Every leader I have worked with over the past thirty years has faced the same question at least once: is now the right time to change? The question sounds simple. The answer rarely is. Changing too early wastes energy and goodwill. Changing too late means the market has already moved on without you.
I use a five-area quick scan to help leadership teams make this call with more confidence. The five areas are profitability, product, people, purpose and environment. Each one tells you something different about the urgency and readiness for agile business innovation.
Profitability is the most obvious signal. If margins are shrinking and the trend has been consistent for two or more years, the business model is under pressure. But declining profitability is a lagging indicator — by the time it shows up in the numbers, the underlying causes have usually been present for years. Look at profitability not as a trigger but as a confirmation.
Product signals are more forward-looking. Are your flagship products still growing, or are they in the maturity or decline phase of their lifecycle? Are competitors launching things you wish you had thought of first? Is your innovation pipeline genuinely full, or does it contain the same ideas recycled under new names? A product portfolio that is ageing faster than it is being renewed is a strong signal that the innovation capability of the organisation needs attention.
People signals are often the most honest. What is the quality of the conversations in your leadership team? Are people raising difficult truths or managing upwards? Is there a pattern of talented people leaving? Are the people who stay energised or exhausted? Organisations that are ready for agile innovation tend to have leaders who are genuinely curious, willing to be wrong, and capable of holding complexity without collapsing it into premature certainty.
Purpose is the question most organisations avoid until they are in crisis. What is the organisation actually for? Not the mission statement on the wall — the real answer, the one that shows up in how decisions are made and what gets prioritised. If the honest answer is 'we exist to hit this quarter's number', the organisation is running on borrowed time. Purpose is not a communications exercise. It is the strategic anchor that makes every other decision coherent.
Environment is the broadest signal. Has the competitive landscape shifted? Are new entrants using fundamentally different business models? Has customer behaviour changed in ways that your current offer does not address? Are regulatory, technological or social forces creating pressure that your current structure is not designed to absorb? If the answer to more than one of these questions is yes, the environment is telling you something your internal metrics may not yet be showing.
The honest answer to 'when is the right time?' is almost always: earlier than feels comfortable, and later than panic suggests. The organisations that navigate transformation well are the ones that start before the burning platform forces them to. They use the five-area scan not as a one-off exercise but as a regular discipline — a way of staying honest about where they are and what the signals are telling them.
Sari van Poelje
Author of Mastering Agility (Routledge, 2024). Thirty years helping leadership teams build the four abilities of agile business innovation design.