When the Pilot Survives the Audit
Why the successful pilot is so often the thing that kills the rollout, and the governance move that breaks the pattern.
Advancing the science and practice of organizational transformation.
We research how governance, leadership, and institutional decision-making shape organizational resilience. We publish evidence, advise leaders, develop analytical tools, and provide expert analysis that helps organizations, and the legal system, understand why complex transformations succeed or fail.
Publish evidence
Case files, white papers, and reports that put governance findings on the record.
Advise leaders
Direct counsel to boards and executives carrying transformation of their own.
Develop tools
Analytics and benchmarks that turn the research into instruments you can run.
Provide expert analysis
Independent analysis for organizations and the legal system when transformations are contested.
The agenda
Five questions the research sets out to answer.
Governance
How do governance decisions influence organizational outcomes?
Tracing outcomes back to the decisions, and the decision rights, that produced them.
Leadership
What leadership behaviors enable successful transformation?
The observable behaviors that move change from announced to sustained.
Institutions
Why do some organizations become resilient while others fail?
What resilient organizations build before the stress event ever arrives.
Technology
How should organizations govern emerging technologies?
Oversight for systems that outpace the structures meant to govern them.
Evidence
What can public failures teach us about better governance?
Reading the public record of breakdowns for lessons that transfer.
The research agenda, in full. Five threads, one body of evidence.
Explore the agendaContents
The work, in five parts.
Est. 2026
Research
The evidence base. Primary study of governance in the field.
Research AgendaMethodologyGovernance MechanismsDatasetsResearch Projects
02Publications
What the research becomes. Argued, edited, and on the record.
Case FilesArticlesWhite PapersResearch NotesAnnual Reports
03Briefings
The research, in conversation. Watch and listen.
The Governance FilesTransformidable BriefingWebinar ArchiveLive Sessions
04Tools
The research, turned outward. Instruments you can run on yourself.
Governance CodebookMechanism ExplorerGovernance WatchBenchmarksRisk Models
05Events
Where the findings are argued in the room. Roundtables and briefings.
RoundtablesBriefings
06About
Who does the work, how it is funded, and the standards it is held to.
MissionPeopleStandards
Case File No. 001 · From the field
UCPath
The University of California’s systemwide consolidation of payroll and HR onto a single platform, and what its long, contested rollout reveals about governing large-scale transformation.
Read the case fileExhibit AThe UCPath Project Roll-out
Initiation
September 2011
Replace campus-by-campus systems with one platform.
First Planned Deployment
Wave 1: January 2013
The first wave of implementation included the Office of the President, UCLA (and its medical center), UC Merced, UC Santa Cruz, and the UCPath Center
Full Implementation Target
August 2014
Estimated completion of all waves.
Tools · Governance Analytics
Turn the research into a number you can track.
Coming soonThe Governance Resilience Index
A standing benchmark built from the case files, scoring how well a sector’s governance is set up to carry transformation without breaking. Run it on your own organization, then see where you sit against your peers.
Coming soonResilience Index, all sectors
Rolling, indexed to 100 at launch
68 ↑6
Q3 2026
Credit unions74
Community banks61
Public agencies48
Healthcare systems43
Figure 1 · Illustrative index values, pending first release.
Latest publications
A Governance Resilience Index: Methodology and First Findings
The full construction of the index: what it measures, what it deliberately does not, and how the first sector scores were derived.
Resilience Is a Governance Property, Not an Operational One
Organizations keep trying to buy resilience with tooling. The evidence says it is decided upstream, in how oversight is structured.
The State of Governance 2025
One year of case files, read together: where transformation held, where it reverted, and what the difference kept coming down to.