On a beautiful, frosty but calm day in early March 2017, I was striding down the 3rd on Gullane No 1…a magnificent golf course on the east coast of Scotland, just a short distance from Edinburgh. It’s a fabulous long par 5 which sweeps down overlooking the Firth of Forth with views over Fife and East Lothian. As ever and perhaps as a standard requirement for most golfers, my heart and head were full of optimism. The drive I’d hit was long but just slightly to the right and I was confident that I would find it in the rough just by the bunker. As we got closer (I was playing with Phil Femminile, a good friend of mine from Singapore who was making all the right noises about the wonderful course we were playing etc) and started going through the long stuff, I was gripped by the usual concern when looking for a small white object in the sea of green...and suddenly imagined Tiger in the same situation...except he never would be! I was struck by the thought that when it comes to golf, Tiger and I sit at opposite ends of the strategy / implementation challenge. For the sake of clarity, let's define them: Strategy is, according to the OED, a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim and implementation is the process of putting a decision or plan into effect, execution. 

The thing about Tiger (insert any other professional golfer you like) is that he doesn’t actually think about implementation at all. His stroke is almost always perfect so his focus is on strategy…what do I want the ball to do, what are the extenuating circumstances (wind and weather, underfoot conditions, lie). 

At the other extreme, if you think about a beginner at golf, even the most fundamental of strategic decisions which she needs to make, ie which club to use, is entirely irrelevant. Whether she uses a driver or pitching wedge, the impact on distance, direction, shape of flight are (or at least seem to be) all entirely random! For her, it's all about implementation; what are the hips doing, what about the grip, head, feet etc. 

How does that analogy play in the world of transformation? The cynic might say that the leadership of companies would like to think that their organisations are a lot like Tiger when in fact they’re probably a lot more like the beginner! What’s perhaps more interesting however is that when you speak to senior and mid level people within those organisations who have some responsibility for transformation programmes, be they sponsors, programme and project managers or influencers, you find that there is no naïveté about their assessment of the trackrecord and capability. In the vast majority of cases, they will point to one or other key weakness that exists within their business or their division, which in their opinion has led to poor results, be it poor retention, slow decision making processes, intransigent stakeholders, inefficient processes etc. 

So, if it’s not naïveté and it’s not a lack of knowledge or ignorance, what’s the cause of this false optimism and more importantly what are the solutions?

To go back to my golfing analogy, if you’ve got a terrible slice, what can you do? To my mind, there are three solutions: Fix it by having some lessons, aim down the lefthand side of the fairway (if you’re a right hander) in the hope that your slice will carry the ball onto the short stuff, or aim down the middle on the basis that 1 out of 10 shots will go straight! And which option do we normally choose (corporates and average golfers that is?) The last one!

What role does the programme manager have to play in this destructive circle of denial and repetition? The reality is that the artefacts that we are taught to produce lend credibility to our processes but more importantly to ourselves and they present a type of linear certainty around execution which is both unrealistic and unhelpful.

• Unrealistic because even with the most incredible detailed due diligence process, our actual knowledge of the target / end state / set of business requirements is going to be flawed.

• Unrealistic because the time limitations which are a necessary part of decision making inevitably lead to a scoping process which is flawed (either in not challenging requirements enough or in not enabling a breadth of thought and vision).