Two Divisions. Two Results.

“It’s intuitive, but is it truthful?”

I looked up at John, my client, with a huge question mark on my face. I’d just told the team how I thought we should handle something, and it made perfect sense to me.

“Think about it,” John continued. “What you’re saying makes sense. It’s intuitive. But have we examined this enough to know that it’s truthful?”

Years ago, I was working with a management consulting company, and our team had been engaged by a major retailer to help improve its supply chain operations. I served as the project lead. John was part of the team the client assigned to work with us. He was a young man, fresh out of college, very intelligent, and humble and respectful to everyone on the team.

So when he asked me that, I stopped.

“Let’s take a closer look,” I said.

We did. I brought more information to support what I’d said, and the whole team offered input. In the end we reached essentially the same decision, with one significant difference. Now it had more information behind it, more discussion, and the whole team agreed with it.

That kind of cooperation ran through the entire project.

The company had multiple divisions, and we began by implementing a new process in one of them. It wasn’t an experimental methodology. It was a disciplined process built around principles and practices our consulting team had successfully implemented elsewhere.

The first implementation was an extraordinary success. The key performance indicators didn’t just improve; some reached levels the organization had never achieved before.

The numbers were gratifying, of course. But something else had happened that was every bit as important.

The division’s leadership had gotten behind the project. They didn’t simply approve it. They supported it. There is a considerable difference between the two.

They made it clear that the work mattered. They participated, reinforced the changes, and helped solve problems when they arose. Their people understood that this wasn’t another corporate initiative that would disappear when management’s attention moved elsewhere. People like John felt free to challenge us, and the challenges made the work better.

With results like those, the logical next step was obvious: take what we had learned and implement the same process in another division.

Same corporation. Same facility. Same consulting team. Same methodology.

We knew the process worked because we had just demonstrated it. There was every reason to expect another success.

We didn’t get one.

What Changed?

Corporate leadership expressed support for the second implementation, but there was resistance beneath the surface. Some members of the leadership team were skeptical of what we were doing. Others were openly critical.

Then came a decision that, looking back, told us almost everything we needed to know.

Several of the project’s strongest critics and detractors were assigned to the implementation team.

We were asking people who didn’t believe in the change to help lead the change.

The process hadn’t changed. The underlying principles hadn’t changed. The consulting team hadn’t changed. But the environment had.

The first division’s leaders had created conditions in which the new process had an opportunity to succeed. In the second division, leadership created conditions that made success extraordinarily difficult.

The second implementation failed.

For consultants, that’s an uncomfortable thing to say. We prefer talking about successes. They make better case studies. But I probably learned more about organizational change from comparing those two implementations than I would have learned from two successes.

Leadership Is Part of the Process

Organizations spend enormous amounts of time evaluating methodologies. Which system should we implement? Which consulting firm should we hire? Which process should we adopt?

Those are legitimate questions. But there is another question that should come first:

Are we prepared to lead the change required to make this work?

Leadership support cannot consist merely of approving a project, allocating a budget, and telling everyone else to cooperate.

People watch what leaders actually do. They notice who gets assigned to the project. They notice whether resistance is confronted or accommodated. They notice whether senior leaders participate when things become difficult. And they quickly determine whether the initiative really matters.

That doesn’t mean everyone must agree with every decision. Healthy skepticism can make an implementation better. Good leaders should invite difficult questions and listen to people who see problems others have missed.

John was a skeptic. He asked his question, we looked closer, and the team moved forward together. The critics on the second team weren’t testing the work to make it better. Their minds were made up before we started.

There is a fundamental difference between constructive skepticism and putting people in charge of a change they are committed to resisting.

We learned that difference the hard way.

Same Process. Different Leadership.

Those two projects gave us something unusual. We saw essentially the same methodology implemented inside the same corporation, in the same facility, by the same consulting team, under dramatically different leadership.

One produced outstanding, at times record-breaking, results. The other failed.

That’s why, when someone tells me an improvement effort is mainly about selecting the right system or methodology, I know there’s another part of the conversation we need to have. Processes, systems and expertise all matter. None of them operates independently of leadership.

Before your next project starts, look at the names on the team. For each person, ask one question: are they asking hard questions so the work gets better, or have they already decided it won’t work? Keep the first kind close, because they’re your Johns. Hear the second kind out, but don’t put them in charge of the change.

Sometimes the difference between extraordinary results and failure isn’t the process at all. It’s whether the people leading the organization believe in what they’re asking everyone else to do, and whether they make room for someone like John to ask, “It’s intuitive, but is it truthful?”

I still ask myself that question before I recommend anything to a client.

It matters even more now. AI tools can hand us a confident, reasonable answer in seconds, and it usually sounds right. Whether it’s truthful is still ours to find out.

If you’re about to launch a change and want an honest read on whether your organization is ready to lead it, that’s what Management Consulting is for.

Dan Holland has been in management consulting since 1982, including twenty years leading his own independent practice. Today he works directly with owners and leadership teams at mid-sized companies and nonprofits on the decisions, plans, and organizational problems that deserve more than an internal gut check. No sales calls, no funnels — just a direct reply from Dan at [email protected].