Change Activation
Embedding the Transformation Office into Strategic Planning
Nov 3, 2025
Overview
This roundtable brought together transformation leaders to discuss how to evolve the transformation office from a pure execution function into a strategic planning partner. Participants shared experiences across industries, representing organizations with varying levels of Transformation Office (TO) maturity. The conversation focused on practical strategies for gaining a seat at the strategic planning table, managing compressed timelines, and building C-suite relationships that position transformation offices as essential to organizational success.
This roundtable was held on October 16th, 2025.
Roundtable Participants
Led by Aric Wood, ECLC Chapter Lead
Amisha Kapoor, Biogen - Global Finance Transformation Leader - Payroll Strategy
Ana Coronel, Independent - Transformation Executive
Archana Lamoureux, Citi - Head of Standards and Innovation
Bill Munley, Customers Bank - SVP, People Experience Team (PXT), Shared Services
Canice Pinto, First Advantage - Senior Director, Operations and Customer Experience
Curtis Hall, US Department of State - COO, Change Management Team, Passport Services
David Kaempf, Enterprise Transformation Leader
David Stein, VML - SVP, Performance Marketing Operations
David McVay, US Bank - SVP, Head of Strategic Program Management
Elizabeth Wright, Bayer - Digital Transformation Lead
Erlin Kakkanad, Principal Financial Group - Director Business Transformation
Gary Gregory, Sony Pictures Entertainment - Change Management Program Manager
Gina Chung, ZoomInfo - VP, Strategic Programs
Hayk Grigoryan, Abbvie - AD - Factory of the Future of Transformation
Jackie Cazar, Moody's - SVP Process Excellence
Jeanette Portzer, Belden - Director Change Management
John Williams, Meta - Change Manager
John Nolan, City National Bank - SVP Strategic Change
Justin Marchi, City National Bank - Head of Enterprise Change Management
Lyvie Racine, Roche - Strategy and Business Excellence Lead
Marjorie Etter, Meta - Global Training, Knowledge & Change Management Leader
Matt Twitchell, Stryker - Senior Director, Manufacturing Operations & Business Excellence
Michael Wiersma, Carrier - Enterprise Transformation Leader
Nan Li, Condé Nast - SVP, Head of Global Transformation
Nicholas Mudd, Cummins - Global Service Transformation Director
Paul Ruggier, Helios Towers - Group Head of Business Excellence
Rosangela Martinez, Morgan Stanley - Executive Director
Sam Berman, Strategy & Transformation Executive
Sarah Merriman, JLL - Change Management Director, COE
Sid Behari, Citi Group - MD Global Head of Expense Strategy & Execution
Part I: Pathways to Strategic Integration
Incremental Relationship Building
For transformation offices that don’t already have a seat at the table, the first steps forward involve incremental trust-building and value demonstration. Several leaders described starting with administrative or facilitation roles in strategic planning sessions, then gradually introducing change principles and human-centered design thinking. By asking clarifying questions about the "why" behind initiatives and helping teams define success criteria, transformation leaders revealed gaps in alignment that executives hadn't recognized.
This approach—getting a foot in the door and then demonstrating unique value—often leads to invitations into future strategic conversations. The key is showing that transformation offices bring perspectives beyond operational execution: they surface questions about people impact, change saturation, and realistic implementation timelines that purely operational or financial lenses might miss.
Proof of Concept Approach
Multiple participants emphasized the power of working closely with willing leaders to create success stories, then leveraging those champions to expand influence. Word-of-mouth credibility from peer executives carries more weight than self-promotion. The strategy involves finding early adopters, delivering visible results, and enabling those leaders to share their success in executive forums and staff meetings.
Budget and Resource Gatekeeping
Some transformation offices have gained strategic influence by managing the initiative funding process. When transformation teams control the budget allocation for major projects, they naturally gain input into which initiatives are well-defined, realistic, and aligned with overall strategic priorities. This creates opportunities to provide feedback before initiatives launch rather than being brought in only for execution.
Part II: Managing Timeline Realities and Organizational Capacity
The Risk-Based Conversation
When faced with unrealistic timelines, effective senior transformation leaders frame the discussion around trade-offs rather than simply pushing back. The approach involves clearly articulating what can be delivered within the given timeframe versus what cannot, then outlining the specific risks of compressed timelines. This puts decision-making authority back with business leaders: Are these acceptable risks? Can we slow down the front end to move faster on the back end?
