Working papers

Responsible Transformation

Staying answerable after the project has gone

Terry Cooke-Davies. Position paper for the Responsible Project Management community. Draft for discussion, 5 November 2026. Comments and disagreement welcome.

1. The question

The Manifesto for Responsible Project Management asks project professionals to anticipate the consequences of their projects. It asks them to be aware of potential impacts, including unintended ones, and to weigh the needs of people, planet and profit over the short, medium and long term. This paper argues for one further step. Responsible transformation asks that someone remains answerable for those consequences after the project has gone.

The phrase “responsible transformation” came up at a meeting of the Responsible Project Management Café on 2 November 2026. The meeting was facilitated by Shirley Thompson and Nick Lambrou. Brendan D’Cruz, John Chisholm and I were the others taking part. I thought at the time that I had been first to use the phrase, responding to something Brendan said; others remembered it differently. It does not matter. The phrase belongs to that conversation, and this paper is my attempt to say what it triggered in me.

A point Nick made in the same meeting resonated strongly with me. Over the following days it has led me to a distinction between two kinds of change: continuous change, which goes on all the time in people, organisations and the natural world, and discontinuous change, which is what projects are for. The distinction is not new to me. It was at the root of my earliest interest in projects. In 1990 I described a project as a piece of work with a specific objective, a beginning and an end, and argued that project management was the mechanism that allows innovation and change to take place (Cooke-Davies 1990b). In the same year I argued that corporate culture was both the most important influence on project performance and the hardest to change (Cooke-Davies 1990a).

My doctoral research (Cooke-Davies 2000) and the papers that followed it (Cooke-Davies 2002, 2003a, 2003b) were concerned with the gap between delivering a project and achieving what it was for. More recently I have been writing about how the consequences of what we do correct, or fail to correct, the way we act (Cooke-Davies 2026a, 2026b, 2026d, 2026f, forthcoming). This paper draws those threads together. It is not a new theory. It is an attempt to say plainly and coherently what more than thirty-five years of looking at projects has taught me about responsibility. The earlier papers are available at insearchofwisdom.online/pm-research-papers.

2. Two kinds of change

Continuous change is the ordinary cycle by which any living thing learns. We act. Something happens as a result. We notice it, adjust, and act again. A cook tastes the soup, finds it too salty, and uses less salt next time. I have described this cycle more fully elsewhere (Cooke-Davies 2026b, forthcoming). It runs in every person, in every team and in every organisation’s day-to-day operations. It runs in cultures, which keep what one generation learns and pass it to the next. It runs, on much longer timescales, in living things and in the physical world. It does not stop.

Discontinuous change is different. A project sets out to move something from one state to another within a defined time. It fixes an objective, draws a boundary around the work, assembles a temporary organisation, and disbands that organisation when the work is done. This is what makes projects useful. Without the ability to hold an objective steady and concentrate effort on it, an organisation could improve what it already does but could not do anything new.

The point I want to make is this. The discontinuity is in the arrangement, not in the world. The plan, the baseline, the scope and the closure date are things we decide. The world does not observe them. It goes on responding to what the project did, in the same continuous way, after the project team has moved on. The consequences of a project arrive on their own timetable, and they arrive whether or not anyone is still there to receive them.

This matters more as the scale increases. Cultures change faster than the living systems they depend on, and living systems change faster than the physical world. Human culture is very good at copying what visibly succeeds. It is much less good at copying what quietly prevents failure, because successful prevention leaves nothing to see (Cooke-Davies 2026c). Geoffrey Vickers made a related distinction between producing what is wanted and regulating the relationships on which production depends (Vickers 1972). Production is visible and rewarded. Regulation is mostly invisible until it fails. The slowest consequences, those that pass through living systems and the physical world, are the ones least likely to reach anyone who can do something about them. Often they arrive years or decades later, on people who had no part in the decision.

So every transformation, whether of a person, a project or an organisation, is a deliberate discontinuity set inside continuous processes that carry on regardless. That is the frame for the rest of this paper.

3. What the Manifesto already asks

The Manifesto sets out ten principles. In summary, they ask project professionals to understand the intentions behind a project from different perspectives; to be aware of its potential impacts and unintended consequences; to involve a wide range of stakeholders in decisions; to look for ethical complexity and hidden impacts; to recognise what is not known; to anticipate change and evaluate options; to make room for creativity; to be open with stakeholders; to manage human and natural resources with care; and to balance the needs of people, planet and profit over the short, medium and long term (Responsible Project Management n.d.).

These are good principles, and they reach further than a quick reading suggests. Stewardship and balance both look beyond the life of the project. But almost everything the Manifesto asks is something the project professional does while the project exists. Anticipation, awareness, curiosity and openness are all forms of foresight. They help the project form a better picture of what its consequences will be.

