VCM thought leadership
Business Transformation Leader: How to Stop Your Operating Model Reverting at Month Six
If you are six months into a major transformation, the launch may already feel like yesterday.
The new operating model is live. The technology works. Teams have attended training. The board has seen the first progress report. Adoption dashboards are showing encouraging numbers.
Then the warning signs appear.
People start asking for exceptions. Decisions move back into old email chains. Managers recreate familiar spreadsheets. Functional leaders begin measuring performance through legacy targets. The new governance forum becomes optional, while the old informal meeting quietly returns.
Sound familiar?
You are not necessarily facing resistance to the transformation. You may be facing something more difficult to detect: reversion.
This is the point at which your operating model stops being a project and starts becoming the way your organisation runs. That transition rarely happens automatically. As a Business Transformation Leader, your responsibility is not simply to deliver the future state. It is to make the future state durable.
Why month six is where transformation momentum often weakens
The first few months after go-live are usually highly managed.
The transformation office is active. Senior leaders are visible. Issues are escalated quickly. Teams receive additional support. Progress is discussed in leadership meetings, and exceptions receive attention because everyone knows the change is being watched.
Around month six, the context changes.
The transformation is no longer new. Leaders are pulled back towards business-as-usual priorities. Project resources begin to move on. Training is considered complete. Reporting shifts from adoption to financial performance. The organisation assumes that because people are using the new system or attending the new meetings, the change has landed.
But usage is not the same as behaviour change.
A person may log into a new platform while still making decisions through the old hierarchy. A team may attend a cross-functional forum while continuing to optimise its own departmental targets. A manager may follow the new process when being observed, then return to the old shortcut under pressure.
Here’s where most business leaders get confused: adoption can be visible while reversion is already underway.
Research from Prosci identifies three useful adoption measures: speed of adoption, usage and proficiency. Those measures matter, but they need to be connected to the behaviours and outcomes your operating model was designed to create. Otherwise, you may be measuring activity rather than transformation.
Adoption gets people started. Behaviour change keeps the model alive.
Adoption asks whether people have begun using something new.
Behaviour change asks whether they make different decisions, collaborate differently and respond differently when conditions become difficult.
That distinction is crucial.
Think of your new operating model as a route through a city. Adoption means people have tried the new road. Behaviour change means they consistently choose it, even when traffic increases, deadlines tighten or nobody is standing beside them with instructions.
If the old route is faster for an individual team, easier to explain or more closely connected to its targets, people will naturally return to it. That is not always defiance. Often, it is rational behaviour produced by the environment you have created.
Your sustainment plan therefore needs to answer four practical questions:
What behaviours must become routine?
What systems and processes make those behaviours easier?
What metrics prove that the behaviours are producing value?
What happens when people revert to the old way?
If you cannot answer the fourth question, your new operating model is still optional.
The hidden cause of reversion is usually the performance system
Let’s talk money.
Your organisation may communicate one transformation ambition while rewarding another. If that happens, the incentive system will win.
Imagine that your new model depends on shared customer ownership, but each function is still rewarded mainly for its own quarterly result. You have asked people to collaborate while measuring them as competitors.
Or perhaps your transformation requires faster decisions closer to customers, but managers are still judged on avoiding every risk and escalating every difficult choice. You have announced empowerment while rewarding caution.
This is how reversion happens: not through one dramatic rejection, but through hundreds of small decisions made according to the old scorecard.
McKinsey’s guidance on operating model redesign highlights the importance of connecting leadership incentives to the success of the redesign. Deloitte similarly emphasises aligned goals and complementary incentives across functions. The principle is straightforward: if your metrics contradict your operating model, your metrics will eventually determine how the business behaves.
At month six, complete an incentive and measurement audit:
Which legacy KPIs are still active?
Which new behaviours are visible in performance reviews?
Are leaders rewarded for enterprise outcomes or only functional outputs?
Do targets encourage collaboration, speed and customer value?
Can a manager succeed financially while ignoring the new operating model?
That final question often reveals the real problem.
Build a behaviour scorecard, not just an adoption dashboard
Your transformation dashboard may currently show training completion, system usage and process compliance. Keep those measures, but add indicators that reveal whether the operating model is changing how work gets done.