Often, executives underestimate the complexity involved in change management—they view it as "just a communication" or "just a training." Making the invisible work visible helps leaders understand how quickly a workforce can truly change.
Gap Analysis Framework
For organizations with rigid external deadlines (such as seasonality or regulatory requirements), Elizabeth Wright (Digital Transformation Lead, Bayer) suggests a gap analysis approach. This involves documenting what will be delivered by the deadline, comparing it against stated business expectations for a minimum viable product, and identifying gaps. The conversation then shifts to whether embedded business teams can address those gaps internally, or whether the organization should accept a delayed launch to deliver a more complete solution.
This approach transforms the conversation from "can we make the deadline?" to "what are we willing to trade off to make the deadline?"
Integrated Roadmaps
Several leaders emphasized the importance of tying finance roadmaps directly to technology and transformation roadmaps. This creates visibility into implementation windows that should be avoided (quarter-close, year-end, annual planning cycles) and helps align budget utilization across fiscal years. When transformation offices have strong ties to finance leadership, they can better manage these dependencies and push back on problematic timelines with executive support.
Visibility into Change Saturation
One of the most powerful contributions transformation offices make to strategic planning is providing visibility into the cumulative people impact of multiple initiatives. When workers report being pulled in too many directions, transformation offices can answer the question: "What are all the initiatives happening across the organization and are they truly aligned with our strategic objectives?"
This visibility enables executive conversations about prioritization, resource allocation, and the need to say "no" to initiatives that don't fully align with the organization’s vision. It helps leaders understand that pursuing too many priorities simultaneously creates change fatigue and reduces the likelihood of success for any single initiative.
Part III: Broken Strategic Planning Practices & Recommended Fixes
Vague Strategies Without Measurable Outcomes
Many organizations create compelling strategic visions with excellent language but fail to define specific KPIs and expected outcomes. By end of year, it's impossible to compare actual results against the strategic plan because the plan was too abstract. The fix involves moving strategies "down a notch" into concrete roadmaps with measurable milestones, specific operational definitions, and clear success criteria that enable year-end evaluation.
Strategies That Live in Drawers
Too often, strategic plans are created annually, filed away, and never revisited. Or worse, completely changed the following year without reflection on the previous year's direction. Organizations that pivot dramatically year-over-year without explaining why create confusion and undermine confidence in leadership direction.
The solution involves treating strategy as a living, breathing plan with quarterly reviews to realign funding, reallocate resources, and make intentional pivots based on learnings. Some organizations successfully implement quarterly calibration exercises to assess whether initial assumptions remain valid, enabling strategic planning to become an iterative process that responds to market changes, new regulations, M&As, and geopolitical shifts.
Lack of Reflection and Learning
Effective strategic planning requires tracking progress against the vision and being honest about failures. Organizations need mechanisms to ask the right questions.
“You need to make sure that your organization is looking back quarterly and answering the right questions. Did we make the expected step forward so far this year? What did we learn along the way? Was something more expensive than anticipated? Are we still heading in the right direction?”
David Kaempf, Enterprise Transformation Leader
This reflection enables informed decisions about whether to continue, pivot, or invest elsewhere.
“A structured and layered monthly operating review (MOR) and Quarterly Business Review (QBR) offer a great conversational setting to clarify progress to goals, impact from initiatives and celebrate the results and learning from the team.”
Mike Wiersma, Carrier - Enterprise Transformation Leader
Disconnected Financial Planning
Strategic plans often lack integration with multi-year financial models. While strategies have clear economic implications, many organizations either don't connect strategy to financials at all, or limit that connection to a single year. This fails to account for implementation costs and the timing of benefits realization across multiple years. It also often fails to account the budget needed to sustain a strong, in-house TO.
“Many inputs are needed to craft meaningful strategic long-range plans. The velocity of sustained improvement and change heavily depends on connecting and aligning on these inputs along with having a clear decision-making process.”
Mike Wiersma, Carrier - Enterprise Transformation Leader
Top-Down Only Approach
Many strategic planning processes are exclusively top-down, missing the bottom-up perspective from frontline employees. While top-down planning might set arbitrary cost reduction targets or aspirational visions, bottom-up input reveals what's actually feasible and often surfaces opportunities that leadership hadn’t even considered.
“Think bottom-up, top-down but also consider the mighty middle. You don’t want middle management stuck in the crossfire; consider transformations from their perspective too.”
Sarah Merriman, JLL - Change Management Director, COE
The most effective strategic planning incorporates multiple perspectives and senior transformation leaders can often bridge the gap between frontline perspectives and leadership aspirations.
