Spotlight On with Dr Andrew White, Founder & CEO of Transcend.Space

So across private equity and large corporates, transformation has become constant, not a one-off.

And yet, despite significant investments, many efforts still fall short.

So a big part of your work looks at why that is, particularly the leadership dynamics beneath the surface.

So let me start there.

Andrew, your research suggests that even well-designed transformation efforts often underperform.

So what do you see as the most common leadership blind spots from the outset?

Yeah, great to be here.

Thank you for inviting me.

I'm going to talk about the research that I did while I was at the business school at Oxford University.

So this was done in partnership with...

I think you put your finger on a couple of things.

One is that transformation is constant.

And the second is, I suppose, asking the question, is there something missing in how leaders address this, which particularly comes to the surface in private equity funded businesses? Yeah.

So the way I think is best to describe this is to think about your dominant and non-dominant hand.

And the dominant hand represents all the things that leaders know how to do well when it comes to executing some transformation work.

It's the Gantt chart.

It's the project plan.

It's the governance.

It's the KPIs.

It's the stage gates and all of those things that are put in place prior to the transformation and then are used to execute the transformation.

Yeah.

The problem comes is that life doesn't really play out like that.

It's useful and it's necessary, but it's not sufficient because you've got the non-dominant hand.

And the non-dominant hand is the emotions and the people and the politics and the complexity.

And often we miss that.

So across private equity and large corporates, transformation has become constant, not a one-off.

And yet, despite significant investments, many efforts still fall short.

So a big part of your work looks at why that is, particularly the leadership dynamics beneath the surface.

So let me start there.

Andrew, your research suggests that even well-designed transformation efforts often underperform.

So what do you see as the most common leadership blind spots from the outset?

Yeah, great to be here.

Thank you for inviting me.

I'm going to talk about the research that I did while I was at the business school at Oxford University.

So this was done in partnership with...

I think you put your finger on a couple of things.

One is that transformation is constant.

And the second is, I suppose, asking the question, is there something missing in how leaders address this, which particularly comes to the surface in private equity funded businesses? Yeah.

So the way I think is best to describe this is to think about your dominant and non-dominant hand.

And the dominant hand represents all the things that leaders know how to do well when it comes to executing some transformation work.

It's the Gantt chart.

It's the project plan.

It's the governance.

It's the KPIs.

It's the stage gates and all of those things that are put in place prior to the transformation and then are used to execute the transformation.

Yeah.

The problem comes is that life doesn't really play out like that.

It's useful and it's necessary, but it's not sufficient because you've got the non-dominant hand.

And the non-dominant hand is the emotions and the people and the politics and the complexity.

And often we miss that.