A case that cannot say what the present arrangement is worth to the people living in it has not yet established that its benefits are new.
Read the business case for your largest change programme as a document with a shape rather than a conclusion. It almost certainly does two things. It sets out what the enterprise gains by moving — the benefits, the run-rate saving, the capability the market will eventually reward. And it sets out what the enterprise loses by standing still — the erosion, the competitive drift, the regulatory exposure arriving whether or not you are ready.
Two arguments, aimed at the same audience, written by people who need the answer to be yes. Neither is dishonest. Both are incomplete in the same direction.
A decision to change contains four arguments, not two. Beside the merits of changing sit the demerits of changing — what the move costs the people asked to make it, which most enterprises acknowledge as a training line and a communications plan. And beside the demerits of standing still sit the merits of standing still: what the present arrangement is currently giving those same people, every day, reliably, at no apparent cost to them. That fourth argument is almost never written anywhere in the pack. It is also the argument actually holding the current arrangement in place.
The Strategic Context
The four-cell structure is neither new nor proprietary, though it is regularly presented as both. A choice between acting and not acting can be laid out as the anticipated gains and losses of each course — the merits and demerits of changing, set against the merits and demerits of remaining as you are. The form descends from the decisional balance sheet set out by Irving Janis and Leon Mann in 1977 and has been adapted widely in behaviour-change work since [SOURCE DETAILS REQUIRED].
In most commercial teaching it is pointed outward. A leader is told to work out which cell moves a given individual — some people respond to gain, others to the fear of loss — and then to argue accordingly. Used that way it is a persuasion aid, and a fairly cynical one: a method for selecting whichever true-enough argument lands on a particular person.
The more valuable use is the reverse. Turn the four cells on your own case and ask which of them your organisation has actually written, with evidence, signed by someone. The first cell is always written, usually at length. The fourth is written whenever a sponsor needs urgency. The second appears in thin form, priced as training and backfill. The third — the merits of not changing — is missing, and its absence is not an oversight. Writing it requires conceding, in a document seeking approval, that the arrangement you propose to dismantle is delivering something real to somebody.
Whether the change is warranted at all is a prior question, and the motive behind it — expansion from strength or escape from difficulty — materially changes the answer [Related article: Are You Expanding From Strength, or Gambling on Rescue?]. What follows assumes the direction is sound and asks what the case has failed to price.
What Leaders Misread as Resistance
When a well-funded programme meets slow adoption, the standard diagnosis is cultural. People are attached to old ways. Middle management is protecting territory. The communications were insufficiently compelling. Each explanation places the problem in the disposition of the workforce, which conveniently leaves the case itself unexamined.
The alternative reading is duller and more useful. Adoption is slow because the third cell is full. The people declining to move are receiving something from the current arrangement that the new one has not been designed to reproduce — discretion, predictability, a buffer against a demand they cannot otherwise absorb, a relationship that resolves problems the formal process cannot.
Consider a hypothetical health service consolidating ward rostering onto a single scheduling platform. The case is straightforward: visibility of coverage, reduced agency spend, a defensible audit trail. What the spreadsheets and the group chats currently provide is a ward manager's ability to trade a shift informally at eight in the evening, which is how the roster survives contact with reality. Nothing in the platform business case values that capability, because nothing in the enterprise had ever recorded that it existed. It appears in the benefits ledger only as the noise the system will eliminate.
That is the general shape. The merits of not changing are usually informal controls, absorbed variability and tacit capability — mechanisms the enterprise depends on and has never documented. Treating them as sentiment guarantees you will remove them without replacing them.
Reframing the Issue
The third cell is not a psychological obstacle to be managed. It is an inventory of what the current operating model produces, compiled by the only people positioned to compile it, and it is available for the cost of asking.
That reframing changes what the cell is for. Read as persuasion, cell three tells you which comfort to counter. Read as diagnosis, it tells you three commercially significant things: what the new model must reproduce, what you are choosing to destroy and must therefore compensate for, and — most uncomfortably — whether your benefits are as new as the case claims. If the status quo already delivers part of the value you have booked as a gain, you have counted a transfer as an improvement.
Benefits That Are Really Transfers
Enterprise benefit cases are built against a baseline, and the baseline is where the third cell should have been priced. The usual counterfactual is decline: without this programme, costs drift up, service degrades, exposure grows. Sometimes that is true. Often the honest counterfactual is that the present arrangement continues to work at a level nobody has measured, because measuring it was never in anyone's interest.
The consequence is arithmetic rather than philosophical. Where a benefit is already being produced informally, the programme does not create it; it formalises it, at cost, and often at a lower level for a period. Where a benefit is produced by moving work from one function to another, the enterprise has recorded a saving in the receiving ledger and an unrecorded cost in the sending one. Neither is a fraud. Both are the predictable output of a case in which one cell was written by people with an interest in the answer and one cell was not written at all.
The merits of changing are usually evidenced by a pilot, which introduces a further problem: pilot results carry contamination of their own, and the sponsor who most wants the result is frequently the person who produced it [Related article: How Much of Your Pilot's Success Was Bought by Its Sponsor?].
For a portfolio leader the implication is direct. Two proposals with identical benefit profiles are not equivalent if one is displacing an arrangement that works and the other is displacing an arrangement that does not. The second is a better use of capital, and nothing in a standard case template will surface the difference.
Why the Four Cells Land on Four Different Ledgers
The cells are not merely unwritten in different degrees. They accrue to different parties, and that is why the case has the shape it has.