“The mighty middle must be good at translating goals, simplifying organizational jargon, and sequencing the desired projects and activities. The best planning and execution happens when we have extreme clarity around the Why, How and What.”
Mike Wiersma, Carrier - Enterprise Transformation Leader
Missing Customer Centricity
When all functions and stakeholders do their strategic planning homework simultaneously, fixing what they consider to be pain points, that doesn’t necessarily allow for a customer-centric view. If strategy genuinely starts with the customer, the planning process should sequence accordingly, beginning with customer-facing functions and building outwards from there.
Confidentiality as Obstruction
While some level of confidentiality is necessary in strategic planning, organizations sometimes use it as a safety net that prevents gathering essential input. When confidentiality blocks transformation leaders from bringing in voice-of-customer insights or frontline perspectives, it becomes an obstruction rather than protection. Leaders need to evaluate when confidentiality is truly necessary versus when it's limiting the quality of strategic decisions.
“Confidentiality is a tension to manage rather than a problem to solve. By uncovering the true barriers to achieving strategic outcomes we can define who needs to be involved to help move initiatives forward.”
Mike Wiersma, Carrier - Enterprise Transformation Leader
Everything Is a Priority
Organizations often struggle with too many goals, poorly defined goals, or aspirations that aren't actually goals. Without rigorous prioritization and cascade/catchball processes, strategies become wish lists rather than focused plans. Effective strategy requires making hard choices about the three to five things the organization will excel at and can feasibly accomplish.
Approving Efforts Prematurely
Some organizations approve strategic initiatives before they're adequately defined, leading to scope creep, misaligned expectations, and resource waste. Better practice involves ensuring initiatives have clear business problems to solve, appropriate scoping, defined business outcomes, and measurable progression criteria before approval.
Rigid Long-Term Plans
Organizations sometimes create multi-year strategic plans and stick to them despite significant market and technology changes. While consistency has its value, inflexibility in the face of changing conditions can lead to the pursuit of outdated strategies. Strategic plans need built-in flexibility and regular calibration points.
Part IV: Practical Techniques for Strategic Planning Improvement
The "Disneyland" Visioning Exercise
One effective technique for aligning leadership involves gathering executives and asking them to describe their "Disneyland": what does the ideal future state look like? Leaders contribute their visions, which often reveal significant misalignment. The exercise then identifies roadblocks preventing the organization from reaching that destination and breaks the journey into measurable progressive steps. From there, you can create a multi-year vision with quarterly or annual milestones that enable reflection and course correction.
“The Magic wand question helps us identify the (customer’s) “Perfect Day”. If we can’t agree on what great looks like, our customers and teams will fail to reach their fullest potential and win.”
Mike Wiersma, Carrier - Enterprise Transformation Leader
Horizon-Based Planning
To address the challenge of all initiatives being long-term and high-investment, David McVay (SVP, Head of Strategic Program Management, US Bank) suggests implementing a three-horizon framework:
Horizon 1: Benefits realized within the current year
Horizon 2: Benefits realized in 2-3 years
Horizon 3: Benefits realized in 3+ years
By limiting the number of initiatives in each horizon and forcing tempo to match benefit realization expectations, organizations create greater clarity around when value will be delivered and can better manage stakeholder expectations.
Pre-Mortem Analysis
Before launching strategic initiatives, conducting a pre-mortem exercise helps teams describe what success looks like in behavioral and measurable terms. This involves defining the target condition (description, behaviors, and leading/lagging metrics) and navigating the zone of uncertainty by anticipating obstacles. This preparation increases the likelihood of success and creates a shared understanding of what "done" means.
Strategic Goal Alignment Playbooks
Developing organizational playbooks with examples and stories for activating ideal behaviors from creation through execution helps scale best practices. These playbooks should connect goals, initiatives, metrics, and ownership in a clear framework that enables consistent execution.
Value Stream Mapping
Incorporating value stream mapping into strategic planning helps identify dependencies, bottlenecks, and realistic timelines. This technique brings rigor to estimation and helps differentiate between stretch goals and reality-based plans that account for skills, environment, timing, dependencies, and risks.
Part V: Building C-Suite Relationships and Strategic Credibility
Listen First, Solve Later
Early-career transformation leaders often try too hard to demonstrate value by immediately proposing solutions and showcasing everything they can do. More experienced leaders emphasize the power of asking questions, listening, observing what's not being said in meeting and building trust before offering solutions. The deeper insights come after trust is established, when executives share information they wouldn't reveal in initial meetings.
