It’s caused by clarity protecting what the system refuses to face.

I have been circling the same professional dynamic for more than a decade now, possibly even two — and only recently did I realise how much of it I was also carrying myself.

Ever since I read the Standish Chaos report, showing that IT project failure is more common than success, I’ve been triggered by management consulting’s limited ability to structurally reduce failure odds in complex, multi-year programs.

To avoid failure, the dominant moves often seem to be either avoiding a clear commitment altogether, or “throwing away the baby with the bathwater.” Both lead to a standstill: a plateaued program that looks hyperactive on the surface, but is in reality treading water.

In such situations, the uncomfortable truth may be that there never was firm ground to begin with, and that the next responsible move would be to dismantle the program gracefully. But there is often another possibility: a comfortable lie that materialises stagnation — a void hidden in plain sight by governance rituals.

That lie usually sounds like “we’re doing this to make things better,” while remaining vague about the concrete choices being made, the trade-offs involved, and the uneven consequences for different actors. Progress is never neutral — and that is precisely why such statements are only partly true, and so easy to support.

Over time, I’ve learned that stagnation is not always the final phase before a program’s end. It can also be a transition phase — turbulent, sometimes destabilising — before revitalisation, if a team finds a way to acknowledge and fill the void rather than cover it.

That turbulence has also been mine in 2025. Because no external transformation I’ve witnessed ever came without an internal one — and this time, I could no longer pretend I was only observing it from the outside.