What really kick-starts transformation?
People often ask me:
“What’s the No.1 thing to kick-start transformation?”
My answer usually surprises them.
It’s not vision.
It’s not strategy.
It’s not investment.
It’s a sense of urgency.
Not something written on slides — but something people feel.
Something they can relate to personally and emotionally.
More powerful than any abstract “why” is when urgency connects to real life:
our growth, our children, our family, our future, our hope.
Transformation starts moving when people feel:
“This truly matters — and it matters to me.”
Urgency is created through lived experience — not dashboards
Urgency doesn’t come from reports or KPIs.
It comes from experience.
When William Bratton became Police Commissioner of New York City in 1994, his first challenge was breaking a culture of complacency among his senior staff around public safety.
Instead of relying on crime statistics, Bratton required all NYPD officers — himself included — to commute by subway.
By experiencing jammed turnstiles, unsafe stations, and daily fear firsthand, problems stopped being abstract.
Urgency became real. Ownership followed.
The results were striking:
- Within 2 years, New York became the safest large city in the nation
- Public confidence in the NYPD jumped from 37% to 73%
A similar pattern played out at Stanford Hospital.
When Amir Dan Rubin became CEO, he didn’t start his first management meeting with strategy slides.
He put his leadership team into a case study:
You’re at work. You get a call. Your wife, your mother, or someone you love is being rushed to the emergency department. You’re stuck in traffic. You’re frightened. You arrive at the hospital. What do you want to happen next?
By anchoring transformation in our family and the people we love, he created a powerful sense of urgency around patient experience.
The outcomes spoke for themselves:
- Patient satisfaction moved from the mid-40th percentile to the mid-90th percentile nationally
- Hospital revenue increased by ~50% within four years
Urgency rooted in human experience doesn’t just move hearts —
it changes systems, behavior, and results.
Never waste a burning platform
Here’s the hard truth:
A genuine sense of urgency is hard to manufacture.
Most of the time, it shows up on its own:
- something we mess up
- a crisis
- a painful customer complaint
- something employees deeply hate living with
These are burning platforms.
The mistake leaders often make is reducing the discomfort too fast, and stepping away too soon.
A more powerful move is to lean in:
- acknowledge fear, pride, care, shame
- surface competitiveness
- name what people are really feeling
Handled with care, these moments can unblock energy and momentum that no transformation roadmap ever could.
Transformation doesn’t begin with answers.
It begins when people feel the question deeply enough to act.
References / inspiration:
– HBR, Tipping Point Leadership (William Bratton, NYPD)
– Success from the Beginning, Stanford Graduate School of Business (Amir Dan Rubin)
Ontransformation.org 
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