Every board has a financial strategy. Ask to see the cultural one.

Ask your CFO for the financial strategy and a document lands in your inbox before the coffee goes cold. Modelled, stress-tested, reviewed every quarter by people who take it seriously. Now ask the same organisation for its cultural strategy… and things go quiet. Not the values poster in reception. The actual strategy: the one that names how your people will move through the next big change, who owns that work, and what it costs.

In more organisations than would admit it, that second document does not exist. There is a transformation budget, and somewhere near the bottom of it a 'training and comms' line doing an extraordinary amount of heavy lifting.

The gap stays invisible while the slideware is fresh. It surfaces later, because every serious change is running two projects at once. The first is the visible one: new structure, new system, new roles, the milestones a steering committee can inspect. The second runs quieter. It is the work of endings… what people are being asked to let go of, and what they need to see before they will loosen their grip. In the book, and again in this article, I call the pairing 'The Duality'. Fund the first project while leaving the second to goodwill, and the programme reports green right up until it doesn't.

The full article makes the case properly. There is a challenge from a client conversation that reframes what taking change seriously ought to mean (it leans on the financial strategy comparison, and it stings). There is the Let-Go Inventory, a named two-column exercise you can run with your leadership team inside a week. And there is a case for walking the gemba, the place where the work actually happens, ahead of one more pulse survey.

(Unashamed side note: I built Pragma for exactly these conversations. It is a change advisory app that answers the 'what do I actually do on Monday' questions in my tone, at app.pragmaticchange.com.au. The FAQ covers how leaders are using it.)

Your organisation would never run five years of capital allocation on gut feel and a poster. The people side deserves the same seriousness, written down, owned and resourced. The full argument, with the exercises, is in The Duality of change. Or, as the article closes… make it a thing.