How to Stop Transformation Value Leaking Between Strategy and Delivery
The 7 Percent, episode 1 | Host: Andy Haley, CEO of Sullivan & Stanley | Released 20 October 2026 | 13 minutes
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Business transformation value leaks between strategy and delivery because organisations rarely understand every variable that connects a decision to its outcome, or have the means to influence them. In the first episode of The 7 Percent, Andy Haley, CEO of Sullivan & Stanley (S&S), draws on 25 years in complex business and technology transformation to explain where that value goes. He also introduces the Intelligent Enterprise framework, which helps organisations hold on to it.
Key takeaways
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90% of C-suite leaders are confident in their strategy, yet only 7% consistently deliver the full value of their transformation, according to Sullivan & Stanley’s Intelligent Enterprise research.
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On average, £27M of every £100M invested in transformation never reaches the outcomes it was meant to fund.
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Value leaks as the number of variables between a decision and its outcome grows, across partner ecosystems, data, automation and regulation.
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The Intelligent Enterprise framework focuses on four intelligences: Human, Artificial, Technology and Execution.
Why do business transformations fail to deliver their full value?
Most boards are confident their strategy is clear and understood, and finance teams are often comfortable committing to multi-year funding. Andy’s question is why that clarity and investment so often fails to turn into outcomes.
His answer starts with complexity. Organisations once had a business and a technology estate to align. Now they also run on partner ecosystems, outsourced processes, data and far more automation. Regulators and fast-moving competitors add pressure from outside. Each of these adds variables between a decision and its outcome, and every unmanaged variable is a place where value can leak.
What does it take to hold on to transformation value?
Andy argues that leaders need a confident understanding of the outcome they care about and of the variables that drive it. They also need to be set up to influence those variables across their people and their partners. This is usually where benefits realisation breaks down. Most boards believe they have the first. Far fewer can say the same about the second, and that gap accounts for much of the value leakage Sullivan & Stanley sees with clients and in its research.
What is an Intelligent Enterprise?
An Intelligent Enterprise is an organisation that is confident in how well it is optimised to deliver the outcomes it cares about. Sullivan & Stanley’s framework sets out four intelligences that make this possible.
- Human intelligence now carries the most weight. As technology becomes cheaper and more widely available, the judgement of leaders and the psychological safety people need to move quickly become the main source of difference between organisations.
- Artificial intelligence earns its own category because organisations are still working out how to govern it and where accountability for it sits.
- Technology intelligence covers how functionality reaches the people who use it, including the legacy estate. Legacy remediation increasingly eats into change budgets, and later in the season it gets an episode of its own.
- Execution intelligence is about orchestrating programmes that run at different speeds through different partners.
Why is transformation value becoming harder to define?
Andy closes on value itself, which he sees as increasingly subjective. A transformed organisation may be more valuable for reasons beyond its financial results, from the strength of its brand to a culture people want to work in. Whatever form value takes, every change should have a clear line of sight back to the outcomes the organisation cares about.
About The 7 Percent
The 7 Percent is a podcast from Sullivan & Stanley, hosted by CEO Andy Haley. In each episode, Andy speaks with a senior leader who has been accountable for delivering major transformation about the decisions that shaped their programme. Season one runs to nine episodes, released fortnightly from 20th October 2026 to 2nd February 2027.