Notes on the first three weeks of a system-change engagement

The first three weeks of an engagement are not planning weeks. They are sensing weeks. The plan you would write on day one is almost always the wrong plan — not because it is badly reasoned, but because the information it is based on has not yet surfaced.

These are the notes we keep on a fresh engagement, in the order they tend to matter.

Week one — who is actually in the room

The stated sponsors and the operating sponsors are almost never the same people. The stated sponsor signed the contract. The operating sponsor is the one whose phone rings when something goes sideways, and whose credibility is quietly on the line if it doesn't land. Our first job is to find this person and, respectfully, confirm that they know they are this person.

We also watch for the reluctant allies — colleagues who have been brought in because the sponsor couldn't avoid inviting them, and who are holding information the engagement will need. They tend to be quiet early. We try to make their presence low-cost and their dissent legitimate from the first meeting.

Week two — what language is already doing work

Every organisation has a handful of words that are doing more work than they should. "Transformation." "Capacity." "Journey." "Culture." The words are stable; their meanings are not. If we use them without scrutiny, we inherit the ambiguity. If we try to replace them, we lose the handles the organisation uses to think.

The move we make is neither. We keep the words, and we make their meanings visible. We ask people to say what they mean when they use them. The resulting map is usually the first useful artefact of the engagement.

Week three — what the system is rewarding right now

Before naming a change, we try to notice what the current system is, in fact, producing. Not what its policies say it produces. Not what its leaders hope it produces. What actually, observably, gets rewarded inside it — promoted behaviours, funded programmes, tolerated workarounds.

The answer is almost always more coherent than people assume. The system is not broken. It is doing exactly what it has been built to do. Naming this — gently, precisely, without blame — is the move that opens the rest of the work.

The engagement plan we write at the end of week three is a better plan than anything we could have written on day one. It is also, usually, a smaller plan. It names fewer things with more confidence. That is the point.

The first three weeks are not a delay. They are the work.