Friday 5 June 26
The Strawberry Patch and the Leadership Challenge of Invisible Progress
By The Leadership Alchemist, a performance optimisation expert who believes in ethical intelligence, practical productivity, and the responsible acceleration of human potential.
Every year, we grow strawberries in our garden. Every year, my dog Courtney somehow identifies and eats the first ripe strawberry before anyone else. It is a talent I neither understand nor particularly appreciate!!
What I do appreciate, however, is the lesson the strawberry patch offers about leadership, transformation and value creation.
For much of the growing season, there is little to see. The soil is prepared, the plants are tended, conditions are managed and effort is invested. Yet visible evidence of progress remains frustratingly absent. To the casual observer, very little appears to be happening. Then, seemingly all at once, the fruit emerges.
The temptation is to view the harvest as the event that created the value. It is not. The harvest merely reveals value that has been accumulating for weeks, unseen beneath the surface. This distinction matters because organisations often struggle with exactly the same phenomenon.
6 year old Courtney; retired racing greyhound with a fractional portfolio of strawberry thief, squirrel tracker and Chief Happiness Officer.
The Tyranny of Visible Results
Modern corporate life is dominated by visibility. Quarterly reporting cycles, investor expectations, board scrutiny and performance dashboards all encourage leaders to focus on what can be measured today. Yet the drivers of long-term organisational performance rarely conform to quarterly timelines.
Trust develops before collaboration improves. Capability develops before productivity increases. Alignment develops before execution accelerates. Culture shifts before performance follows.
The challenge is that these are largely invisible processes while they are happening. This creates one of leadership's greatest paradoxes: The activities most responsible for creating future value often provide the least immediate evidence that value is being created.
Why Transformations Struggle
The statistics tell a familiar story. Research from McKinsey & Company has consistently found that approximately 70% of transformation programmes fail to achieve their intended outcomes. Similarly, research from Boston Consulting Group suggests that only around 30% of transformation efforts achieve or exceed their objectives sustainably.
What is striking is that these failures are rarely caused by a lack of strategic intent.
Most organisations know where they want to go. The challenge lies in the less visible work of creating alignment, changing behaviours, building capability and sustaining commitment long enough for results to emerge.
In short, organisations often become impatient with the roots because they are focused on the fruit.
The Economics of Compounding
Investors understand the power of compounding. Leaders sometimes underestimate it. Small improvements accumulated over time create disproportionate outcomes.
Research from Harvard Business Review and academic studies on organisational performance repeatedly demonstrate that sustained competitive advantage is more commonly derived from cumulative operational and behavioural improvements than from singular strategic breakthroughs.
The organisations that outperform over time are rarely those pursuing dramatic reinvention every year.
More often, they are organisations that improve decision quality, leadership effectiveness, customer experience and execution discipline consistently over long periods.
What appears modest in isolation becomes transformative when compounded.
The Value Hidden Beneath the Surface
Many of the factors that drive enterprise value are initially intangible.
Strategic Alignment
One of the strongest predictors of execution success is leadership alignment.
Yet alignment rarely appears on a balance sheet.
When leaders develop a shared understanding of priorities, trade-offs and strategic intent, decision-making accelerates and organisational energy becomes more focused. The benefits emerge later through improved execution and reduced friction.
Capability Building
Leadership capability, learning and organisational development often appear as costs before they appear as value.
Research from Deloitte Insights has repeatedly highlighted the connection between workforce capability, adaptability and long-term organisational performance.
The return is real, but rarely immediate.
The Strategic Orbits Exercise® rapidly empowers teams to work with their own complexity and build capability concurrently; moving rapidly from strategy to execution by mapping and shifting strategic priorities and actions in real time.
Culture and Trust
Culture remains one of the most discussed and least understood drivers of performance. Research by Amy Edmondson on psychological safety and team effectiveness has demonstrated that high-performing organisations create environments where learning, challenge and adaptation can flourish.
Yet trust, openness and collaboration are difficult to observe in their formative stages. Like roots, they become visible only through their effects.
What Sophisticated Boards Look For
The most effective boards understand the difference between outcomes and conditions. Outcomes are lagging indicators. Conditions are leading indicators.
Revenue growth, profitability and shareholder returns matter enormously, but they tell us what has already happened.
The more revealing question is whether the organisation is building the conditions from which future results will emerge:
- Are leaders aligned?
- Is capability increasing?
- Are behaviours changing?
- Is decision quality improving?
- Is the organisation becoming more adaptable?
These questions are often harder to answer than financial questions. They are also frequently more important.
The Leadership Imperative
The role of leadership is not simply to deliver results. It is to create the conditions from which results become inevitable. That requires a degree of patience that can feel uncomfortable in a business environment increasingly conditioned for immediacy. Not passive patience. Disciplined patience.
The confidence to continue investing in activities whose value has not yet become visible. The judgement to distinguish between an initiative that is failing and one that is still growing. The wisdom to understand that enterprise value is usually created long before it is recognised.
The strawberry patch follows exactly the same logic.
The fruit is not the achievement. It is merely the evidence of an achievement that occurred much earlier.
Perhaps that is why Courtney is always so eager to find the first strawberry. She understands something many organisations forget: By the time the fruit appears, the real work has already been done!
For leaders navigating growth, transformation and organisational change, it is a useful reminder. Visible progress is not the only form of progress.
Some of the most valuable work your organisation is doing today may be the work that nobody can yet see. And if you nurture it long enough, the harvest will come.
Boardroom Reflection
Enterprise value is rarely created at the moment results become visible. It is created in the months and years beforehand through the disciplined accumulation of capability, alignment, trust and execution.
The fruit gets the attention. The roots create the value. 🍓🐾🌱
Stay safe, and add value. \
The Leadership Alchemist