If the word transformation stresses you out, if digitalization triggers a small internal panic, and if every new model feels like another round of pressure that lands on your shoulders before it reaches its value, you are not alone. In fact, you are in the same boat as most of the sector, and the boat has no paddles.
You might nod as you read this. You might disagree. You might feel exposed. Or relieved. Or seen. That is the point. And I hope that after reading, you share your perspective.
Transformation, in all its forms, has become the humanitarian and development sector’s favourite promise. Digitalization. Localization. Sustainability. Decentralization. New financial and operational models. The goals are noble. The vision is inspiring. The promise is efficiency wrapped in innovation and sustainable impact.
Then implementation begins, and reality enters the room. Suddenly there is resistance, burnout, resignations, dilemmas, and teams who tense up at the word transformation and panic the moment someone mentions digitalization.
Over the years, I have worked inside and beside organizations navigating transformation across international and national institutions, large and small, profit and nonprofit. From headquarters to country offices and across functions, I have watched transformation unfold again and again. Different logos. Different strategies. Same patterns.
And here is what I learned. Transformation is not only a new system or a new strategy. It is not just a restructuring or a redesign. Transformation is an X ray. It exposes what works, what quietly fails, and what the organization has carried forward without noticing. It tests leadership daily. It reveals change fatigue long before it reveals progress.
This paper is about those truths.
It is about the systems and habits that shape transformation.
It is about the quiet fixes that matter more than the dramatic ones.
I call it the small c cut. Not a Capital C Cut. Not the loud, sweeping restructures that close units, end programs, or overhaul entire operating models. The small c is change fitness. It is deliberate, precise, and grounded in awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement.
So let us begin with what transformation reveals and what the small c cut can release.
1. The Operating Model Is Not Broken, It Is Pulled in Too Many Directions
When transformation begins, the first thing that shows its cracks is the operating model. On paper it all looks aligned, but in practice finance, human resources, supply chain, risk management, monitoring and evaluation, and project management rarely move together. Look a little closer and you see the real picture. Parallel systems doing the same work. Overlapping mandates no one fully owns. Teams convinced that the same process belongs to them alone.
At this stage someone usually creates a RASCI, but the only thing it clarifies is how confused everyone already is.
Workflows move in different directions. Accountability becomes blurry. Processes that should follow each other in order end up running side by side with no connection. And the consequences are always the same. Duplication grows. Shadow systems appear. Bottlenecks build up. Bureaucracy increases.
People are not resisting the operating model. The model is resisting itself.
Here is the small c cut: Map every core process. Assign one owner to each process. Build a visual one-page process flow. Connect the processes so the model becomes a single chain rather than scattered parts. Before rolling out a new process, simulate the workflow to identify gaps and pressure points.
Pro tip: Stress test the model under competing priorities and emergency scenarios. A process is only optimized when it is grounded in first principles and real, evidence based workflow data, not assumptions.
2. Your Digital Tool Is Not Failing, Your Old Habits Are
Organizations invest heavily in digital systems. ERPs, CRM platforms, grants tools, data systems, and AI tools all promise efficiency, accuracy, and clarity. Then reality arrives. The tool feels complicated. It does not serve the user. Staff end up serving the tool.
The reason is simple. Old habits stay alive. Teams keep parallel trackers in Excel. Managers rely on manual sheets because they do not trust system data. Legacy templates keep circulating. People fall back to familiar shortcuts because the old way feels easier. The ERP, the data platform, or the AI tool becomes a modern shell filled with outdated logic.
The deeper issue is that digitalization often happens before process redesign. The organization automates workflows that were never optimized. The system ends up copying old, complicated practices. A wide gap opens between what the tool can do and what the organization is ready for.
One quick reality check: if staff need to create their own side spreadsheets to make the system work, the spreadsheets are the real system.
Here is the small c cut that works: First, look outside, consult organizations that used it before and gather lessons and practices. Then, look inside before integration. Map processes before digitalizing them. Simplify workflows so the digital tool remains simple. Invest time in understanding user habits, context, and what worked well in offline or older systems and what did not.
Test thoroughly. Ask group of end users from diverse settings to test. During rollout, avoid moving too fast. Take time. Implement in phases. And create community of practice to platform peer learning and knowledge sharing.
