If business change needs to be continuous, why are you still commissioning it as a programme?
Seeing business change in a new light — lessons from nine years of Henko.
Henko quietly turned nine in August. Nine years of navigating an increasingly turbulent business environment, from one crisis to another, while remaining independent. It hasn't been an easy journey. We don't just help others change; we've had to keep changing ourselves too.
Yet, looking back, I realised I've never properly explained what Henko stands for, why we challenge conventional approaches to change, and, most importantly, why this should matter to those commissioning business transformation.
So, perhaps it's time.
Three decades of digital transformation. But what actually transformed?
Henko was founded on a simple conviction: in the digital and technology revolution, technology must become integral to how businesses create value, not something delivered to the business through projects.
After decades of digital transformation, organisations have invested enormous sums in technology, modernised platforms, adopted Agile and moved to the cloud. Yet many still operate with the business on one side and technology delivery on the other, connected through layers of projects, governance and coordination.
The consequences go beyond organisational complexity. The existing technology estate accumulates technical debt, processes remain slow, and even small changes become unnecessarily expensive. Organisations structured primarily around project delivery are simply not designed to address these problems continuously. It is not about working harder or delivering projects more diligently, but about fundamentally realigning ownership across business and technology. As someone once told me, "nobody washes a hire car." And technical debt rarely gets the attention it deserves when everyone is focused on delivering the next project.
Agile was supposed to help bridge that divide. Instead, it largely adapted to the existing organisational structures, becoming a better way of delivering projects. Scaled approaches went further in accommodating existing governance rather than challenging the operating model itself. Better delivery, perhaps, but not the transformation businesses needed.
The transformation we missed was not about delivering technology faster, or more of it. It was about integrating technology into business value chains and making continuous improvement everybody's business.
Now AI is exposing the consequences of that missed transformation.
Beyond the obvious applications, much of AI's value will emerge through countless small experiments, improvements and automations within the business. These use cases cannot all be centrally anticipated, planned and delivered as projects. They will emerge from people who understand their work, have the opportunity to improve it, and can collaborate in cross-functional teams to explore new possibilities continually.
If you managed to get through three decades of digital without fundamentally transforming, you may not get away with it in the age of AI.
What if the problem isn't the change, but how we go about it?
The traditional response to a new challenge is familiar. Leadership defines an ambition, appoints a transformation leader, commissions a programme and engages specialists to deploy the change at scale.
The programme gets a budget, timeline and adoption targets. Before long, the method becomes the objective. We measure Agile maturity or AI adoption while the business outcomes that justified the investment quickly fade into the background.
Meanwhile, the organisation continues operating through its existing governance, funding mechanisms and constraints. Managers are asked to embrace new practices while being held accountable through the old channels.
When priorities clash, running the business wins. Progress slows. And complaints about resistance to change begin.
But what if people are not resisting change? What if the change itself has been badly conceived from the start?
The deeper problem is assuming that organisational change can be predetermined, centrally deployed and scaled through uniform adoption, as though the intended business outcomes would naturally follow.
Real change is systemic. You cannot improve flow without addressing the constraints between teams. You cannot sustain excellence while continuously prioritising new delivery over the quality of what already exists. You cannot deploy strategy effectively when the constraints within your value chains are barely visible to those making decisions. And you cannot fundamentally change how people work while continuing to govern them through the old processes.
Change happens through collaboration within and across teams. But leadership and teamwork must evolve together: leaders create the conditions for collective accountability, while teams take ownership of improving results.
These are not separate transformation workstreams. They are interconnected parts of the same organisational system.
Different teams have different starting points, pressures and opportunities. Change must account for those realities, while leadership adapts the governance and conditions that shape them.
That responsibility cannot simply be outsourced, however capable your consultants may be.
Could the way we commission change be part of the problem?
There is another uncomfortable question for those commissioning transformation: does the way we commission consulting support reinforce the very approach we need to reconsider?
Traditional engagements often concentrate significant consulting capacity into a defined programme. The budget determines the resources and duration, and the programme determines the expected pace of adoption.
But why should an organisation's ability to change be determined by how many consultants it can afford?
Meaningful change progresses at the pace at which people and leadership can absorb it, practise it and make it their own. That capacity develops over time, and rarely uniformly across an organisation.
Large interventions have their place. But when consultants become responsible for delivering the change, the organisation risks becoming a passenger in its own transformation. And when the engagement ends, so can the momentum.
Perhaps we need to stop buying change as a temporary project and start developing the ability to change as a permanent capability.
Henko: seeing change under a different light
The name Henko was deliberately chosen. We associate it with two ideas that capture the philosophy behind our work: change under a different light and change with no return.
For us, change is not primarily about introducing new methods or practices. It starts by helping people see their present differently, question assumptions and discover possibilities they hadn't previously considered. With a new perspective, they can shape change that makes sense in their own context, rather than follow somebody else's recipe.