Cell one — the merits of changing — accrues to the enterprise and, visibly, to the sponsor. Cell four — the demerits of standing still — accrues to the enterprise and to whoever inherits the consequence, usually years later. These are the two cells an executive committee is structurally motivated to write.
Cells two and three accrue to functions, teams and individuals. The cost of changing is borne in the middle of the organisation, in effort, risk and temporary incompetence. The merits of not changing are held by the same people. Neither group writes the case, approves the case, or is asked to sign the benefits.
A document written entirely by the parties who collect the upside will systematically under-price the two cells collected by everyone else. That is a governance property, not a character flaw, and it is correctable by the same means as any other structural bias: give the missing cells an owner who does not report to the sponsor, and require evidence rather than assertion.
Decision Framework
The practical instrument is a completed four-cell balance for a specific decision, with an evidence requirement and a named owner for each cell. The discipline lies less in the framework than in refusing to accept an empty cell as an empty fact.
| Cell | The question | Who should own the answer | Evidence that settles it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Merits of changing | What does the enterprise gain, and by when? | Sponsor and benefits owner | Baselined measures with a stated counterfactual |
| Demerits of changing | What does the move cost the people making it — in effort, risk and temporary loss of competence? | Receiving function leaders | Capacity analysis and a costed transition period |
| Merits of not changing | What is the present arrangement giving people that the new model does not yet reproduce? | An owner independent of the sponsor | Structured enquiry with the people doing the work |
| Demerits of not changing | What arrives anyway if we do nothing, on what timeline, with what confidence? | Risk or strategy function | Dated exposure with stated assumptions |
Four tests give the instrument force. First, the empty-cell test: an unwritten cell is recorded as unexamined, never as zero. Second, the independence test: whoever completes cell three must not be the sponsor, since a sponsor completing it will complete it thinly. Third, the reproduction test: for every merit found in the status quo, state whether the new model reproduces it, deliberately removes it, or has not considered it — and price the second and third. Fourth, the transfer test: for each booked benefit, state whether it is genuinely new to the enterprise or is being moved from a ledger nobody is watching.
From Strategy to Execution
Immediately, take one programme already in flight and complete cell three for it — not through a survey, which produces sentiment, but through structured conversations with people who currently do the work about what the existing arrangement lets them do. Expect two or three genuine capabilities that appear nowhere in the design. The exercise takes days, not months, and the cost of running it after go-live is substantially higher than the cost of running it now.
Over the next two to three quarters, make the four cells a required section of the case template, with the independence rule attached. Add one governance step: no benefits case proceeds to funding with cell three marked as not applicable. It will be attempted, and the attempt is diagnostic.
Over the longer term, the capability worth building is the ability to distinguish new benefit from transferred benefit across the whole portfolio. An enterprise that can do this stops rewarding programmes for formalising what already worked and starts allocating capital toward arrangements that genuinely do not exist yet. That distinction, applied consistently, changes what gets funded.
One boundary is worth marking. Completing the cells tells you what a change will cost and displace; it does not tell you what each function must stop and start for the new direction to become real in the cost base. That is a separate and equally neglected discipline [Related article: When You Chose a Position, Did Every Function Change — or Only Marketing?].
Signals to Monitor
- Adoption that stalls in one function while succeeding in others. The variance usually maps to how much that function was getting from the old arrangement, not to how well it was communicated to.
- Workarounds that reconstruct the previous model inside the new system. These are cell three, written by the workforce in the only language available to it.
- Benefits realised in aggregate but unattributable to any specific change in behaviour. Frequently a transfer rather than a gain.
- Turnover or absence in the roles carrying the largest demerits of changing, tracked against the transition period rather than annually.
- Requests for exceptions and manual overrides, which quantify what the new model failed to reproduce.
- A case in which cell three is completed with a single line. Thin completion is worse than none, because it closes the question.
Questions for the Leadership Team
- For our largest programme in flight, what does the current arrangement give the people we are asking to move — and who has asked them?
- Which of our booked benefits are new to the enterprise, and which are transfers from a ledger we are not measuring?
- Who owns the cost of changing, and did they write the number, or did we?
- What informal capability will this change remove, and what have we funded to replace it?
- If the third cell turned out to be substantial, would our governance allow the benefits number to be revised down before approval, or only after failure?
- Where in the past three years did we misdiagnose a full third cell as cultural resistance, and what did that error cost?
Closing Perspective
The third cell is always written eventually. If the enterprise does not write it during appraisal, it is written afterwards — in workarounds, in exceptions, in a benefits case quietly rebaselined, in the departure of people who understood something the design never captured. Written then, it costs considerably more, and it arrives as evidence of failure rather than as an input to a decision.
The choice available at the front end is narrow and genuine. For everything the present arrangement is providing, an enterprise can reproduce it in the new model and pay for that, remove it deliberately and compensate the parties who lose it, or accept a smaller benefit number and approve the change anyway. All three are defensible. What is not defensible is the fourth option, which is to leave the cell blank and treat the resulting shortfall as a failure of conviction on the part of people who were never asked what they would be losing.
The discipline is not sentimental. It is the ordinary requirement that a case examine the arguments against itself with the same rigour it applies to the arguments in favour — and the merits of doing nothing are the arguments against, held by the people whose cooperation the whole plan depends on.
About the author
Kevin Jogin is Founder & Principal Advisor at EraNorth. Meet the Founder.