Look deeper into assess practical elements such as access to the tool, number of clicks per task, internet connectivity, language barriers, terminology, and interface design. These details determine whether a tool empowers staff or overwhelms them. And when dealing with a vendor, trust but verify. Confirm what they offer, the tools, the technology, its actual value, and whether it is truly the best solution for your organization and leaders.
Pro tip: Invest heavily in communication. Poor communication leads to organizational change failures. Technological advancement often triggers uncertainty and panic. Transparent, open, and frequent communication ensures that everyone feels informed, supported, and prepared.
3. Skills Are Not Missing, They Are Uneven and Unasked For
Some teams get excited about change. Others struggle quietly. Others resist and try to block the shift. Staff hesitate to admit what they do not know. Managers assume skills exist because silence is misread as confidence. Technical units respond by producing more documents instead of building practical capability. At this point everyone looks busy, yet the skills gap remains exactly where it was.
The issue is not talent. It is uneven fluency and uneven understanding of transformation. In many cases the people cheering the loudest understand the least, and the people who actually need to run the new workflow are still waiting for someone to teach them how.
Here is the small c cut that lifts everyone. Process owners and workstream leads need a shared baseline of digital literacy, financial literacy, project management concepts, and operational awareness. Expertise in one domain is not enough. Basic cross functional knowledge is essential. Leaders need to understand how other functions operate and how their work connects to the broader change, especially when the transformation brings digital tools, localization models, or new financial and operational structures.
Deliver short micro learning sessions that give process owners and transformation leads a clear understanding of the vision, the mechanics of organizational change, and the logic behind the new workflows. Make sure transformation leads have project management skills and a grounded understanding of localized solutions and localization approaches. This is what ensures standardization, quality control, and the ability to scale new ways of working.
Pro tip. Create platforms where transformation leaders can exchange lessons, offer peer support, and share how they handled dilemmas or resistance. Shared experience builds confidence faster than any manual. And remember to celebrate their wins more often. Skills grow faster when people feel seen.
4. You Do Not Lack Data, You Lack One Truth Everyone Trusts
Finance presents one number. Programs present another. Grants presents a third. Dashboards look polished and cool, but the underlying data is inconsistent. Templates vary across regions. Meetings start with reconciliation instead of decision making. Leaders ask for raw extracts because they do not trust the reports in front of them. At this point the program director is having nightmares about indicators, and the finance manager is quietly questioning their life choices.
The reality becomes clear during transformation. The organization is not short on data. It is short on alignment and data quality. Without consistency and shared logic, data cannot mature into decision intelligence. The result is slow decisions, fragmented and inaccurate reporting, and limited ability to shift toward predictive or real time analysis.
In simple terms, it becomes garbage in, garbage out.
Here is the small c cut that aligns the truth. Simplify the workflow. Data quality improves only when systems are intuitive, fields are clear, and the process feels natural to the people entering information. Invest in practical training that covers both data entry and basic interpretation. Make the data journey transparent so everyone understands how inputs become insight.
Establish a straightforward data management framework. Define one owner for each metric. Define who validates it. Define how it moves from field entry to leadership reporting. Retire duplicate templates and conflicting tools. One pathway creates one truth.
Pro tip. Show data entry staff how their inputs shape dashboards and decisions. Low engagement teams create higher staff turnover. When people see the impact of their work, accuracy and ownership rise immediately.
5. The Problem Is Not Innovation, It Is the Flood of Initiatives No One Can Carry
HQ produces frameworks faster than teams can absorb them. Pilots launch without capacity. Handbooks and guidelines arrive in waves. Toolkits multiply. Each new workstream promises transformation, but all of them compete for the same tired people. Field teams are asked to test ideas with no extra bandwidth. And somewhere in HQ, someone discovers their talent in writing newsletters, and now teams are expected to stay updated on ten priorities they have no time to deliver.
Here is the small c cut that protects your bandwidth: Start by mapping every initiative on one consolidated timeline. Then layer initiatives across functions to reveal overlaps, unrealistic pacing, and hidden duplication. Sunset projects and ideas without an owner, a value case, or a realistic pathway to delivery. Create stabilization time after rollouts so teams can absorb, adjust, and embed new practices before something else arrives.
Pro tip: Assess new initiatives through two lenses: strategic relevance and operational feasibility and context. Prioritize using both. And always include frontline perspectives. They carry the weight of implementation and often see the practical daily risks long before headquarters does.
