If the constructive integration and motivation of everyone involved is successful, the strategy review represents an important milestone for the steering of the transformation in terms of content and management. This motivational aspect is, at a minimum, just as important as the content of the strategy for the success of the transformation. Studies show that political, motivational, and emotional causes are mentioned significantly more frequently as the reasons for the failure of projects than technical or organizational challenges.

What Does Successful Mean?

Jørn Utzon will certainly have had his own personal assessment of whether the opera house seen in Sydney today is a successful realization of his vision. But as a project, the construction of this theater was certainly not a masterpiece of project management. Besides the massive disputes carried out in public view which led to Utzon's dismissal, there were many other critical points which would surely have driven many financial investors to abandon a similar project in the business world long before its completion. The construction time was almost ten years longer than planned, and the budget was exceed by an enormous 1400%. Despite this, Utzon and other critics deplored at the time of the opening the compromises which, although they lowered the costs, resulted in a less than ideal execution of the project, especially of the interior appointments. Of the approximately 100 rooms in the opera house, only one was ultimately truly realized according to Utzon's plans. This hall with the large windows to the sea was named after its architect in 2004, more than 30 years after completion of the opera house.     

In the eyes of the world, the problems in the technical realization of the project are long since history. The opera house in Sydney is today one of the most striking and famous buildings of the 20th century, and our mental picture of Australia would be incomplete without it. Jørn Utzon was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2003, a kind of Nobel Prize for architecture.    

So the opera house in Sydney is an encouraging symbol for transformation processes in companies. Despite the raw, ivory tower-like vision, despite the difficulties in the course of the project, and despite the complaints about the final product, the opera house in Sydney finally came to represent a gigantic success. Professionally handling large-scale transformations means accepting that visionary projects cannot, by their nature, be planned perfectly and that it is perfectly natural when their realization more or less takes a different course than the one originally set. The art in managing them is to deal constructively with the unexpected and to shape a transformation process which is both motivating and successful.