Seven ways to tackle the big, messy stuff.
Thinking formed in practice, published as part of the Bearing & Course Points of View library.
Complex programmes do not fail because people are incompetent. They fail because the conditions that allow good work to happen are missing. Unclear problems, the wrong people in the room, assumptions nobody has named, progress measured by activity rather than outcome. What follows comes from years inside large organisations, difficult programmes and the occasional genuine crisis. It is what actually works when things start to wobble.
Start at the start, and find the real problem. Real progress comes from understanding what is actually happening, not what people assume is happening. Begin with what hurts, what keeps breaking, what the people doing the work every day are dealing with. Follow the full journey. Look sideways as well as down. Often the real problem becomes obvious the moment you view the whole system rather than the noise at the surface.
Know who matters, and define what good looks like. Every organisation has people who quietly hold everything together and people who unknowingly slow things down. What good looks like should never be a boardroom aspiration disconnected from operational reality. If your vision of success requires a completely different organisation to deliver it, you do not have a vision. You have a wishlist.
Co-design priorities and accept the trade-offs. You cannot solve everything at once. Bring the relevant perspectives into the same conversation: operations, finance, technology, the people who will use what gets built, and the people who will maintain it. When people help shape the logic of a decision, they accept the trade-offs that follow more readily.
Make assumptions explicit and surface barriers early. Some of the biggest risks in complex programmes come from assumptions nobody has said out loud. Call them out while they are small and addressable. Governance bottlenecks, missing owners, hidden dependencies and the cultural habits that slow decisions down rarely arrive dramatically. They build gradually. Prevention is always cheaper than recovery.
Deliver thin slices. Deliver the smallest meaningful piece of value early. Something real that people can use or test. No big reveals. No reassurances that progress is happening behind the scenes. Just visible, steady evidence that the direction is right.
Show your working. Capture what was agreed, why it was agreed and what was known at the time. An action without a verb, a responsible person and a due date is not an action. It is a comment that will return at the worst possible moment. When the reasoning is visible and the commitments are unambiguous, momentum holds.
Have the right people in the room. Too many governance structures fill the room with seniority rather than relevance. A room full of people managing their email while someone presents is not governance. It is theatre. The best programme boards are populated by people who understand the work, carry the context, and have both the time and the authority to decide.
The right conditions do not appear by accident. Someone has to create them deliberately.