It’s 9:01 AM. You're joining yet another design workshop in your life sciences transformation program. There are 27 people on the call. A few you know. Most you don’t. You scroll through the invite again: no agenda, no pre-read, just a vague subject line—“Business Design Discussion: Supply Chain.”

The facilitator opens with a few slides. It’s the first time you’ve seen any of this content. Half the room is hearing it for the first time. Yet somehow, a critical decision is expected before the hour is over.

Sound familiar?

The Dangerous Illusion of Progress

Large-scale IT transformations have never been more complex—or more prone to self-sabotage. On paper, your program looks healthy. Dozens of workstreams. Daily meetings. Consultant headcount going up. People are busy. Budget is burning.

But here’s what’s really happening: people are busy, but not necessarily taking decisions.

Because the meetings are unfocused. The wrong people are in the room. The right people are unprepared. And the consultants—many of whom lack regulatory or business experience—focus on the technical shell without understanding the substance. So nothing sticks.

And how do we respond?

We add more people.

More consultants to fix the gaps left by the last wave of consultants. More workshops to redo the ones that didn’t land. More layers of review and escalation because no one really trusts the design anymore.

The Consequence: Missed Requirements, Wasted Effort

This isn’t just frustrating—it’s dangerous.

Misaligned, incomplete, or incorrect requirements lead to significant rework later in the program. Especially in life sciences, where regulatory validation, GxP compliance, and audit-readiness are part of the non-negotiables, missed requirements can delay go-lives, derail inspections, or worse.

And when decision-making gets buried in a fog of conflicting inputs, unclear ownership, and reactive conversations, the business stops trusting the process. The consultants look confused. The program loses credibility.

More People ≠ More Progress

Somewhere along the way, we confused headcount with horsepower. But transformation isn’t about how many people you can throw at a problem—it’s about whether the right people are solving the right problem, with the right context. And context doesn’t scale linearly.

Bringing in more consultants without business, operational, or regulatory understanding may increase activity—but not productivity. It just generates more noise.

We’ve seen “design” sessions where five consultants explain the same flow differently. Where documents contradict each other. Where technical expertise replaces business logic—and no one notices until validation starts.

A Return to Discipline

So what’s the fix?

It’s not revolutionary. It’s foundational.

• Right meeting, right people: If someone doesn’t own or influence the outcome, why are they there?
• Preparation before participation: If people haven’t seen the material ahead of time, they shouldn’t be asked to decide on it.
• Quality over quantity in consulting: Fewer experts with real business or regulatory depth are worth more than a room full of technical translators.
• Define the decision: Every meeting should have a clearly stated decision to be made—or don’t have the meeting.

Especially Critical in Life Sciences

In our domain, the cost of confusion is higher. We operate in validated environments. We deal with regulatory agencies, clinical data, batch records, serialized products, and human health. We can’t afford to treat transformation like a team-building exercise.

The credibility of the solution starts with the credibility of the process—and the people behind it.