Reflections from The SAP Transformation Summit in The Hague 2025
Last week at the SAP Transformation Excellence Summit, one theme kept surfacing: organizations are treating transformation like a project when it needs to be a capability.
The most interesting conversations weren't about technology features. They were about the gap between strategic intent and executable plans. And how that gap compounds when you're running 10+ concurrent transformations.
What We Heard
Several patterns emerged from conversations with transformation leaders:
The strategy-to-execution disconnect is universal. Companies have clear strategic objectives and sophisticated process intelligence, but struggle to connect them. Your process mining shows bottlenecks, but you can't map which ones block which strategic outcomes. So you end up optimizing locally while strategic value leaks.
Dependencies surface too late. Most organizations discover critical blockers in quarterly reviews, not during planning. By then, you're managing crises instead of coordinating execution. The question isn't whether you have dependencies. It's when you surface them.
Transformation needs to be repeatable. One executive put it well: "We can't keep reinventing transformation methodology every time. We need organizational muscle memory." The companies succeeding at this aren't just delivering one transformation. They're building the capability to transform continuously.
Tools don't change behavior without changed ways of working. You can invest millions in enterprise sofware, but if teams default to last year's playbook, nothing transforms. The hard part isn't buying new capabilities. It's changing how people actually work day-to-day. Several leaders admitted their biggest blocker wasn't budget or technology. It was getting teams to work differently than they did last year.
The Tool Paradox
This last point came up repeatedly, often with some frustration. Leaders have invested in sophisticated transformation tooling. Their teams have access to process intelligence, enterprise architecture platforms, and digital adoption solutions. Yet transformations still move slowly.
Why? Because tools don't change behavior unless the new way is easier than the old way.
Teams will route around any system that creates more work. If resolving a cross-functional dependency requires updating three platforms and joining six coordination meetings, people will just pick up Slack and handle it informally. If reporting progress means navigating complex dashboards, they'll send a summary email instead.
The transformation tools work. The integration architecture is solid. But the daily work patterns haven't changed.
What Actually Drives Behavior Change
A shift is happening in how leading organizations approach this. Instead of just "fixing what's broken," they're making the new way of working the path of least resistance.
What does that look like practically?
Strategic context that's already translated. When teams receive strategy updates, they don't get board-level abstractions. They get "here's what this means for your work specifically." AI can help with this translation, but only when it has the structure to work with.
Dependency resolution without coordination theater. When one team's timeline affects three others, they don't schedule alignment meetings. They flag it in-platform, participants respond async, it gets resolved or escalated. Fewer meetings, more coordination.
Confidence tracking instead of status reporting. Teams update whether they believe they'll deliver the outcome, not whether tasks are complete. This is psychologically different. "We're 60% done but confidence is dropping" surfaces truth that RAG status hides.
Process improvements linked to strategic outcomes. Your process mining shows inefficiencies. But unless you can see which ones block which strategic objectives, prioritization becomes political. When that connection is visible, it becomes analytical.
This isn't about having better dashboards. It's about changing the daily mechanics of how transformation work happens.
The Integration Architecture Question
The most productive conversations at the summit centered on this: organizations have process intelligence, project management tools, and strategic objectives. They just can't connect them effectively.
And even when they build integration layers, teams still work around them.
Here's what we're exploring. Tangible Growth sits between strategic planning and execution tools. It translates C-suite strategy into team context and manages dependencies across initiatives. But the real question is whether it changes how teams actually coordinate.
When your customer experience transformation depends on platform modernization, which depends on organizational redesign, we map those connections during planning. Teams track confidence across all three. Dependencies surface before they become blockers.
But here's the behavior change part: resolving those dependencies happens async through Slack. No six-person coordination meetings. Teams update confidence bi-weekly with a few clicks. Strategy cascades automatically when leadership updates objectives.
We're betting that reducing coordination overhead is what drives adoption. Make the new way easier, and teams will use it. Keep requiring them to do extra work, and they'll route around it.
The AI Translation Layer
The AI conversations at the summit were practical, not philosophical. Nobody asked "will AI replace strategists?" They asked "can AI help translate strategic intent across 50 teams without losing 70% of the meaning?"
That's the actual use case. When your CEO says "become more customer-centric," can AI translate what that specifically means for supply chain, for engineering, for finance? In their language, with their constraints visible, without requiring a strategy consultant to manually cascade it?
The answer seems to be yes, but with caveats. AI can accelerate translation when strategic intent is clear. It can't create clarity that doesn't exist. And it only works when there's structure for it to work with.
The Playing to Win framework provides that structure. When strategy is articulated as specific choices (where we'll play, how we'll win, capabilities we need), AI can translate those choices into team context reliably.
Without that structure, AI produces generic recommendations that teams ignore.
Three Questions That Kept Coming Up
Across multiple conversations, transformation leaders were wrestling with:
"How do we know which initiatives actually matter strategically?"
Not which ones are "business critical." They all claim that. Which ones demonstrably drive the outcomes the board cares about?
"How do we surface dependencies before they become conflicts?"
Especially when transformations span functions, geographies, and systems. Project management tracks task dependencies. What tracks strategic dependencies?
"How do we actually change working patterns, not just install new tools?"
Teams have access to sophisticated platforms but still default to last year's processes. How do you make the new way easier than the old way?
What We're Testing
We're offering working sessions for organizations dealing with these challenges. Specifically for those managing multiple concurrent SAP transformations or complex change programs.
Not a demo. A working session where we map one of your actual transformations, identify strategic dependencies, and show how early warning systems work before risks cascade.
More importantly, we'll explore whether this actually changes how your teams coordinate, or if it's just another tool they'll route around.
The format:
- 1-2 hours, customized to your context
- We work with your real transformation challenges
- You leave with a working environment to test with real teams
- We're honest about whether this fits how your organization actually works
Who it's for:
- Organizations running 5+ concurrent transformations
- Leaders who need better dependency visibility
- Teams where strategy and execution feel disconnected
- Anyone frustrated by sophisticated tools that teams work around
The summit reinforced something we've seen repeatedly. The bottleneck in transformation isn't methodology or technology. It's the translation layer between strategic intent and team-level execution. And that translation layer is both technical and human.
Organizations have sophisticated tools for process mining, project management, and strategic planning. What's missing is the connective tissue that:
- Surfaces strategic dependencies during planning, not after commitments
- Connects process improvements to strategic outcomes
- Makes transformation repeatable, not heroic
- Changes how teams actually coordinate, not just how they report
The last point matters most. You can map every dependency perfectly, but if resolving them still requires six coordination meetings, teams will find workarounds.
The capability gap is as much about changing working patterns as connecting data. The technical integration enables the behavior change. But only if it makes the new way the path of least resistance.
If you're wrestling with this in your organization, let's explore it together.
Limited availability. Sessions scheduled within 2 weeks.
