The transformation trap

Why do so many transformation strategies fail once implementation begins?

People lack the discipline to follow through. Everyone knows you should exercise, for example, but it’s easier to sit on the couch and watch television. Companies are the same.

It’s exciting to get a call from the CEO and be asked to help plan a new strategy. But if, six months later, you get another call saying you’ve been picked to head up implementation, you’re like, “Why am I being punished?” Strategy is challenging and exciting; implementation is hard because it takes discipline.

Shouldn’t leaders be experts at implementation? If not, how did they become leaders?

Leaders are taught to plan, not to implement. Everyone with an MBA had a strategy course. How many studied implementation?

There’s also a difference between delivering a project within a department or division and implementing a corporate-wide strategy. Change-management principles work for individual projects, but not for corporate-wide strategy. If they did, the failure rate wouldn't be so high. Research by my company, Bridges , as well as McKinsey and BCG suggests that only one in three corporate transformation programs achieves its objectives. Why? They lack the discipline, an implementation framework, and tools. Consequently, companies keep repeating the same mistakes.

How can leaders change their behavior to let employees know they’re serious about this?

Two A’s: Alignment and Accountability.

In banking, everybody has two important stakeholders they want to keep happy: the regulator and their immediate boss. The customer comes a distant third. Banks are also very siloed. When customers deal with a bank, they often get separate requests for details from different departments, and think, “Don’t you people talk to each other?”

The “Alignment” required to launch a new initiative—say, becoming the best bank—translates differently in every part of the bank. The C-suite and the rest of the company must be completely aligned behind it.

I’ve worked with DBS in Singapore for over a decade. I wrote the book World’s Best Bank with its former CEO, Piyush Gupta. In 2014, DBS came up with a very powerful idea. Nobody wakes up on a Monday morning and says, “Let’s go banking.” Nobody wants to visit a bank branch. DBS realized it could use technology to make banking invisible.

The bank adopted a purpose statement: “Make Banking Joyful.” The CEO told every employee, “You’re empowered to do whatever it takes to make banking joyful for your customer, whether internal or external.”

That was a strong purpose statement that aligned the whole bank and allowed it to drive the strategy across every part of the business. Piyush, who was named one of the world’s top 100 CEOs by Harvard Business Review, went to each of his direct reports and asked, “What are you doing to support the bank’s strategy?” He drove the alignment from the top.

So that brings us to the second “A”: Accountability. Accountability for whom?

Suppose you’re my boss and tell me, “Robin, this is important. Over the next four weeks, I want you to take this action so we can deliver a faster turnaround for our customers.” Most of the time, you then go to your next meeting, do whatever else you need to do and never come back to me.

With agile methodology, which is becoming best practice among banks and other businesses, we have accountability. It’s called a “check-in,” just as you check in at the airport.

You check in with your employee and ask, “How are you getting on with that action? What can I do to support you? Are there any hurdles or resources you’re missing?”

That isn’t micromanagement. Micromanagement is coming to me and saying, “Have you done what I told you to do?” This is positive reinforcement: “What support can I give you? Are you on the right path? What additional resources do you require?”

We don’t hold people accountable enough during implementation. Leaders spend six or 12 months preparing a strategy, hold a big launch, and then expect the whole company to be engaged and aligned within 60 minutes. Leaders need to follow up on the key actions employees are taking and check in with them to ensure the company is moving forward in the right direction.

People often say transformation fails because employees resist change. But if employees believe AI will eliminate their jobs, resistance may be a rational strategy for self-preservation. How can leaders address that anxiety?

I’ll give you a practical example. I was sitting with the CEO of a large bank in Southeast Asia. He was complaining that employees weren’t moving as quickly as he wanted.

I asked, “Have you guaranteed that nobody will lose their job to technology?” He said, “What do you mean?”

I used the building of the pyramids as a metaphor. Legend has it that, because the people who built the secret passages knew where the pharaoh and his gold were entombed, they were entombed with him. I said it’s the same for people in banking today: “I implement the AI for you, and then I get entombed and my job goes away? No thanks.”

The next day, the CEO issued a document across the bank saying that nobody would lose their job to AI. DBS did the same thing. It told employees, “You may choose to leave. If you stay, we will retrain you, reskill you ,and reposition you.”

