Governance & Lobbying is the glue which connects each phase together in an aligned and cooperative manner.

Governance has long been seen as either some kind of policing activity where people are either forced to comply with things or alternatively a watered down box ticking exercise. Both approaches are insidiously destructive as they appear to have solved a problem when in fact they are making things worse!

In fact the first part of governance is often overlooked - that of handover. There needs to be some handover to explain the why, to explain the constraints, to explain the reasons behind the decisions that have been taken.

The key to effective governance is balance that Lobbying provides and is built upon the simple premise that a problem or an opportunity can be discovered at any time by anyone rather than the “normal” western type management approach which tends to be the person who is right is the person who is more senior.

Things change. Always. Continually. Guaranteed. So you can either ignore that inconvenient truth or accept it and put in a method to deal with it when it does happen. In the domain of Transformation it is not only the change related to the transformation we are executing but more importantly change to the context - the why - that we must also deal with.

What we decided to do yesterday (and how and why) for many good reasons could be a massively bad thing to do today. This is a fact of life in the 21^st century. So, if we are to deal with transformation in a Pragmatic way we need to accept this fact and deal with it rather than pretend it doesn’t exist and hope for the best. The overall idea that someone creates a strategy and 24 months later it is delivered is rubbish. The plans for the project portfolio (and the reasons) could (and generally do) change as the projects execute. Therefore we need a holistic and coherent environment for transformation to happen within which allows us to backtrack as soon as possible rather than blindly following a flawed plan.

It is not only that work at any level can deviate from guidance (it will - the devil is in the detail) but also the fact that the strategic plan or roadmap changes (or should change) that causes the disconnect between each level.