Funding the organisation you have (not the one you want)

It’s a tempting binary, particularly in financially constrained environments. However, it’s also the wrong place to start.

What sits underneath most failed transformations isn’t a lack of ambition or intelligence, but a lack of empathy with organisational reality – an honest understanding of the constraints people are operating under, the delivery capacity that actually exists, and the fragility leaders are trying to manage while still being seen to act. Too often, transformation programmes are designed for the organisation leaders wish they had, not the ones they are asking to change.

The debate over funding is so often a proxy for the confidence the organisation has yet to earn. Empathy-led transformation (understood as disciplined realism rather than sentimentality) starts by recognising that maturity must be built incrementally, through small, credible steps that prove capability before attempting to scale it.

However, organisations are still repeating the same failed transformation patterns, from over-scoped programmes and premature expectations of benefits to massive changes unsupported by realistic delivery capability. The result is repeated “reset” transformations, rather than sustained forward progress.

The trap itself is limited by reducing self-funding to two familiar, yet flawed, positions:

This reflects a genuine confidence in execution, capability and control, but fails when savings are assumed to be available upfront. Business leaders expect large, cashable benefits early, regardless of whether their organisation has yet earned cost transparency or cross-functional trust.

Absolute adherence to self-funding can then become a self-constraint disguised as prudence, pushing teams to over-scope change and attempt chasm-leaping programmes that often result in another reset transformation once organisational memory fades after under-delivering.

While often used to justify necessary investment in technology, M&A or operating-model change, this argument is frequently a shield to bypass true organisational readiness. Funding transformation from savings is sensible when treated as a learning and maturity mechanism. It can work when initial activities are deliberately small, partial, local and designed so that early gains can be reinvested.

Large, durable savings are rarely a starting condition for change, but rather an outcome of transformation maturity. Its objective is to prove execution capability and justify the right to expand through building institutional confidence. Experimentation is expected, but failing can be small, fast and designed in, rather than excused after the fact.

Both savings-led and investment-led approaches have worked and failed. Context regarding maturity, trust and governance determines these outcomes; therefore, copying another organisation’s funding logic is dangerous. Funding from savings is appropriate only once the organisation accepts that large, durable savings are an outcome of transformation maturity, rather than a starting condition.

As organisations diverge in their ability to adapt to increasingly unsettled environments – political, economic, social, etc. – this distinction only becomes more pronounced. This is where empathy-led transformation becomes critical. Not empathy as sentiment, but as leadership discipline — the ability to recognise an organisation’s current maturity honestly, design change that people can realistically absorb, and build confidence through small, credible successes that earn the right to scale.

Leaders are not choosing how to fund transformation; they are choosing what kind of organisation they believe they are today. Where decisions are grounded in realistic understanding, transformation is designed coherently – with scale, funding and execution aligned to build maturity, rather than chase hype-driven resets.

As we navigate an increasingly unsettled political and economic environment, the ability to be flexible is paramount. However, flexibility is earned through repetition, not declaration.

Executives increasingly ask practical questions to clarify the right approach for their organisation: how well costs are currently understood; what changes as transformation accelerates; and what trade-offs exist between near-term progress and longer-term sequencing. Rather than funding ideology, these questions determine whether transformation compounds or stalls.

Rather than deciding whether transformation should be funded from savings or new investment, leaders must recognise whether they are clear-eyed about the organisation they are leading today, or rather the one they hope to fast-forward to. Funding discipline only works when it is grounded in the reality of your delivery capability. Where that realism is present, small, well-sequenced steps build the trust that eventually unlocks the conditions for meaningful, durable savings to finally be realised.