# The Ideas Are Already in the Building > Prescriptive transformation plans fail because the person at the top never has all the context. A directional strategy changes what teams build and how they... Published: 2024-05-21 · Updated: 2026-06-23 · Topics: Digital Transformation, Product Strategy & Development, Team Building & Culture · Author: Alan Wizemann The typical executive playbook for a transformation tends to follow a familiar arc, the kind that sounds responsible right up until it stops working. A new leader comes in, spends a few months listening, and then announces a comprehensive vision, a multi-year roadmap with clear objectives, clear deliverables, and clear ownership. After that the team is handed the plan and told to execute against it. I have watched this approach play out enough times to know roughly where it usually ends up. About six months in, the world has changed, or the team has uncovered something the plan never accounted for, or it turns out the data simply does not support one of the assumptions quietly baked into phase two. The roadmap slowly becomes an artifact that people work around rather than with, while the leader who built it finds themselves defending it instead of evolving it. The problem, and this is the part I think gets diagnosed wrong, is not that they failed to plan well enough. The problem is that the plan assumed the person at the top had all of the relevant context (and they never do, especially not in the first year). The approach I have landed on over time is a different one, which is to come in with a direction rather than a prescription. At Southern Glazer's, the direction I put in front of the organization was to connect the network: how do we get suppliers closer to our customers, through us, and how do we use the data, the technology, and the marketing relationships we already have to bring that middle layer to life in a way that creates value for everyone sitting in it? That is the strategy, and the important thing about it is that it is not a project list – it is a canvas. What I have noticed, repeatedly, across every company I have done this at, is that the best ideas for how to actually execute a direction like that almost never come from the person who defined the direction in the first place. They come instead from the people who have been inside the organization for years, watching the same gaps go unaddressed and thinking through the same opportunities. They are quietly waiting for someone to give them the permission or the support or just the organizational structure to act on what they already know. The ideas are already in the building, and I do not mean that as a platitude about valuing your employees. It is something I have come to see as almost literally true. In nearly every transformation I have led, I have put out a directional strategy and made it clear that the teams around it are expected to bring their own ideas into it. What comes back is not generic at all – it is specific, informed by years of context I do not have, and it fits the real constraints and the real opportunities of the business in ways that a top-down roadmap routinely misses. The reason those ideas do not surface under normal conditions is not that the people lack them. It is that the organization simply is not built to receive them. Projects get approved or they do not, initiatives get funded or they do not, and people learn pretty quickly where the ceiling sits and then stop thinking above it. In some organizations, people have been sitting on a genuinely good idea for years, not because anyone rejected it, but because there was never a structure that made it feel like the idea had anywhere to go. Changing that dynamic is one of the most important things a transformation leader can do, and it turns out to be mostly a structural problem rather than a motivational one. When you build teams around product thinking instead of project execution, something shifts in how they relate to the work. A project has a start and an end and a defined set of deliverables, whereas a product has a mission and an ongoing responsibility to the user. Teams organized around products are constantly listening, to customers, to data, and to the organization around them. That means they are wired to receive ideas and react to them rather than to grind through a fixed plan until the day it is declared done. One thing that helps this work in practice is being explicit with the teams about what the strategy is and, just as importantly, what it is not. A direction is not a finished answer; it is a starting point that the team is expected to push on, refine, and improve. When I put out a strategy at Southern, I am clear that what I want back from the people around me is their own thinking about how to execute it – I am not handing them a blueprint, I am handing them a compass and asking them to help map the route. That changes the relationship between leadership and the rest of the organization in a way that I think is genuinely meaningful. The default in a lot of large companies is that leadership sets direction and everyone else executes. What I have been building toward is a slightly different arrangement, where leadership sets direction and then deliberately creates the organizational conditions for the ideas to come back. The strategy gets better over time precisely because it is being informed by what is actually happening inside the business rather than by what merely looked right before any of the work had started. This only works, though, if you genuinely listen to the ideas when they come back – not performatively, not in a suggestion-box kind of way, but in a way where an idea from a product manager on a single team can actually change what that team builds, or inform how the broader strategy itself evolves. If the strategy is nominally open but the organization still feels top-down in practice, people figure that out fast and they stop contributing, and you are left back where you started. I have been thinking about this a great deal lately in the context of AI, because I am increasingly convinced the same dynamic applies, just with higher stakes. The organizations that will get the most out of AI are not necessarily the ones with the biggest AI budget or the most sophisticated tools. They are the ones where the people closest to the customer, the people who understand the operations, the people who have been watching the same problems for years, feel like their knowledge is part of what is being built into the technology. Their input is the training data, in a very real and not at all metaphorical sense. At Southern, we have seen this play out in how our sales teams are improving our recommendation models. The neighborhood knowledge, the customer relationships, and the product expertise they have accumulated over years of being in the field amount to information no algorithm can generate on its own – it has to come from them. Building systems that can capture and use that input is, in my view, just as important as building the models themselves, and that is true in strategy just as much as it is in technology. The ideas are in the building; the job, the whole job really, is to create the conditions where they can finally get out. --- Canonical: https://alanwizemann.com/articles/the-ideas-are-already-in-the-building