A project leaking value doesn't fail loudly. It just quietly costs you twice.
Any real change — a merger, a new tool, an AI rollout, a process redesign — asks people to work differently than they did before. Without guardrails around how that change actually gets adopted, without redesigning the workflow it's supposed to replace, and without governance to catch what falls through the cracks, two things go wrong at once, not one.
First, the new thing underperforms. The tool, the merged team, the new process — it doesn't deliver what it was supposed to, because nobody rebuilt the surrounding work to actually use it well.
Second, and less obvious: the old way of doing things doesn't cleanly stop either. Approvals still route through the old chain. People quietly keep a version of the previous process running, because the new one was never fully defined or trusted. So you're paying for the change and still paying for the thing it was meant to replace — value leaking from both directions, at the same time.
That's the double jeopardy. It's not that the change failed. It's that nothing was built to close the door behind it.
Closing it requires three things done together, not separately: guardrails that define how the new way actually gets used, a redesign of the workflow around it — not just the tool or the announcement — and governance that catches the gap between what was supposed to change and what actually did.
Skipped, and most transformation efforts pay for the new thing and the old thing at once — without ever noticing they're doing both.