Too Important to Drift

Nothing drifts on purpose. A ship at anchor does not decide to leave its mooring. It moves because the current is patient and the attention on deck has wandered. By the time the shoreline looks wrong, the ship has already travelled further than anyone meant it to, and the easy correction is now a hard one.

Most transformations end the same way. Not with a dramatic failure, but with a slow accumulation of small, reasonable decisions, each of which made sense at the time.

The condition, not the event

The numbers are sobering, and they have barely moved in twenty years. McKinsey has long held that roughly seventy per cent of transformations fail to meet their goals. Bain's 2024 analysis put it higher, finding that eighty-eight per cent of business transformations fall short of their original ambitions. Gartner has estimated that the majority of digital efforts never scale. KPMG found that ninety-six per cent of organisations are in some phase of change at any given moment.

Read those figures together and a quiet truth emerges. Change is no longer an event a business passes through and recovers from. It is the permanent condition in which a business now operates. This is the more useful way to hold it: not as a storm to be survived, but as water you are already swimming in.

What drift actually looks like

Sidney Dekker, a professor based here in Australia, gave this its clearest name. In Drift into Failure he argues that complex systems rarely break because of one faulty part. They drift. A succession of small everyday decisions, each defensible, each made under pressure and with imperfect information, slowly carries the whole system toward a place no one chose. You can suffer the organisational equivalent of an accident, he observes, inside a system where everyone followed the rules and nothing looked wrong.

Anyone who has sat in a steering committee knows what drift looks like long before it is named. The status report is green. The dashboard glows. The slides are calm. And the people doing the actual work are quietly holding the thing together with both hands. Practitioners have a name for it: watermelon reporting. Green on the outside, red in the middle. It is rarely dishonesty. It is what happens when red is treated as a confession rather than a request for help, so the truth gets shaded toward comfort, one reasonable increment at a time. The cost of discovering that truth late is almost always greater than the cost of discovering it early.

That is the heart of it. Your transformation is too important to drift because, by the moment the failure becomes visible, the recovery is expensive, the trust is spent, and the options that were once open have quietly closed.

What you are really transforming

There is a deeper reason, and it is the one most programmes miss. It concerns what is actually being transformed.

It is tempting to think a transformation is about the technology: the new platform, the migration, the system that arrives on a date. The technology is only the prop. What you are really changing is the product, and product is a far larger thing than the artefact you switch on.

Pine and Gilmore mapped this in the Harvard Business Review decades ago. Economic value climbs a ladder, from commodities, to goods, to services, to experiences, and finally to transformations themselves, which Pine has lately called the transformation economy. At each rung the customer is buying something less tangible and more personal. They are no longer buying the thing. They are buying what the thing lets them become.

Vargo and Lusch made the same case from the other direction. Their service-dominant logic, one of the most cited ideas in modern marketing, holds that every firm is a service firm, even a manufacturer. A product is not an end in itself. It is a vehicle for value, and that value is only realised in use, co-created with the person using it. The car is not the product. The journey is.

Put those two ideas side by side and the definition of product expands until it touches everything a business builds. The onboarding flow is product. The invoice is product. The way a support call leaves someone feeling is product. The portal a member opens on the worst day of their year is product. None of these is technology. Every one of them is an experience, and every one of them is what a transformation is genuinely reshaping.

The same physics in every market

This is also why the discipline does not change from one industry to the next. Those high failure rates appear across every sector, which tells us the problem is systemic, not vertical. A bakery, a bank, and a community health provider run on different systems and answer to different regulators. Yet they are all in the same business: building experiences that deliver value a customer can feel, then changing those experiences without losing the thread of why they mattered in the first place.

The vertical sets the context. It does not change the physics. Drift behaves the same everywhere, because attention behaves the same everywhere.

The opposite of drift

The antidote to drift is not a better reporting template. It is proximity to reality. It is someone whose job is to keep the picture honest, who can tell a true green from a green that is hiding red, who stands close enough to the work to feel the current moving before the shoreline looks wrong.

The Stoics had a single word for this practice: prosoche, continuous attention to what is actually in front of you. The Zen tradition arrives at much the same place by a different road. It is the deliberate opposite of drift, and it is a practice, not a single act.

That is the work we do. Company31 is the senior team you bring in when a programme has to land. We make sure you are building the right thing, we get it moving, including the ones that have stalled, and we stand up the governance that keeps it honest. We are independent, tied to no vendor, with nothing to resell. The only thing we are ever selling you is a clear view of where you actually stand.

Change once, and change it well

Change is not a storm you wait out. It is the water you are already in. You will not still the current, and you should not try. The discipline is not control. It is attention: staying close enough to reality that drift can never quietly gather, and changing with intent rather than being carried.

Your transformation is too important to drift. So do not let it.

See clearly. Choose well. Change once.

Ready to see your own picture clearly?

Start with a conversation, not a sales pitch. If this raised a question about a programme of your own, we are happy to talk it through. There is no vendor agenda and no obligation, just a clear, independent view of where you stand and what genuinely deserves your attention first.

company31.com · The 31 Brief · Sydney, Australia

References and sources

Pine, B. J. II and Gilmore, J. H. (1998). Welcome to the Experience Economy. Harvard Business Review, July to August 1998.
Pine, B. J. II. The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations. Strategic Horizons.
Vargo, S. L. and Lusch, R. F. (2004). Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68(1), 1 to 17.
Dekker, S. (2011). Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems. Ashgate.
McKinsey and Company. Perspectives on Transformation and related Transformation Practice commentary on the roughly seventy per cent failure rate.
Bain and Company (2024). Analysis finding eighty-eight per cent of business transformations fall short of their original ambitions.
Gartner. Estimates on the proportion of digital transformation efforts that fail to scale.
KPMG. Global Transformation Study, on the share of organisations in some phase of change.
Watermelon reporting is a long-standing practitioner concept in programme and project management describing status that reads green externally while the underlying delivery is red.

This insight is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal, financial, or technical advice. Figures are drawn from the research cited above and were current at the time of writing in June 2026. Company31 is an independent advisory and is not affiliated with the organisations or authors cited. Readers should seek tailored professional advice before acting on any information here.