For example, track:
Decision behaviour
Percentage of decisions made at the intended level
Average time from issue identification to decision
Number of decisions escalated outside the agreed governance route
Frequency of senior leaders overriding delegated authority
Cross-functional behaviour
Percentage of initiatives with shared ownership
Number of handoffs between functions
Resolution time for cross-functional issues
Evidence that teams are sharing data rather than recreating it locally
Leadership behaviour
Attendance and preparation for operating model reviews
Number of agreed actions completed by leaders
Time senior leaders spend coaching new behaviours
Frequency with which leaders use the new metrics in business reviews
Outcome behaviour
Cycle time
Customer experience
Quality
Cost-to-serve
Employee capability and retention
Value delivered against the original transformation case
The purpose is not to create more reporting for its own sake. It is to identify reversion early, while you still have time to intervene.
A useful rule is this: measure what people do when the transformation is inconvenient. That is where the operating model becomes real.
Replace launch communications with leadership routines
Your launch message explained what was changing and why. At month six, your leadership routines must demonstrate that the change is now part of how the organisation operates.
That requires repetition.
Create a standing monthly operating model review with a clear agenda:
What outcomes are improving?
Where are teams reverting?
Which incentives or processes are creating friction?
Which decisions are still being made through legacy channels?
What will each leader reinforce before the next review?
Keep the forum focused on decisions and behaviour, not presentations. If the meeting becomes a passive status update, it will lose its value quickly.
You should also build sustainment into existing routines:
Add operating model behaviours to one-to-one discussions.
Use team retrospectives to examine where the new model helped or failed.
Include transformation outcomes in quarterly business reviews.
Make new responsibilities part of onboarding.
Update role profiles and performance expectations.
Recognise teams that demonstrate the new model under pressure.
Visible leadership matters because employees watch what leaders do more closely than what leaders say. Prosci’s research reports that projects with highly effective sponsors are 79% more likely to meet their objectives than projects with ineffective sponsors. Sponsorship is not a launch activity. It is a continuing operating requirement.
Design the month-six reset before you reach month six
Here’s the kicker: sustainment should not begin when momentum has already disappeared.
You should design the month-six reset during the original transformation plan.
Set a formal review point around the six-month mark. Treat it as a transition from implementation leadership to business ownership. At that review, you should decide:
Which transformation responsibilities move permanently into line management
Which temporary governance forums should close, continue or evolve
Which adoption measures can be retired
Which behaviours require further coaching
Which legacy processes must be removed
Which leaders are accountable for unresolved reversion risks
This is also the point to revisit your original business case. Are the expected benefits appearing? If not, is the problem with the design, the capability, the measurement or the behaviour?
Avoid declaring success simply because the system is live. A transformation is delivering value only when the new way of working produces better decisions and more resilient performance.
Use 90-day cycles to keep the new model moving
Long-term transformation can become difficult to manage because the destination feels distant. Use shorter leadership cycles to maintain focus.
Every 90 days, select a small number of sustainment priorities:
One or two behaviours to reinforce
One legacy process to remove
One incentive or metric to realign
One capability gap to address
One measurable business outcome to improve
Assign an executive owner to each priority. Review progress monthly and make the results visible.
This approach gives you enough time to see whether behaviour is changing without allowing drift to become normal. It also creates a rhythm of continuous improvement rather than treating the operating model as a finished design.
At Value Chain Management, our approach connects strategic alignment, operationalisation, technology and data leverage, and continuous monitoring. You can explore our services or learn more about our value chain thinking. The central principle is simple: transformation must be designed across connected functions and capabilities, not managed as an isolated project.
Your practical month-six checklist
If you are approaching month six, take these actions now:
Identify the three behaviours most critical to the new operating model.
Compare those behaviours with current incentives and performance measures.
Analyse where decisions are still following legacy routes.
Create a monthly operating model review with named executive owners.
Add reversion indicators to your transformation dashboard.
Remove at least one legacy process that makes the old model easier.
Recognise teams that demonstrate the new behaviours under pressure.
Set the next 90-day sustainment priorities.
The goal is not to keep the transformation team permanently alive. The goal is to transfer ownership into the business without transferring ownership back to the old habits.
The real test of transformation begins after go-live
Your transformation is not proven when people can describe the new operating model.
It is proven when the old operating model is no longer the easiest option.
That requires more than communication, training or technology. You need aligned incentives, meaningful metrics, visible leadership and routines that repeatedly bring the new behaviours into everyday decisions.
As a Business Transformation Leader, your most important month-six question is not, “Have we launched?”
It is:
“What will make this organisation choose the new way when nobody is watching?”
Answer that question honestly, then build your operating model around the answer. That is how transformation moves from adoption to durable behaviour change.