6. Your Strategy Is Not Weak, It Is Misaligned With the Realities of Transformation
In transformation moments, ambition often outruns reality. Leadership sets bold goals for digitalization, localization, new operating models, or new delivery approaches, yet the strategy quietly assumes capacities, staffing, funding, and stability that do not exist. The strategy becomes visionary but not operational, inspiring but not executable. A transformation strategy without grounded operational truth becomes theatre, leaving transformation leads spending their days managing dilemmas, reacting to field level pushback, and trying to bridge a gap that should have been acknowledged from the start.
Zoom in to any country office and you will find the same person expected to deliver on the Grand Bargain, the Nexus, climate commitments, localization targets, safeguarding requirements, and at least three global priorities announced last quarter. This person is treated like a unicorn who can do everything, solve everything, and deliver on every global ambition. In reality the only magical power they have is trying to survive the week with limited staff, limited time, and limited budget.
Here is the small c cut that brings strategy back to earth: Introduce a transformation feasibility check for every major objective. Validate each pillar with real teams and real workflows before finalizing it. Ask what it truly requires: skills, data, systems, decision rights, funding flow, and sequencing. If the foundation is not there, pause the objective or redesign it. The aim is not to shrink ambition, but to anchor ambition in what the organization can realistically carry while it evolves. Speed matters, but quality, staff wellbeing, and organizational culture matter too, so keep the balance even if change takes longer than expected. A strategy that collapses under its own weight helps no one.
A strategy that listens will always outperform a strategy that only speaks.
Pro tip. Treat strategy as a dynamic framework. Transformation shifts the system week by week. Invest in scenario planning early and design the strategy with multiple possible futures in mind. Build 360 degree feedback loops from frontline teams and transformation workstreams so the strategy adjusts as the organization grows.
7. Change Is Not Failing, It Is Under-Structured
Announcements arrive late. Training comes after rollout. Managers improvise answers. Rumors fill the gaps. Staff interpret confusion as instability. Teams and leaders are not resisting change; they are trying to navigate it without a map, with limited support and unprepared guidance. And let us be honest, most of us have relied on that one colleague who somehow knows every rumor before any official announcement is made, because their updates feel more reliable than the actual communication plan.
In NGOs, change is rarely rejected; it is simply unsupported by leaders who lack the fitness to lead it.
Here is the small c cut that supports people. Build a simple change spine. One clear playbook for workflow leads. A steady communication rhythm. Early updates. Predictable steps. Basic transformation risk management. When change is structured lightly but consistently, confidence grows and resistance dissolves.
Pro tip. Make change visible and understandable before it becomes official. Show early demos, share prototypes, or walk teams through mock workflows. Address teams’ questions not only through a Q and A document but also by hosting webinars and panels, and by providing an email channel where people can ask questions directly. Early visibility and clear communication can make projects several times more likely to succeed by building buy-in and reducing resistance. When people see the future in small, simple, concrete glimpses, fear reduces and ownership increases.
8. Decisions Are Not Slow, Your Approval Pathways Are
Procurement requests sit in inboxes waiting for someone’s calendar to open or for a free spot in the warehouse. Policies require signatures from people who have no operational role or understanding of the context. Grant decisions travel through layers that add no value. HR takes months to recruit a single role and even longer to terminate someone who is not delivering or is actively toxic. And in many offices, the fastest moving thing in the entire approval chain is the rumor about why the approval is delayed. Teams spend more time chasing approvals than doing the work. Transformation demands speed and results, yet the organization is designed for delay and paperwork.
Delays in NGOs are designed. They are not accidents.
Here is the small c cut that restores speed: Publish clear decision rights and financial threshold approvals. Place authority at the point of execution and empower leaders closest to the work. Trust managers to decide but hold them accountable for the decisions they make. Assess how long it takes to take administrative decision like recruitment, approving a PR, releasing items from a warehouse, making payment. When approval pathways match operational reality, momentum returns and organizational transformation progress.
Pro tip: Introduce automatic reminders or auto approval after a defined time window. This reduces bottlenecks, discourages passive gatekeeping, and signals that inaction is also a decision.
