The Choice No IT Leader Wants to Make
IT leaders are tasked with two equally critical — but conflicting — priorities:
✅ Keep operations stable.
✅ Drive transformation.
But with limited capacity, you can’t do both well at the same time.
The result? Most IT teams get stuck in firefighting mode — keeping the lights on while falling behind on innovation.
Why the Paradox Persists
Stability vs. Transformation
Too much focus on stability? IT slows down and loses influence as business units bypass the team.
Too much focus on transformation? Chaos reigns, trust erodes, and projects fail.
📊 Only 16% of IT teams achieve high performance — balancing both.
The rest stay trapped in the paradox.
The Cost of Chaos
This isn’t just frustrating — it’s expensive.
- 💰 $2 trillion wasted annually on poor software and failed projects (CISQ)
- ⏳ 35–45% of IT time lost to unplanned work (ITPI)
- 📉 43% of IT projects miss their goals (Gartner)
- 🔥 Birmingham’s £38M Oracle failure ballooned into £3B in financial damage
When IT is stuck in reactive mode, the entire business suffers — stalled innovation, wasted spend, and lost trust.
What Causes the Paradox?
We’ve identified four critical execution traps that make the paradox worse:
- The Accountability Trap — no visibility into work or outcomes.
- The Cultural Trap — vendors who don’t act like part of your team.
- The Value Trap — budgets spent without measurable impact.
- The Execution Trap — activity without progress, chronic issues never resolved.
These gaps drain your team’s focus and prevent progress.
How to Break the Paradox
It doesn’t have to be this way.
We built the Balance Blueprint™ to break these traps and unlock your team’s ability to lead forward:
- ✅ Stabilize: Cut chaos below 10% — stop firefighting.
- ✅ Enable: Slash backlogs 40% in 12 weeks — regain capacity.
- ✅ Earn: Achieve 99%+ change success — deliver results stakeholders trust.