One-on-One Conversations
Thirty-minute one-on-one meetings with C-suite executives yield remarkable insights. Coming prepared with four topical questions and then listening for the full 30 minutes reveals perspectives and concerns that never surface in group settings. These conversations build relationships that become invaluable when you need executive support further down the line.
Cultivate Relationships Across Levels
Don't be intimidated by organizational hierarchy. Everyone is human and most people are eager to discuss what's important to them. Building a broad network of relationships across the organization—not just upward—creates a foundation of support and intelligence that becomes critical when you need to mobilize resources or navigate political challenges.
“Everyone wants to talk about what’s important to them so build those relationships. Cultivate relationships within your organization by asking others what they truly care about.”
Ana Coronel, IGT - VP Organization, Transformation & Global Services
Progress Over Perfection
Waiting to deliver perfect work often means missing opportunities to demonstrate value. Getting something out there and iterating based on feedback typically produces better results than waiting until the last minute to deliver something that's still imperfect. Relentless prioritization combined with a bias toward action builds credibility faster than perfectionism.
Focus on Outcomes, Not Details
Early-career transformation professionals often get too deep in the details of execution without focusing enough on the change management and strategic alignment aspects. Being results-oriented is valuable but results require adoption and, fundamentally, workplace buy-in. Developing tools, processes, or another SharePoint without adequate change leadership means they won't gain traction. Balancing execution excellence with transformation thinking is essential for strategic credibility.
Bring Unique Perspectives
Transformation offices add value by bringing perspectives that other functions don't naturally consider: people impact, change saturation, realistic timelines, adoption risks, and the human side of change. Leaning into these unique contributions rather than trying to replicate what strategy or finance teams already do well establishes the transformation office as complementary and essential.
Translation as Core Competency
One of the most valuable skills transformation leaders develop is translation: taking technical complexity and making it understandable, translating executive vision into actionable plans, and helping different functions understand each other's constraints and priorities. This translation capability positions transformation offices as essential connective tissue in the organization.
Key Takeaways
Integration takes many forms: Whether through formal organizational structure, facilitation roles, budget gatekeeping, or incremental trust-building, there are multiple pathways for transformation offices to become strategic partners. Choose the approach that fits best with your organizational context and the value you can bring to the table.
Visibility is power: Providing executives with visibility into change saturation, initiative alignment, resource constraints, and people impact is one of the most valuable contributions transformation offices make to strategic planning. Play with your strengths in mind.
Frame conversations around trade-offs: When timelines are unrealistic, effective leaders don't just push back; they clearly articulate what can be delivered, what cannot, and what risks the organization accepts by proceeding. This empowers executives to make informed decisions.
Strategy without measurement is fiction: The most common strategic planning failure is creating compelling visions without concrete KPIs, measurable milestones, and regular reflection on progress. Transformation offices can add value by helping translate abstract strategy into measurable roadmaps.
Living strategies require discipline: Quarterly reviews, calibration exercises, and a willingness to pivot transform strategy from a static document into a dynamic guide. This requires both rigor and business agility.
Relationships unlock influence: One-on-one conversations, listening before solving, and building trust across organizational levels create the foundation for strategic influence. Technical expertise alone is insufficient.
Bottom-up input is essential: Strategic planning that only flows top-down misses critical insights from frontline employees who understand operational realities and customer needs. Transformation offices can facilitate this two-way dialogue.
Change management requires budget: Organizations that fail to budget for change management alongside technology and operational costs set initiatives up for failure. Transformation offices should advocate for change management as a funded component of strategic initiatives from the beginning.
Progress beats perfection: Demonstrating value through action and iteration builds credibility faster than waiting to deliver perfect solutions. A bias toward action with relentless prioritization is more effective than perfectionism.
Translation is a core competency: The ability to translate between technical complexity and executive vision, between different functional perspectives, and between strategy and execution positions transformation offices as essential organizational connective tissue.
The Executive Council for Leading Change
The Executive Council for Leading Change (ECLC) is a global organization that brings executives together to redefine the landscape of organizational change and transformation.
Our council aims to advance strategic leadership expertise in the realm of corporate change by connecting visionary leaders. It's a place where leaders responsible for significant change initiatives can collaborate, plan, and create practical solutions for intricate challenges in leading large organizations through major shifts.
In a world where change is constant, we recognize its crucial role in driving business success. ECLC’s mission is to create a community where leaders can excel in guiding their organizations through these dynamic times.