9. Your Systems Are Not the Issue, Your Integrations Are
Systems grow in number but not in value. The tech stack expands, yet productivity stays the same. What was meant to simplify the work ends up scattering it. Staff copy and paste data across multiple platforms. Tools duplicate each other. Information hides in inboxes, shared drives, and personal folders, all under the banner of supporting the organizational transformation. And in many cases the proposed solution is to create yet another focal point or another team to manage the confusion, which only adds one more layer to the same problem.
Here is the small c cut that brings coherence: Keep policy as the anchor and adapt procedures to context. Reduce the number of tools in use instead of adding new ones to compensate for the old ones. Build simple integration bridges between the essential systems. And before introducing or integrating anything new, challenge it with one question: does this create real operational or strategic value, or does it simply add another step.
Pro tip: Run process mapping and process engineering regularly. Some workflows require quarterly reviews, others annual. Regular mapping can deliver significant productivity gains by identifying inefficiencies early. The point is simple. Integrations stay healthy only when the processes beneath them stay current. Adding new systems to fix old systems without fixing the process is how organizations end up with tech solutions that look like a Tesla but still need a horse in front to move.
10. Your Core Functions Are Not Overhead, They Are the Backbone You Keep Undervaluing
Finance closes late because it lacks the staff or the timely inputs to do otherwise. HR is buried under recruitment cycles, performance reviews, and terminations that take months to finalize. Supply chain operates reactively because capacity is stretched thin and procurement plans never receive the prioritization they need. Governance roles exist in organograms but hold little real authority. Programs depend on support structures that were never resourced or empowered to carry their weight.
Weak backbones create strong frustration.
Here is the small c cut that strengthens everything. Rebalance internal budgets to fund realistic capacity in finance, HR, supply chain, risk, and governance. Treat these units as operational enablers, not administrative costs. Evaluate transformation through operational readiness: can these functions support the new model, the new systems, and the new expectations. Assess each function individually, then assess how they operate together. A backbone only works when its parts move in harmony. When these functions strengthen, program delivery stabilizes and system performance rises everywhere.
Pro tip. Map how information flows, where handovers fail, and where decision rights become unclear. When information moves smoothly across functions, coordination strengthens and blind spots disappear.
Bonus Reflection: Restructuring Is Not a Strategy, It Is a Reaction
When budgets shrink or pressure rises, organizations often turn to restructuring. Roles are cut. Units disappear. Teams are merged. Org charts are redesigned to look cleaner than the reality they need to support. Leadership presents the shift as a path to efficiency, yet the workload remains exactly the same and lands on fewer people.
The organization becomes harder to recognize. Institutional memory disappears overnight. Critical relationships vanish. Staff fear rises. The people who remain carry double portfolios, unclear responsibilities, and the emotional weight of losing colleagues. And once an organization begins to lose trust, it loses the very foundation that makes its work possible.
Restructuring without change fitness does not reduce workload. It redistributes confusion.
Here is the small c cut that keeps restructuring honest. Map the real workload before touching the organogram. Identify which tasks truly matter, which can stop, and which can be redesigned. Then make the decisions that leadership often avoids. Restructuring requires unpopular choices, not hopeful assumptions. If you remove roles but keep the work, you are not creating efficiency. You are creating silent burnout.
Pro tip. Restructuring attracts drama, so shape the narrative early. Be clear with your own staff about what is changing and why, and remember that every decision you make changes someone’s daily life in a very real way. Then open source the process. Share with the media what you are doing, the options you considered, and what you hope to achieve. When you communicate openly, you remove the suspense that fuels rumors and give journalists less room to invent a storyline. Transparency turns restructuring from a mystery into a message.
Where the Small c Cut Ends and Begins
Organizational transformation and change management are, at their core, a philosophy of precision. They start with one simple question: what is the smallest, smartest adjustment that unlocks the greatest clarity and speed. Small cuts remove noise. Small cuts restore focus. Small cuts return the system to its purpose. And when they are applied consistently, they prevent the need for Capital C restructuring and create balance long before crisis forces it.
The system wants to evolve. The small c cut is the most effective way to help it do so without tearing anything down. Cut what drains. Cut what distracts. Cut what slows. Cut what no longer serves. And keep what matters. Keep what strengthens. Keep what accelerates.
Transformation thrives when it is driven by precision, not performance. The communities we serve deserve institutions that are lighter, clearer, and aligned with purpose.
My take remains simple. Optimization in small steps is what frees an organization to take the big ones.
To explore this idea further, you can read more on small c cuts here and here.
Ali Al Mokdad
