A message to every procurement leader who sees clearly what their organization refuses to hear.
You’ve been in the meeting. You know the one.
The CFO is presenting the business case for a multi-million dollar transformation. The timeline is aggressive — 18 months to full deployment. The change management budget? It got trimmed. “We’ll handle that internally.”
You’re sitting there doing the math in your head. You know this organization. You know what happened to an initiative last year. You know the data quality issues no one wants to talk about. You know the integration gaps between systems that have been “on the roadmap” for three years.
You know this is going to fail.
But when you raise your hand — carefully, diplomatically, professionally — you get the look. The “let’s not be negative” look. The “we’ve already committed” look. The “this is above your pay grade” look.
So you sit back. You document your concerns in an email you know will never be read. And you watch the initiative launch anyway.
Eighteen months later, when it’s over budget, behind schedule, and delivering 40% of promised functionality, no one remembers your email. The vendor gets blamed. The implementation partner gets blamed. The “resistant middle managers” get blamed.
The board? They’re already approving the next initiative.
The Frustrated Expert
I’ve been documenting this pattern for 18 years. Across ERP implementations, SaaS deployments, digital transformations, and now AI initiatives. The faces change. The technologies change. The pattern doesn’t.
And recently, I finally named what I was seeing.
I call it the Clarity-Authority Matrix. It maps what happens when practitioner clarity meets — or doesn’t meet — organizational readiness to listen.
There are four quadrants. But one quadrant matters more than the others, because that’s where most experienced practitioners end up:
The Frustrated Expert: High clarity, low organizational readiness.
You see the gaps clearly. You cannot get buy-in to address them. You’re structurally neutralized — not because you’re wrong, but because the organization isn’t ready to hear what you’re saying.
If that sounds familiar, you’re not crazy. You’re just in the wrong quadrant.
The Math Gets Worse
Here’s what kept me up at night while I was writing this: the problem is compounding.
Every initiative that fails without a proper post-mortem doesn’t just waste resources — it erodes the organizational muscle required for the next attempt. The baseline failure rate for ERP implementations sits between 55-75%. But that’s the first attempt baseline.
Organizations that skip readiness assessment and proceed after a prior failure see their success probability drop dramatically. And this pattern is accelerating as we move from Generative AI to Agentic AI to Autonomous AI.
The trajectory looks like this:
By the end of this decade, organizations without readiness discipline will face near-zero success probability — while those with systematic assessment maintain 70%+ success rates across every technology wave.
The math is unforgiving. And boards aren’t seeing it.
The Question I Finally Asked
After 18 years of documentation, I finally asked the question that had been forming in the back of my mind:
Why do we keep blaming practitioners for failures that boards approved?
The Chairman and board approve the investment. They set the strategic priority. They demand the timeline. They cut the change management budget. And then they blame the practitioners when it falls apart.
They’re not just complicit. They’re the root cause.
That realization became a white paper.
Something to Hand to Your Board
I wrote “Are Company Boardrooms Ruining Their Procurement and Supply Chain Capabilities from the Inside Out?” for one reason: to give practitioners like you something to hand to your board.
Not a complaint. Not a resignation letter. A documented argument — backed by 18 years of pattern evidence — for why board-level accountability is the missing piece in every transformation failure.
Inside, you’ll find:
- The Governance Chain of Failure — how capital allocation decisions structurally guarantee implementation failure
- The Clarity-Authority Matrix — why even excellent fractional leaders get trapped in organizations that aren’t ready to hear the truth
- The Compounding Failure Effect — why skipping readiness assessment doesn’t just waste today’s budget, it erodes your ability to succeed with tomorrow’s AI
- Five Board-Level Requirements — concrete governance actions that can be discussed at your next board or audit committee meeting
This isn’t theory. It’s pattern recognition across 180+ implementations since 1998.
The Core Thesis
I’ll give you the thesis for free, because it’s the thing I most need you to understand:
If human agents cannot effectively collaborate with each other, they will never be able to effectively collaborate with AI agents.
That’s the filter. That’s the readiness test. That’s the question every board should be asking before they approve another $10M AI initiative.
Most of them aren’t asking it. And by 2030, the organizations that didn’t will have compounded their way to irrelevance.
For the Frustrated Experts
If you’re reading this and nodding — if you’ve lived this pattern — I want you to know something:
You’re not crazy. You’re not a pessimist. You’re not “resistant to change.”
You’re someone who sees clearly in an organization that isn’t ready to listen.
The question is: what do you do with that clarity?
You can keep sending emails that never get read. You can keep watching initiatives fail and saying “I told you so” quietly to yourself. You can leave.
Or you can start the conversation about why these failures keep happening — not at the practitioner level, not at the vendor level, but at the governance level where the decisions actually get made.
That’s what this white paper is for. Use it.
The white paper is available now at: Are Company Boardrooms Ruining Their Procurement and Supply Chain Capabilities from the Inside Out?
$67. Eight pages. Eighteen years of pattern evidence.
One argument your board hasn’t heard yet.
Jon Hansen is the creator of the Hansen Method and Hansen Fit Score (HFS) framework for procurement transformation. His work focuses on preventing the documented 80% implementation failure rate through organizational readiness assessment. He can be reached at procureinsights.com.
-30-
Why aren’t the decision-makers, the ones who ultimately approve initiative funding, held accountable?
The uncomfortable truth:
The people who approve $10M investments with 20% success probability face zero consequences when that probability plays out exactly as predicted.
