The Work With No Bell Attached
By Jamie Jacobs & Jackson Lynch
I read comments on LinkedIn every day. Most of them agree, congratulate or vanish into the feed. One from Jackson Lynch didn’t do any of those things. It provoked conversation.
He was responding to research on why transformation efforts stall.
“The pattern I’ve seen in transformations that stall: the operating model during the change doesn’t separate the transformation work from the noise of running the business. The same people are accountable for both, with no protected capacity for either.”
— Jackson Lynch
The operating model redesign had a start date in February and a completion date in June. It is August. The work is somewhere around half finished, and the four people carrying it can each name the week they stopped. None of them decided to stop. A reduction in force landed in March. The compensation cycle opened in April. A senior leader resigned in May. Each of those arrived with a date, a requester and someone waiting on the other end of it.
The redesign arrived with none of that.
The usual reading is fatigue. Too many initiatives at once, an organization that has absorbed more change than it can metabolize, people who have run out of room. The second reading is sponsorship. The executive team said the words in January and had stopped saying them by spring.
Both readings describe something real. Initiative counts in most companies genuinely exceed what a workforce can absorb, and a leader watching the room go flat in the fourth transformation town hall of the year is reading it correctly.
What neither explanation accounts for is the shape of the failure. Fatigue produces a slowdown. What happened here was a stop, and it happened four separate times, cleanly, on four different calendars, in three consecutive months.
Only One Kind Of Work Has To Be Summoned
Every hour inside a function lands in one of four categories, and the differences between them are not differences of degree.
Execution is work you produce yourself. The investigation, the comp recommendation, the board deck. The value is real, and it ends when the task ends.
Brokering is sitting between two parties who could, in principle, transact without you. Routing a manager to a center of excellence, chasing recruiting for a status update, carrying a position from the CEO down to a team. Also real, and entirely transactional.
Changing capability is the work that leaves the business permanently more capable after you stop touching it. Roles rewritten to outcomes. Decision rights installed. A leader whose judgment now produces the answers you used to supply.
Unscheduled is everything interrupt-driven: the walk-ups, the escalations, the quick question, the crisis, the “do you have a minute?”
Three of those four arrive on their own. Somebody requests, somebody escalates, somebody chases, somebody panics. Changing capability has no external forcing function anywhere in the system. No invitation arrives for it. Nobody asks where it stands. No one is inconvenienced this week if it does not happen.
That is the whole mechanism. Transformation work is changing-capability work by definition, which means everything it competes against shows up with a claimant attached and it shows up with none.
The asymmetry is what makes it expensive. Execution converts effort to output at a fixed rate and produces no additional future capacity. Changing capability is the only category where an hour spent this quarter reduces the hours required next quarter. The organization is systematically starving the only work that compounds, and it is doing so without a single person choosing to.
None of this is particular to HR. A finance team automating the close is running changing-capability work while the close itself runs every month with a hard date and an auditor waiting.
An operations group redesigning its network is doing the same thing while shipments leave daily. In both cases the recurring obligation has a bell attached and the redesign does not. In both cases the redesign is the one that slips.
Your Strongest Operators Are The Collision Point
The redesign was staffed with the four best people in the function. That was not a mistake. Work of that consequence has perhaps five credible owners in any organization, and a leader who assigned it to anyone else would be making a worse decision.
Those same four people are also the default destination for every escalation, every executive request and every problem that has to be solved correctly the first time. Trust concentrates. It concentrates in the same small set of roles that carry disproportionate weight on the strategy, which is roughly five percent of the roles in the company.
The collision is manufactured by good judgment. The people best qualified to change the system are the people the current system depends on most, and nothing in the operating model separates those two claims on their week.
Ask which of the two claims wins and the answer is already visible on their calendars. One of them has a person waiting.
A second-order cost accumulates underneath that one. These four are also the people whose judgment the rest of the function learns from. Every quarter they spend absorbing arriving work is a quarter the bench does not watch them build anything, which is how a capability gap propagates a level down while the org chart looks unchanged.
Protection Is A Passive Instrument
The standard repair is protected capacity. Fence the time, name the workstream, tell the team that Friday afternoons belong to the redesign.
