Get Off the Transformation Treadmill – Executive Summary
HBR, by Darrell Rigby and Zach First, published January 2026
1. Summary
“Get Off the Transformation Treadmill” (HBR, 2026) argues that constant organizational transformation causes more harm than good. Instead of pursuing serial, disruptive change, companies should minimize the need for transformation altogether by managing three capabilities well. First, systems management means continually adapting to preserve strategic fit between the parts of the business, rather than optimizing pieces in isolation. Second, organizations need to detect emerging problems before they force a transformation, which requires moving beyond lagging indicators toward forward-looking, human-centric measurement. Third, agility keeps problems small: when teams surface issues transparently and collaborate across silos, minor friction gets resolved before it escalates into a crisis requiring drastic intervention. The underlying message is that sustainable performance comes from steady, disciplined adjustment, not from repeated Big Bang overhauls that exhaust and destabilize the workforce.
2. Relevance for CIOs
CIOs should treat their organization as a whole system rather than a set of independent levers. Optimizing one function, such as IT or data, without regard to its effect on the rest of the business risks creating new imbalances even while solving a local problem. Measurement systems deserve scrutiny too: dashboards built on rearview, lagging metrics tend to surface issues only once they are already serious. Complementing them with forward-looking indicators allows CIOs to catch drift early. Finally, culture matters as much as process. A blame-free environment that rewards people for flagging problems early is what allows small issues to stay small, reducing the frequency and severity of the transformations CIOs are later asked to lead.
3. Thoughts from Sonny Claussen (CEO Bee360) about this Article
This connects directly to Sonny Claussen’s own experience and his personal takeaway from his attended talk at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium given by George Westerman: durable value comes from disciplined, incremental adjustment rather than dramatic restructuring. It reinforces the point that federated organizations, where Data, AI, Cyber, and Cloud each have autonomous leaders, need strategic coherence more than ever, and that coherence is built through continual, brick-by-brick alignment rather than a single transformational push.