job is truth-seeking — not comfort-seeking. The moment you start choosing the story that feels better over the story that’s accurate, you’ve stopped sponsoring the program and started managing your own anxiety about it.
Most ERP programs don’t fail because someone told a lie. They fail because everyone kept telling a story that was easier to believe than the truth — and the sponsor was the one person positioned to ask what wasn’t being said, and didn’t.
