Honing vs Transformation
Martin's maintenance philosophy for strategy and systems. Honing: continuous, small adjustments as the environment shifts, a standing discipline of noticing drift early and correcting cheaply.
Honing: continuous, small adjustments as the environment shifts, a standing discipline of noticing drift early and correcting cheaply.
Transformation: the dramatic, expensive, multi-year overhaul, which Martin reads not as boldness but as the accumulated cost of not honing. Organisations that require transformation every five to seven years are revealing that nobody was steering between crises.
Why honing loses politically: transformations are visible, fundable and career-making; honing is invisible when done well. The incentive gradient runs the wrong way, itself an Enabling Management Systems design failure.
Connection to The Barnacle Problem: barnacles accrete precisely when no honing discipline exists. The hull is either cleaned continuously or dry-docked catastrophically.
Practical form: quarterly re-application of The Opposite Test and The Cant-Wont Test to the current How to Win, cheap tests, run often, versus one expensive reckoning run late.
Seam with the OKR system: the honing discipline is institutionalised here as weekly OKR Check-ins and quarterly Retrospectives, and as maintaining the methodology itself by changelog rather than reissue.
Our synthesis of Roger Martin’s published work, sources credited. Read the originals: they’re excellent.
Reading about method is not the same as running it. We install this system and build the capability that stays.
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