Fencing holds nothing in place, because holding requires something arriving to hold. Friday is protected until Thursday, when the executive resignation becomes a Friday problem with a person on the other end of it. The block yields. It yields to work that is genuinely more urgent, which is exactly what makes the yielding defensible every time it happens.
The run-the-business work gets no protection either. It wins by default, and a default win leaves it just as un-resourced. It gets absorbed at the margins of a week, by people who are also carrying a quiet debt about the redesign they are not touching.
Both bodies of work degrade. Neither one was ever allocated. The operating model treats a transformation and a compensation cycle as the same kind of object, and only one of them behaves like one.
The Drift Is Rewarded The Whole Way Down
Left alone, any seat migrates toward the three categories that arrive by themselves. Nothing about the migration is a matter of character. It is what the arrival pattern produces when nobody intervenes, and once it starts it seals itself shut.
Reliable delivery of arriving work builds relationship capital. Relationship capital routes more arriving work to the same person. The volume then confirms the original expectation of the role, and the altitude locks in place. Nobody behaves badly anywhere in that sequence. The person is rewarded at every step of the descent.
Two things keep the drift invisible.
The first is self-report. Ask a leader to estimate their own breakdown and the number comes back two to four times higher than a calendar audit produces. The inflation is honest. Relationship depth, meeting attendance and important-feeling work all read as strategic from the inside.
The second is that the redesign never registers as a miss. It had a completion date in June. It did not have an owner by name rather than by function, a written definition of what done looks like or a stated list of dependencies.
A commitment built that way cannot be missed. It can only quietly fail to occur, and a failure to occur produces no post-mortem and no correction.
Compare that to what happens when the compensation cycle slips. Somebody notices within a day, because a downstream date breaks and a person who was waiting starts asking. The cycle has a bell attached to it. The redesign has silence, and silence is indistinguishable from progress right up until the moment somebody opens the file.
The next planning cycle then inherits a transformation that is half done and unowned, and adds three more to the list.
Six leaders. One transformation. Six Readings.
Protiviti’s 2026 Global Executive Survey, run with the University of Oxford across more than 850 C-suite executives and released in June, sorted transformation confidence by chair. Operations reported the strongest overall confidence of any function. HR reported the lowest. The CEO and the board landed as the most skeptical perspective in the study.
Read that spread as disagreement and it looks like an alignment problem, which is how it is usually framed and usually addressed, with an offsite and a nice dinner.
Read it as measurement and something else appears. Operations sits closest to the work that arrives, and that work is getting done, reliably, at volume. HR sits closest to the work that has to be summoned, and it is not getting done. Both chairs are reporting accurately about different categories of work.
The CHRO holds the lowest confidence in the room for a reason that has nothing to do with temperament.
The CHRO is the only executive whose core mandate lives almost entirely inside the one category with no forcing function. Designing the human operating system. Raising the quality of judgment on the executive team. None of it arrives on its own.
All of it has to be defended into existence, every week, against work that does not.
That allocation is being set right now, in every function in your organization, by whoever happens to be asking. In most companies nobody chose it.
You are the only person in the building positioned to choose it.
“Jackson’s right that the choice sits with whoever is doing the asking. I’d add one thing from where we’ve seen success. Every client engagement we build at Gig Talent that sticks, started with naming which work has a bell attached to it and which doesn’t, then building a real allocation, owned by name, with a definition of done.”
— Jamie Jacobs
The people trusted with the hardest work are also the people everyone else has learned to interrupt. If the operating model doesn’t separate those two claims on their week, we’re not protecting the transformation. We’re scheduling its failure.
If your transformation has gone quiet and you’re not sure why, that quiet is the data. We’d like to help you find it before it costs you another quarter.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jamie Jacobs is CEO of Gig Talent, built to deliver principal-evel expertise deployed with precision to accelerate performance, culture, and growth. Her work is grounded in a simple belief: fear is the greatest barrier to transformation and courage expressed through bolder decisions, faster iteration, and more honest leadership is a multiplier that unlocks capability, innovation, and momentum inside organizations.
Jackson Lynch is the founder of Talent Sherpa, an executive advisor and former CHRO who works with CEOs, private equity leaders and CHROs to elevate human capital beyond a support function and into a driver of enterprise performance. He also hosts The Talent Sherpa Podcast.