Research Thread · Harvard Business Review, September–October 2026
Why Transformation Requires Learning, Not Just Execution
When the path — and sometimes the destination — must evolve as we learn.
Transformation is often managed as a project.
Define the future state. Build the roadmap. Set the milestones. Allocate resources. Execute.
But what happens when the environment keeps changing while the transformation is underway?
In their September–October 2026 Harvard Business Review article, Evgeny Kaganer and Christoph Loch argue that many transformations struggle because they are approached as fixed programs built around predefined goals, timelines, and financial targets.
As technology, customer expectations, competition, and other conditions change, some of the assumptions behind those plans can quickly become outdated.
Their alternative is to think of transformation as a learning journey.
That distinction matters.
A learning journey still needs direction. But it recognizes that the path — and sometimes even the destination — may need to be refined as the organization learns.
The organization moves forward, tests assumptions, builds capabilities, learns from what happens, and adjusts its course.
This has strong implications for how we think about adaptivity.
Direction without pretending everything is known
The article contrasts the transformation experiences of DBS Bank and GE.
DBS began with a strategic direction but allowed its vision and priorities to evolve as the organization learned.
GE, by contrast, became more committed to a predetermined transformation ambition even as evidence emerged that some assumptions required reconsideration.
The distinction is not between having a vision and having no vision.
It is between treating the vision as fixed and allowing learning to shape how that vision is understood and pursued.
Adaptivity is not the absence of direction. It is holding direction firmly enough to move — and lightly enough to learn.
Institute for Adaptivity interpretation — not a quotation from the HBR article
Transformation should generate learning, not only results
One of the article’s most useful ideas is that transformation initiatives should not all be judged by the same measures.
The authors describe four types of initiatives:
- Pilots
- Test important assumptions. Their value may lie primarily in what the organization learns rather than in immediate financial return.
- Options
- Build capabilities — in people, technology, and ways of working — that increase what the organization may be able to do next.
- Established business improvements
- Bring learning and new capabilities into the existing business, producing visible operational or performance gains.
- Ventures
- Scale sufficiently validated ideas into new markets, customers, or business models.
PilotsOptionsImprovementsVentures
Not a rigid sequence — a portfolio of different kinds of transformation activity, each generating different forms of learning and value.
A familiar question is:
Did the initiative succeed?
A more adaptive question may be:
What did this initiative enable us to learn, build, improve, or scale?
An experiment that does not deliver the expected commercial result may still generate valuable learning.
But only if the organization is prepared to notice that learning and act on it.
Capability is part of transformation
Organizations cannot simply decide to transform.
A new strategy may require capabilities that do not yet exist: new skills, technologies, relationships, behaviors, decision processes, or ways of working together.
The article’s idea of options is particularly useful here. Organizations can deliberately develop capabilities before their ultimate economic value is completely certain because those capabilities increase the range of future possibilities.
Transformation therefore involves more than executing a new strategy.
It also involves:
Becoming capable of carrying it.
And sometimes the work itself reveals which capabilities are missing.
Learning still requires leadership discipline
Treating transformation as a learning journey does not mean endless experimentation or abandoning strategic discipline.
Leaders still need to create coherence across initiatives, connect learning back to strategic direction, and adjust measures and priorities as the transformation evolves.
This creates an important leadership tension:
How do we provide enough direction to move while remaining open enough to learn?
This is different from simply being flexible.
Adaptivity requires direction and openness, discipline and experimentation.
Leaders need to be able to say:
This is where we are trying to go.
while continuing to ask:
What are we learning that should change how we get there — or refine what we understand the destination to be?
An Adaptivity lens
Institute for Adaptivity interpretation — not the authors’ framework
The research connects naturally with four questions we use to explore adaptivity:
- What is changing around us?
- Notice emerging realities and signals rather than assuming yesterday’s transformation assumptions still hold.
- What needs to change in us?
- Identify the assumptions, capabilities, behaviors, structures, and ways of working that changing realities may require.
- What must not be lost?
- Allow strategy and methods to evolve while remaining anchored in purpose, values, relationships, and sources of distinctive value.
- What might we try next?
- Use experiments, pilots, and learning loops to reduce uncertainty and discover what the situation requires.
Transformation and adaptivity are closely related, but they are not identical.
Transformation describes significant change. Adaptivity is the capacity to keep learning what change is required.
A question for leaders
Many transformation programs begin by asking:
What is the plan?
Perhaps an earlier set of questions is:
What do we know? What are we assuming? What do we still need to learn?
Transformation requires action.
But it also requires the humility to recognize that some answers can only emerge through the journey.
Transform what needs to change. Stay anchored in what matters. Learn your way forward.
Source
Evgeny Kaganer and Christoph Loch, “Transformation Should Be a Learning Journey,” Harvard Business Review, September–October 2026.
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