Making Value Unavoidable
Value doesn’t fail in the spreadsheet. It fails in the operating model.
I’ve tried to push value conversations into organizations that didn’t really have a place for them. We had the mechanics — tracking benefits, running steering updates, producing numbers that made sense on their own. What we didn’t have was anywhere for value to actually sit once the work started. Strategy discussions happened up front. Delivery was tightly managed through the build. And once the system was live, everyone assumed the rest would work itself out.
It rarely did.
You could see it most clearly at the end of large initiatives. The steering committee would close the program. Teams would roll off. Budgets would be reallocated. A few weeks later, questions started to surface about usage, workarounds, or whether the new way of working was really taking hold. By then, the forums and people who could have dealt with it were already gone.
Nobody was ducking responsibility. There just wasn’t an obvious owner anymore.
The few programs that didn’t drift all had one thing in common. Someone stayed accountable after go-live. Not as a symbolic sponsor, but as the person expected to explain what was actually changing in the business and why. That changed how people behaved. Funding didn’t end the moment delivery did. Governance meetings stopped circling milestones and started digging into what people were actually doing week to week.
Those conversations were uncomfortable at first. Usage data didn’t always line up with the story people wanted to tell. Some benefits took longer to show up than planned. But the tone shifted. Decisions became easier to make because the gaps were visible. Teams stopped optimizing for their own checkpoints and started responding to the same signals.
After a few cycles, the same thing kept showing up. Value only held when three things stayed tied together: a concrete business goal, a specific person expected to own the outcome, and the parts of the platform or process that people actually touched every day. When one of those dropped away, the work kept moving, but the impact thinned out.
Making value unavoidable isn’t about rolling out another model or shuffling boxes on an org chart. It’s about deciding, explicitly, that ownership doesn’t end when delivery does. It’s about accepting that some of the most important work happens after launch, when attention is already under pressure and success is harder to claim.
When organizations make that choice, value stops feeling so easy to lose. It doesn’t need defending in every meeting. It shows up in places leaders already care about. And after a while, it stops being treated as a special topic at all. It just becomes part of how the organization operates.
That’s the point where transformation stops being something you announce and starts being something that actually holds.