The business case was approved. Nobody tracked the results.
Approvals release funds. Who is accountable once the solution is live?
Read the field noteStrategy / Culture / Technology → Execution
The dream is rarely wrong.
The road is.
The Road Method is for leaders who have set the strategy, implemented the solution, and still can’t explain the result. Start with the outcome you expected but didn’t get. Then work backward through strategy, culture, and technology to understand why.
Start with a problem you recognizeThe evidence
The gap keeps showing up.
Three studies, three different measures of what happens after the promise.
88%
of business transformations fell short of their original ambitions in Bain’s research.
Bain & Company, 202410–20%
of the gains expected from a transformation are lost inside the organization, before market conditions are counted.
Boston Consulting Group, 20256%
of respondents were AI high performers, reporting significant value and at least a 5% impact on EBIT.
McKinsey & Company, 2026Each study looks at a different part of the road from ambition to results: whether a transformation delivers what it promised, where value gets lost, and how rarely AI has a meaningful effect on company earnings.
How to use it
Do not start with a solution.
Use the problem you can see to decide what to look at next.
01Symptom
Say clearly what did or did not happen.
02Evidence
Follow a real decision, transaction, handoff, or exception.
03Terrain
Ask whether the cause is in strategy, culture, technology, or the way they connect.
04First move
Try one action that tests your diagnosis before committing to a larger fix.
Field notes
Start with what you see.
Field notes on familiar problems, and the questions that help explain them.
Individual functions hit their targets. The organization misses its goals.
When two teams make sensible decisions that hurt the business, look at what each team is being rewarded for.
Read the field noteThe vendor was chosen before the problem was defined.
A careful buying process can still be built around an answer chosen too early.
Read the field noteMore than 10,000 ways to process an order.
Process mining revealed how much real work the official process had left out.
Read the field noteThe engaged leader shows up in the middle.
Adoption is decided when the new way of working runs into the old one.
Read the field noteThe pilot worked. Nobody changed how they work.
A successful pilot does not guarantee that the value will show up in daily work.
Read the field noteThe strategy reached the manager. It never reached the team.
A strategy can sound clear in the leadership meeting and mean very little in daily work.
Read the field noteThe method
Begin at execution.
Trace the road back.
When the outcome falls short, start there. The same problem can have more than one cause. Work backward through strategy, culture, and technology to understand what happened.
01Strategy
What matters most, what comes first, and whether resources and incentives support it.
02Culture
How people make decisions, raise problems, honor commitments, and act under pressure.
03Technology
Whether the systems provide reliable information and help people do the work.
ALL THREEExecution
The evidence may point to one area, several connections, or a strategy that needs to change.
About The Road Method
A closer look at
the work of execution.
Jose Colucci created The Road Method to explore why organizations do not always get the results they expected. These field notes look at specific patterns: a benefit nobody owned, an incentive that pulled in the wrong direction, a decision made before the problem was understood, a process map that left the real work out, or a pilot that never changed the work.
Each note starts with something a leader can see, then asks what might explain it.