And change is a continuous journey, with no return to the starting point. It progresses through small increments, consolidating what works, learning from experience and adjusting direction along the way. Each step builds on the previous one, creating new possibilities for the next. You don't repeatedly start new transformations; you keep moving forward from what you've already achieved.
These ideas are so fundamental to how we work that we made them part of our name.
We start with the present, not an idealised future. We help make value chains, constraints and opportunities visible, including those that rarely reach the leadership conversations where strategy is shaped.
From there, we connect three essential pillars of organisational performance, supported by a common foundation:
LeanTech Excellence — continuously improving quality and reliability through collaborative problem-solving, rather than allowing today's problems to consume tomorrow's capacity.
Value Flow — understanding how value moves across teams, removing friction and organising business and technology around value creation rather than fragmenting it through delivery projects.
Continuous Strategy — bringing coherence and alignment through wider participation in shaping and deploying strategy. When people have skin in the game and share accountability for outcomes, delivery becomes a consequence of pursuing results, rather than the focus of management.
Underpinning all three is Leadership & Teamwork Collaboration — leaders and teams form an interdependent system that must evolve together. Leadership shifts from coordinating individual tasks to fostering team relationships, collective accountability and progress towards results. As leadership changes, teamwork changes, and vice versa. Developing this relationship is itself an iterative process of continuous improvement.
These pillars reinforce one another, but trying to change everything at once is equally unrealistic. Instead, we look for paths of least resistance, shaping manageable increments that deliver business benefits while developing the people who will drive the next improvements.
Change happens almost by stealth, through people improving the business together. Scaling then becomes a progressive expansion of that capability across teams, value chains and leadership levels, rather than the deployment of uniform practices everywhere.
From change consultant to sparring partner
When I was working as a traditional consultant, I had an uncomfortable realisation. Despite working passionately to help clients change, I could be part of the problem. The more responsibility I took for making change happen, the less space I left for the organisation to take ownership itself.
That insight fundamentally shaped Henko, not just in what we do, but in how we engage. Sometimes, the most valuable assistance is creating space rather than filling it, allowing leaders and teams to step forward and take ownership of change.
But this is easier said than done. Large, short-lived consulting deployments create expectations of rapid progress, often pushing consultants to take the reins. The resulting activity can create an impressive illusion of progress, only for momentum to disappear when the consultants leave.
As independent practitioners, we had the freedom to rethink the engagement model from the ground up, without established practices or commercial structures to preserve.
Our engagements are therefore designed around what works for clients. They are often long-lived, often part-time, and assembled from complementary fixed-price services. This makes expert support affordable over time, while keeping external intervention lightweight and ownership firmly within the organisation.
We organise these services around common six-month cycles, adjusting the mix as progress unfolds, new challenges emerge and priorities evolve. There is no predetermined pace at which an organisation can change, so our involvement must adapt to its capacity to progress.
Our role is that of a sparring partner to leaders and teams: bringing challenge, expertise and coaching without taking responsibility away from those who must sustain the change. As new practices and leadership behaviours take root, we aim to become progressively less necessary. Yet some clients retain us as a continuing challenge to established thinking, helping them anticipate what comes next as their organisation evolves.
No grand transformation theatre. No maturity levels to celebrate while the business struggles. Just meaningful progress, connected to outcomes, with the capability to keep going.
Before embarking on your next transformation...
Digital and Agile transformations may now be in the rear-view mirror. AI has taken centre stage, and already we can see familiar patterns emerging: ambitious adoption targets, growing investment and increasingly uncomfortable questions about ROI. So far, the only certainty for some organisations seems to be the rising cost of tokens.
At least AI moves quickly. Including when it comes to exposing the weaknesses of our approaches to change.
With AI, discovering useful applications is only the beginning. The real challenge is to experiment close to where work happens, then standardise and amplify what works. Yet this is precisely the kind of grassroots, continuous-improvement-led change that many service and technology organisations have struggled to establish, with attention and capacity repeatedly consumed by project delivery.
And with AI, the destination itself is uncertain. How much work will eventually be performed by agents? What will remain human? How will organisations, teams and leadership need to adapt? The answers will emerge through experience, not from a transformation blueprint drawn up front.
Perhaps the more important question is not what your organisation should look like after AI, but how it will make AI a continuous journey of change.
That calls for a more fundamental rethink of how you organise change, including the kind of external support you commission.
How will you challenge entrenched assumptions, create the conditions for people to experiment and improve, and develop the capability to continuously turn successful experiments into better business performance?
And if your AI transformation is already following the familiar path and starting to show cracks, perhaps it's time to try something different.
Philippe Guenet
Henko - www.henko.co.uk