Meanwhile, the practitioner who raised concerns in that meeting — the one who got “the look” — watches their career stall for being “negative.”
Procurement Insights
You’re Not Crazy. You’re Just in the Wrong Quadrant.
Posted on January 7, 2026
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A message to every procurement leader who sees clearly what their organization refuses to hear.
You’ve been in the meeting. You know the one.
The CFO is presenting the business case for a multi-million dollar transformation. The timeline is aggressive — 18 months to full deployment. The change management budget? It got trimmed. “We’ll handle that internally.”
You’re sitting there doing the math in your head. You know this organization. You know what happened to an initiative last year. You know the data quality issues no one wants to talk about. You know the integration gaps between systems that have been “on the roadmap” for three years.
You know this is going to fail.
But when you raise your hand — carefully, diplomatically, professionally — you get the look. The “let’s not be negative” look. The “we’ve already committed” look. The “this is above your pay grade” look.
So you sit back. You document your concerns in an email you know will never be read. And you watch the initiative launch anyway.
Eighteen months later, when it’s over budget, behind schedule, and delivering 40% of promised functionality, no one remembers your email. The vendor gets blamed. The implementation partner gets blamed. The “resistant middle managers” get blamed.
The board? They’re already approving the next initiative.
The Frustrated Expert
I’ve been documenting this pattern for 18 years. Across ERP implementations, SaaS deployments, digital transformations, and now AI initiatives. The faces change. The technologies change. The pattern doesn’t.
And recently, I finally named what I was seeing.
I call it the Clarity-Authority Matrix. It maps what happens when practitioner clarity meets — or doesn’t meet — organizational readiness to listen.
There are four quadrants. But one quadrant matters more than the others, because that’s where most experienced practitioners end up:
The Frustrated Expert: High clarity, low organizational readiness.
You see the gaps clearly. You cannot get buy-in to address them. You’re structurally neutralized — not because you’re wrong, but because the organization isn’t ready to hear what you’re saying.
If that sounds familiar, you’re not crazy. You’re just in the wrong quadrant.
The Math Gets Worse
Here’s what kept me up at night while I was writing this: the problem is compounding.
Every initiative that fails without a proper post-mortem doesn’t just waste resources — it erodes the organizational muscle required for the next attempt. The baseline failure rate for ERP implementations sits between 55-75%. But that’s the first attempt baseline.
Organizations that skip readiness assessment and proceed after a prior failure see their success probability drop dramatically. And this pattern is accelerating as we move from Generative AI to Agentic AI to Autonomous AI.
The trajectory looks like this:
By the end of this decade, organizations without readiness discipline will face near-zero success probability — while those with systematic assessment maintain 70%+ success rates across every technology wave.
The math is unforgiving. And boards aren’t seeing it.
The Question I Finally Asked
After 18 years of documentation, I finally asked the question that had been forming in the back of my mind:
Why do we keep blaming practitioners for failures that boards approved?
The Chairman and board approve the investment. They set the strategic priority. They demand the timeline. They cut the change management budget. And then they blame the practitioners when it falls apart.
They’re not just complicit. They’re the root cause.
That realization became a white paper.
Something to Hand to Your Board
I wrote “Are Company Boardrooms Ruining Their Procurement and Supply Chain Capabilities from the Inside Out?” for one reason: to give practitioners like you something to hand to your board.
Not a complaint. Not a resignation letter. A documented argument — backed by 18 years of pattern evidence — for why board-level accountability is the missing piece in every transformation failure.
Inside, you’ll find:
This isn’t theory. It’s pattern recognition across 180+ implementations since 1998.
The Core Thesis
I’ll give you the thesis for free, because it’s the thing I most need you to understand:
If human agents cannot effectively collaborate with each other, they will never be able to effectively collaborate with AI agents.
That’s the filter. That’s the readiness test. That’s the question every board should be asking before they approve another $10M AI initiative.
Most of them aren’t asking it. And by 2030, the organizations that didn’t will have compounded their way to irrelevance.
For the Frustrated Experts
If you’re reading this and nodding — if you’ve lived this pattern — I want you to know something:
You’re not crazy. You’re not a pessimist. You’re not “resistant to change.”
You’re someone who sees clearly in an organization that isn’t ready to listen.
The question is: what do you do with that clarity?
You can keep sending emails that never get read. You can keep watching initiatives fail and saying “I told you so” quietly to yourself. You can leave.
Or you can start the conversation about why these failures keep happening — not at the practitioner level, not at the vendor level, but at the governance level where the decisions actually get made.
That’s what this white paper is for. Use it.
The white paper is available now at: Are Company Boardrooms Ruining Their Procurement and Supply Chain Capabilities from the Inside Out?
$67. Eight pages. Eighteen years of pattern evidence.
One argument your board hasn’t heard yet.
Jon Hansen is the creator of the Hansen Method and Hansen Fit Score (HFS) framework for procurement transformation. His work focuses on preventing the documented 80% implementation failure rate through organizational readiness assessment. He can be reached at procureinsights.com.
-30-
Why aren’t the decision-makers, the ones who ultimately approve initiative funding, held accountable?
The uncomfortable truth:
The people who approve $10M investments with 20% success probability face zero consequences when that probability plays out exactly as predicted.
Meanwhile, the practitioner who raised concerns in that meeting — the one who got “the look” — watches their career stall for being “negative.”
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