In DBS’s first wave, 1,500 roles disappeared. Six hundred people chose to leave; 900 chose to be retrained and repositioned. In an AI-driven bank, plenty of new roles are being created: data specialists, data translators and scrum masters, for example. These roles have become increasingly important in banking.

You already have people who understand the bank, know its networks, share its values and have earned its trust. That’s how you address their anxiety: the C-suite must assure people that they won’t lose their jobs.

But won’t some people inevitably get laid off?

Only if management takes a short-term view. They could look at the numbers and say, “We’re going to invest US$300 million in technology. How will we get a return on that cost? We’ll cut 300 jobs across the business.” Then you can immediately show the board the cost savings.

But that damages the company. You may cut some of your best staff. Recently, Commonwealth Bank, IBM and Ford Motor Company rehired people they had let go because AI wasn’t doing the work they expected.

It’s too early to know whether this “AI boomerang effect” will become a trend, but some top-tier companies are already rehiring. We’re in a transitional phase. When boards demand an immediate return on investment, cutting costs – firing employees – is the easiest response.

Smart companies, however, take a different approach. They tell employees what is changing. Some will choose to resign, but typically the two-thirds who stay are willing to be retrained and reallocated.

That’s interesting, because many people think of AI leading inevitably to layoffs, whatever other benefits it may bring.

Here’s a statistic that may change your mind. When Piyush Gupta started DBS’s digital journey, which also embraced AI, the bank had about 15,000 employees. By the time he stepped down last year, it had more than doubled, to 39,000.

So, the workforce grew because the customer base grew?

Yes. The share price also rose more than 270% during Piyush’s tenure. The bank embraced AI in order to be more customer-centric. Many companies do it to become more efficient. But today, efficiency is table stakes. You have to use AI to improve your customer experience and your operations.

Will agentic AI be a big deal for banks?

Yes, but it is typically harder to implement than most leaders expect. This is because it involves what I call the three Rs for leaders: Restructure your company, Rethink your leadership, and Retrain your employees.

For Restructuring, you move from silos to a customer end-to-end structure. Silos are vertical; customer journeys are horizontal. The top performers in AI look at the whole customer journey from start to finish. They don’t automate just one step; they automate the whole workflow.

The second R is Rethinking leadership. Leaders are the biggest roadblock to technology today. Many still ask their teams to prepare slide decks. Data in a slide deck is already historical. Leaders must ensure their company is using real-time dashboards. The guiding principle for success is: the better the data, the better your decisions.

What can banks learn from the data they already hold?

Data is categorized as structured or unstructured. Social-media content is an example of unstructured data.

For structured data, consider whichever bank you use. It knows you. It knows which restaurants you visit most frequently, which airline you prefer to fly with, and where you go on vacation. It captures all that data through your credit card transactions – and it can use it to personalize the journey for each individual customer—what we call “N=1” (every customer is a market of one). Instead of pushing generic products and saying, “We think you might like this,” the bank knows you.

Leaders need to rethink leadership by constantly saying, “Show me the data. How do we know this?” Intuition still has a role, but leaders must become more data-driven in their decision-making.

The third R is retraining employees?

Yes. BCG’s 10-20-70 rule holds that only 10% of a transformation effort should focus on algorithms and 20% on technology and data. The remaining 70% should focus on people, processes and change management.

No one disputes the central point. Are we aligned? Are we investing in our people?

Earlier this year, a professor friend and I published the Digital Maturity Index 2026 white paper , based on more than 3,500 data points. The key finding: investment in technology is heavy; investment in people is light. Technology investment is outpacing investment in people, and people are struggling to keep up.

The BCG finding reinforces the same point. The third R means retraining people in technology skills, their understanding of technology, and its application across the whole company.

People’s roles will change: their job will be to guide AI and contribute the human element. They’ll check the decisions AI makes, help it make the right choices, and watch for hallucinations, which remain a problem. Collaboration between technology and people will make retraining absolutely critical.

So, there’s no going back. The future is AI?

AI isn’t the future. We are already in the age of AI. If you aren’t using AI today, you’re out of the game.

Banks can no longer operate as they did before because customers won’t tolerate the pain of old-fashioned banking and competitors will take their market. The top-performing companies, such as DBS, are already AI-driven. They’ve trained their people, moved toward the agile enterprise, and built the guardrails. The future is already here.