A situation I have come across many times whilst working with client teams is one where everyone can describe what’s going wrong in a process, but they can’t quite get to a shared understanding of what to do about it. Not because they lack expertise across their areas, but because the issue they are trying to solve is tangled up across teams, systems, and dependencies that nobody can hold the full picture of in their head at the same time.
I have come to believe that one of the most undervalued skills in transformation, and in leadership more broadly, is the ability to make complex things visible. Not simplifying them, that’s different, but making them visible. Taking something that exists as a mess made up of conversations, assumptions, and half-understood connections, and turning it into something a group of people can look at together, point at, and actually work with.
Here are three examples of what this looks like in practice, because the principle is the same even though the contexts are completely different.
Tables, chairs and people
I was involved in an integration between an HCM system and finance, and the fundamental challenge was that neither side really understood how the other one worked. HR had a concept of position management that was central to how they operated, but finance had never mapped it to their own structures in any meaningful way.
The thing that unlocked it was a simple analogy. Think of your organisational structure as a room full of tables and chairs. The tables are your teams, the chairs are the roles, and the people fill the chairs. Once you frame it that way, the next question becomes obvious: what do you attach to the chair rather than the person? Cost centres, entities, projects, brands, manager ownership. All of those things sit with the role, not with the individual, and that’s what connects the HR world to the financial dimensions that drive budgets, reporting, and downstream processes.
What made this work wasn’t the analogy on its own. It was that people from both sides could suddenly see the same structure and talk about it using the same language. Before that, the conversation kept stalling because HR was describing their world in their terms and finance was describing theirs, and the gap between them was invisible. Making the connection visible, even as a rough sketch on a whiteboard, meant we could start designing something that aligned the HR joiner, mover, leaver process with the financial structures that needed to reflect it.
Brown paper and post-it notes
A completely different situation. I was working across operations, finance, commercial, and legal teams who needed to solve a complex process problem, but every time they sat in a meeting room together, the conversation went in circles. Each team understood their part of the process well enough, but nobody had a view of the whole thing, and the dependencies between teams were the part that kept causing problems.
I’d come across a TED talk by Tom Wujec called “How to Make Toast” which demonstrates something deceptively powerful: when you get people to draw a process rather than describe it verbally, the quality of thinking changes completely. So we ran a session based on that approach. Brown paper on the wall, post-it notes, and every team working through the process from start to finish, together, visually.
What happened was exactly what the approach predicts. People started seeing connections they hadn’t articulated before. Someone from legal would look at a step that commercial had put up and say “we didn’t know that happened before our review,” or someone from operations would realise they were duplicating effort because they didn’t have visibility of what finance was already producing.
The brown paper wall wasn’t a sophisticated tool. It was deliberately low-tech. But it made the whole process visible in a way that a verbal discussion never could, and more importantly, it brought people along. They’d built it together, so they owned what came out of it. That matters more than most people think when you’re trying to get cross-functional teams to change how they work.
A portfolio view that unblocked a steering committee
The third example sits at a more strategic level. I was working with an organisation that had a portfolio of change initiatives, and the steering committee had reached a kind of stalemate. They knew things weren’t progressing the way they needed to, but they couldn’t get enough clarity on where the real issues were to make confident decisions about what to prioritise, what to pause, and what to stop.
The problem wasn’t a lack of information. If anything, there was too much. Every initiative had its own status report, its own RAG rating, its own set of risks. But there was no single view that connected the initiatives to the outcomes the organisation was actually trying to achieve.
What I put together was a portfolio view that mapped each initiative against its key success measures and aligned those back to the project activities driving them. The effect was significant. For the first time, the steering committee could see the whole portfolio in one place, understand which initiatives were genuinely contributing to the strategic objectives and which ones had drifted, and make decisions about sequencing and resource allocation based on something more than instinct and individual project updates.
The stalemate broke because the complexity became visible, just enough to act on, and to understand what to say no to, which is as important as deciding where to invest.
The pattern underneath
Looking back across these three situations, and plenty of others I haven’t mentioned, the pattern is consistent. Complex problems don’t get solved by adding more information, more meetings, or more governance. They get solved when someone finds a way to make the complexity visible, so that the people who need to act on it can actually see what they’re dealing with.
It’s not about creating beautiful diagrams or polished dashboards, though sometimes those help. It’s about finding the right way to represent a situation so that a group of people can look at the same thing, understand it in the same way, and move forward together. Sometimes that’s a whiteboard sketch, sometimes it’s a wall of post-it notes, sometimes it’s a portfolio framework on a single page.
I’ve started to think of this as the core of what I actually do, regardless of whether the engagement is labelled as finance transformation, programme delivery, or operating model design. The specifics change, but the thing that consistently makes the difference is the moment when something that was tangled and confusing becomes clear enough to work with.
If you’re sitting in a situation right now where capable people are talking past each other, or where a steering committee can’t quite get to a decision, or where two parts of the business need to integrate but can’t find a common language, it might be worth asking: what would it take to make this visible?
I work independently as a Transformation Director, helping CFOs and senior finance leaders connect the dots across their organisation, across finance, HR, operations, and commercial, making the complex stuff visible so better decisions get made. If any of this connected with something you’re working through, I’m always happy to have a conversation.
Reach me at neilalderson@neilaldersonltd.co.uk or at www.neilaldersonltd.com
The Impact Architect is a newsletter for CFOs and transformation leaders navigating complex change. If this resonated, I’d welcome you sharing it with someone who’d find it useful.