03 • What Change Requires
A Framework for Why Transformations Stall
Gartner's survey also found a 50% year-over-year decline in finance teams' ability to absorb change before becoming fatigued. The window for landing change is narrower than it used to be. Big-bang rollouts, poorly sequenced training, and go-lives without proper stabilisation periods are harder to recover from than they were even two or three years ago.
A useful way to diagnose why transformations stall comes from the Lippitt-Knoster Model, a framework for managing complex organisational change. The model identifies five conditions that must be present simultaneously for change to succeed. Remove any one of them and the transformation produces a predictable failure mode, not a random one.
Applied to FP&A, those five conditions look like this:
Condition 01
Vision
Failure mode without it: Confusion People need to understand why the change is happening. When the rationale is absent or poorly communicated, teams fill the gap with their own assumptions. In a finance context, that usually means people conclude the new system is being imposed on them rather than built for them, and they disengage accordingly.
Condition 02
Skills
Failure mode without it: Anxiety Competency in the new way of working needs to be built during design and testing, not delivered in a training session the week before go-live. Teams that don't feel confident in the new process before they're dependent on it default to old habits, and anxiety spreads quickly across a team.
Condition 03
Incentives
Failure mode without it: Resistance Old behaviours persist when they're still rewarded. If a business manager can get their question answered faster by calling finance directly than by navigating the planning tool, they will keep calling. Without realigning what's rewarded, adoption stalls.
Condition 04
Resources
Failure mode without it: Frustration Transformation work loaded on top of a full operational workload fails before it gets anywhere near adoption. Time, access, and adequate support need to be actively carved out, not assumed to exist in the margins.
Condition 05
An Action Plan
Failure mode without it: False starts Decisions need to be tracked, risks need owners, and the sequence of rollout needs to be explicit. Without a clear plan, teams either spin in circles or go quiet. Oliver Wyman's research into Australian transformation failures attributes the majority of poor outcomes directly to the absence of governance and structured planning.
"Rather than asking 'why is adoption slow?', the model asks 'which condition is missing?', and each missing condition produces a different symptom."
What makes this model useful in practice is that it reframes the question. A team that looks confused needs a clearer vision. A team that looks resistant needs better incentives. Treating them the same way produces the wrong fix.
04 • The Shift
Where xP&A Fits
Traditional FP&A is, by design, a finance function. It owns the numbers, runs the planning cycle, and reports back to the business. The problem is that modern organisations don't operate in a way that accommodates that structure. Sales forecasts affect headcount plans. Supply chain assumptions feed into margin projections. HR timelines shape capital expenditure. When each function plans in isolation, the consolidated picture is already out of date before it reaches the board.
Extended Planning and Analysis (xP&A) is the shift from finance-owned planning to enterprise-wide planning. It connects financial and operational data across departments, giving every function a shared view of the plan and a shared stake in it.
Finance moves from being the team that collects inputs from everyone else to being the team that architects a planning process the whole organisation operates within. That is a different operating model entirely, and it requires change management to match.
05 • Our Approach
How Decision Inc. Approaches It
At Decision Inc., our xP&A practice is built around the reality that implementation and adoption are not the same thing.
We work with finance and operations teams to design planning solutions built on how people actually work, not on how a system expects them to. That means running discovery sessions with the teams who will live in the model every day, not just with the project sponsor. It means making deliberate decisions about what gets simplified, what gets automated, and what requires a process change rather than a technical one.
Our project governance and change management methodology has been applied across more than 400 client engagements per year. It gives our teams a structured way to track decisions, manage stakeholder alignment, and surface adoption risks before they become adoption failures. Change management isn't bolted on at the end, it's part of how we scope, design, and deliver every project.
Our work spans retail, government, mining, and beyond, from modernising finance planning to rebuilding reporting infrastructure for global organisations. Across every engagement, the pattern holds: the technical build is rarely what determines the outcome.
What Success Looks Like
The markers of a genuine FP&A transformation aren't found in the implementation timeline. They show up months later, in how the business operates. Finance teams spend less time rebuilding numbers and more time explaining what they mean. Business managers engage with the plan because they had a hand in building it. Rolling forecasts reflect real changes in the business, not just a refresh of last quarter's assumptions. And when leadership asks a question, the answer comes from one place.
The firms that get there share one thing in common: they treated the change as seriously as the technology. That's where we start.
