The elephant in the Boardroom

Aug 25

3 min read

You know the old parable of the blind men and the elephant. One grabs the tail and insists it’s a rope. Another hugs a leg and swears it’s a tree trunk. The third brushes an ear and calls it a fan. All of them are right about their part but wrong about the whole object.

Swap the elephant for a corporation undergoing transformation. BCG Platinion published a piece noting that 70% of digital transformations miss their mark. While most point to tech-stack shortcomings, the root cause is invariably human.

Throughout my career, I have encountered different parts of this animal from different angles - consumer tech portfolios at Samsung, across 7 distinct roles in commercial, loyalty and partnerships at Resorts World Sentosa, to leading MSc programs at NUS Business School. Across every industry and teams, the pattern is the same: alignment isn't about working harder; it’s about perspective. Breakthroughs happen when teams stop defending their individual corners and are finally given the shared visibility to solve for the whole.

When transformations seem to barely evolve, leaders tend to hire consultants or draw new org chart. But you cannot lecture a silo into seeing the whole elephant especially when one has been defending their individual corners. Telling teams to "think enterprise-wide" is lazy and ineffective management, without the scaffolding of clear communication and visibility.

Beyond realigning the vision and articulating the big picture direction, leader must translate the shifts into tangible meaning for every leader and team member, actively dismantling the silos and cornered mindsets that hinder progress.

The PMO and the Change agent

In BCG's transformation framework, the PMO (Project Management Office) is established to drive and support change across people, programs and leadership. Yet, critical factors that has always been missing out. Attributes of the individuals, particularly for the "change agent" internally who navigate between teams across departments and levels, to ensure any gaps are filled. However, they must be more than champions in name; possessing deep domain knowledge, the soft skills to manage change initiatives and the voice to advocate and recommend are equally essential to success.

The fundamental of creating the breakthrough would be to support the momentum of change through structural ways:

Give existing teams the eyes: Make the entire board visible to break down the isolation. The working teams sat together staring at the exact same dashboard, including key minutes from meeting provide clearer understanding of the steps as well as how different work team's effort comes in to contribute. The latter creates the motivation of additional work required in the change process.
Give them the voice and be heard: Real alignment and agreement requires peer-to-peer friction, not simply polished senior management reporting. Investing in time for real discussion and building the spirit of camaraderie among team members should not be under-invested. Hence, creating a blocked day/time consistently and the discipline of exchanges, say minimum every quarter face to face, is critical as we are surrounded with such fast changes externally.
Rotate the vantage point and widen perspectives: You never truly understand a functional constraint until you’ve owned the outcome and seeing through different lenses. Rebalancing the task (be it short term or midterm) and responsibilities so that the people in the board room had sat in each other’s chairs. Empathy and understanding came from shared operational scars.

A strategy deck gives us the map but the map does not steer the elephant. Building the vision, creating the bridges of knowledge flow, whether through PMO or change agent, facilitating with real conversations of consistent meet up for progress and cross-functional exposure methods are essentials. Make the whole visible, decide with speed and iterate in real time. In an evolving market, a good decision executed today consistently beats a perfect decision delivered a month late.