Why We Feel Stuck?
We feel stuck for many reasons. But one of the most common is also the least examined: we are stuck with the wrong people.
Not incompetent people. Not badly intentioned people. Wrong people — the wrong function, standing in for a role your program actually needed filled by someone else.
I see the same substitution happen three times, in almost every transformation program I’ve been near.
When you need an architect — someone who can hold the whole system in their head and think in structures, dependencies, and consequences — you end up talking to your General Manager or Finance Manager instead. They’re smart. They control budget. Neither of those things makes them capable of big-picture systems thinking. So the architecture never gets designed. It gets approved.
When you need a project manager — someone who will take ownership of the outcome and be accountable for it landing — you get an IT Manager instead. Because it’s “an IT project,” so surely IT should run it. But an IT Manager owns infrastructure and tickets. Owning a business outcome is a different job, with a different set of instincts, and most IT Managers never asked for it.
When you need a change manager — someone driving the strategy and direction of how your people actually adopt the change — you get a Comms Manager instead. And you get communications. Newsletters. Town halls. Happy comms. What you don’t get is change, because producing a message and shifting behaviour are not the same discipline, and no one in the room was responsible for the second one.
Here’s what happens next, every time: you don’t get the result you expected. You lose time. You lose resources. And eighteen months in, you’re no closer to where you were trying to go — except now there’s a steering committee pack that says everything is on track.
If you feel stuck right now, this is worth checking before you check anything else. Not your strategy. Not your budget. Who is actually sitting in the seat, and whether that seat matches the job you need done.
The uncomfortable part is that the wrong person is often the person who was already there, already trusted, already convenient to appoint. Replacing a title with the right function feels like friction. Living with the mismatch for another year feels, falsely, like the path of least resistance.
The solution isn’t more effort from the people you already have in the wrong seats. It’s finding the right people — the ones who can actually help you get out, and then help you thrive once you’re out.
Which seat in your program has the wrong person sitting in it right now?
