What I learned watching McKinsey, EY, and Pivotal run transformations, from the inside

Over twenty years inside insurance, financial services and technology, I worked alongside McKinsey twice (once at a Fortune 250 insurer, once at a $10T asset manager), alongside EY on the same enterprise transformation, and alongside Pivotal inside a Fortune 100 insurer's delivery modernization. Different firms, different decades, different methodologies.

Let me say this clearly before anything else: this is not a takedown. The people across the table were sharp, the frameworks were rigorous, and the decks were usually right. The lessons below aren't about what the big firms do wrong. They're about what an engagement (any engagement, from any firm) structurally cannot carry, and what the organization has to own itself. I know, because owning it was my job after the consultants went home.

1. Culture is overlooked because it can't be put in a deck

Operating models are legible. You can draw them: org structures, cadences, decision rights, KPIs. Culture is what happens after the meeting ends: who actually talks to whom, what people believe gets rewarded, which risks feel safe to name out loud. It doesn't fit on a slide, so it tends to fall out of scope.

Every engagement I sat inside optimized what could be drawn. The org chart changed, the ceremonies changed, the language changed. The unwritten rules, the ones that decide whether someone raises a problem in week two or buries it until month six, were inherited unchanged from the old world. A new operating model running on an old culture behaves like new software on a failing server: the design is fine, and it doesn't matter.

The deck describes the organization you're supposed to have. Culture determines the organization you actually have.

2. Buy-in is assumed, because the sponsor signed

Consulting engagements are sold at the top, and a sponsor's signature gets treated as the consent of the whole organization. It isn't. The signature buys the kickoff. It does not buy the change.

The layer that decides a transformation's fate is the directors and senior managers whose teams have to work differently on Monday. They were usually never in the room when the deal was shaped. They hold a quiet veto, and the pattern is always the same: nod in the steering committee, starve it in the calendar. No confrontation, no resistance you can point to. Just priorities that somehow never make space, until the program runs out of sponsorship before it runs out of slideware.

The engagements that worked treated buy-in as something you earn at every layer, repeatedly, not something you announce. The ones that struggled assumed it was included in the contract.

3. Transformation is not a check-the-box activity

An engagement has an end date. A transformation doesn't. That mismatch produces a predictable illusion: the milestone tracker goes green, the maturity assessment scores improve, the closing readout declares the new ways of working “embedded” at precisely the moment the organization's new muscles are weakest. Practices have been installed; they have not yet become habits. Those are different things, and the difference only shows up under pressure.

Two or three quarters later, a deadline bites, an executive changes, a budget tightens. The organization quietly reverts to what it knew. Nobody decides to abandon the transformation. It evaporates. What the closing readout called completion was actually the midpoint, and the second half had no one assigned to it.

This is why I've become fixated on observation over attestation, not because self-assessment is worthless. An honest self-read is a real signal, and it's where every good inquiry starts: trust, but verify. It's that only observation can settle what attestation can only claim. Some of that observation is instrumented: habits leave evidence in the systems where work happens; box-checking leaves paperwork. And some of it can only be done from a chair in the room, watching who speaks and who defers, whose objection changes the plan and whose evaporates, what the loudest voice costs everyone else. That second kind is where culture, buy-in, and incentives actually show themselves. No dashboard carries it.

4. Programs don't drive outcomes. Incentives do.

This is the strongest pattern of the four, and the least discussed. You can install every ceremony, every tool, every value stream and operating committee. If people are still paid, promoted, and protected for the old behavior, the old behavior wins. Every time. Not because anyone is cynical, but because organizations are extremely good at hearing what is actually rewarded, regardless of what is said.

I watched organizations ask teams to optimize for flow while measuring leaders on utilization. Ask for honest status while making red the career-limiting color. Ask for long-term platform thinking while bonusing this quarter's feature count. In each case the program and the incentive pointed in opposite directions, and the incentive won without raising its voice.

The firms know this, by the way. It's rarely in scope, because compensation and promotion are the most political terrain in any company, and no one hires outsiders to renegotiate them. Fair enough. But that means the single most decisive variable in the transformation is, by construction, out of the engagement's hands. Someone inside has to own it, or accept the result.

Where outcomes are actually won

Add the four together and they describe the same gap: the strategy deck is usually right, and the transformation usually struggles anyway. In months six through twenty-four, after the engagement closes, culture, buy-in, habit-formation, and incentives decide what survives. That's the space between the deck and delivery, and it's where I've spent my career: as the person who inherited the recommendations and was accountable for making them real.

So if you're bringing in a big firm: do it. They'll likely get the design right. Just budget as much leadership attention for after they leave as you do for while they're there. Put culture, middle-layer buy-in, and incentives explicitly on someone's scope. If it isn't theirs, it's yours.

I worked alongside these firms as a client-side leader. Everything here is a pattern observed across multiple companies and years, not an account of any single engagement or organization.