A picture of future consequences is a forecast. However careful, a forecast cannot be shown to be correct in advance. Some consequences will be foreseen and some will not. Some that were foreseen will turn out differently. What corrects a forecast is what actually happens, and most of what actually happens happens after the project has closed.

So the Manifesto treats consequences as something to foresee and weigh. It says less about consequences as something that comes back to someone who can respond. That is the gap this paper addresses. It is not a criticism of the Manifesto. It follows from the Manifesto’s own concern with unintended consequences. If we take those seriously, we have to ask who will be there to notice them.

4. Four layers, one question

Project professionals already have a vocabulary for how change moves through an organisation: projects, programmes, portfolios and business as usual. Each of these layers handles consequences differently, and so does the sponsor, the one role meant to span them. Some consequences escape all of them. The same question can be asked of each: who is still here to answer when the consequences arrive?

The project

A project is judged against time, cost, quality and scope. In research during the 1990s with more than seventy organisations, following De Wit (1988) I distinguished between project management success, measured against those criteria, and project success, measured against the purpose the project was meant to serve (Cooke-Davies 2002). Project management success requires what I called first-order control: the goals are held constant and the practices adjusted to meet them. That is the discontinuity described above. It is also why the project team is rarely the right place to look for answerability. By design, it disbands at handover.

The sponsor

One role is designed to span the discontinuity: the executive sponsor. In 2005 Paul Dinsmore and I described five roles a sponsor needs to play: owner of the business case, harvester of benefits, governor of the project, friend in high places to the project manager, and visible champion (Dinsmore and Cooke-Davies 2005; Cooke-Davies 2005). Of these, harvester of benefits matters most here. Benefits cannot be harvested until the project has been completed and its product handed over and put to use. By then the project team has usually been disbanded. The sponsor, as part of the permanent organisation, is better placed to see what happens next (Cooke-Davies 2005; Crawford and Cooke-Davies 2007).

Our later empirical review of sponsorship, based on 36 projects and programmes in nine organisations on five continents, found that sponsorship is rarely one person’s job (Crawford et al. 2008). It is usually shared among steering committees, project boards and a hierarchy of sponsors, and it combines two aspects, governance and support, whose balance depends on the situation. That finding sharpens the question this paper asks: when ownership is spread so widely, who actually receives the consequences? We found at least one organisation with a clear answer. It judged time, cost and quality at the end of the project but went on measuring benefits during and after closure. Most of the projects we studied, though, were still under way when we looked at them. Like the practice it describes, the research saw sponsorship mainly during the life of the project.

The sponsor's five roles all face the organisation and its business case. None of them faces consequences that were never in the business case, or consequences that land outside the organisation. Responsible sponsorship would widen the role of harvester of benefits to include receiving consequences: the unintended as well as the intended, and those borne by people beyond the enterprise as well as within it. I know that Responsible Project Management has begun work on sponsorship, and I hope this point is useful to it. I mention it here and leave the fuller treatment to that work.

The programme

Benefits are not delivered by the project team. They depend on what operations management does with what the project produces (Cooke-Davies 2002). Project success therefore requires second-order control, in which both goals and methods may change. A programme is the arrangement that carries a change across the gap between delivery and use. It is the first layer at which someone may still be present when consequences begin to arrive. Whether they are depends on how long the programme stays open after delivery, and on whether its sponsor treats benefits realisation as a reporting task or as a time to find out what has actually happened.

The portfolio

The portfolio is where an organisation decides how much discontinuous change its continuous operations can absorb. In 2003 I described a large organisation that had set up a governance committee to look across all its business units at the total programme of change and its effect on business as usual (Cooke-Davies 2003a). That committee was, in effect, a place where the consequences of change could be heard at the level of the whole organisation. Many organisations have nothing equivalent. Where portfolio assurance exists, it tends to concentrate on delivery, because delivery is the consequence that has someone in the room to answer for it (Vo, Williams et al. 2021; Cooke-Davies forthcoming).

Business as usual

Business as usual is where most consequences of change land, and where the continuous cycle carries on. It is also, very often, the layer with least say in the change. In the same 2003 paper I listed the problems general managers had identified with change projects. One was measuring the progress of the plan rather than the change accomplished. Another was the sidelining of people affected by the change, whose knowledge was never brought into the project (Cooke-Davies 2003a). Both describe consequences that were available to be heard and were not.

Beyond the organisation

Some consequences land outside the organisation altogether: on local communities, on people not yet born, on the natural world. None of these has a seat at the project board, the programme board or the portfolio committee. The Manifesto’s concern for people and planet points directly at them. The question is not only whether they were considered when the project was planned. It is also where the consequences of the project actually travelled, who bore them, and whether anything those people later experience can find its way back to someone who can respond (Cooke-Davies 2026d).

In 2003 I suggested that the capacity to deliver beneficial change has three parts, each with its own question. Project management capability asks whether the project was done right. Project sponsorship capability asks whether the right project was done. Organisational project capability asks whether the right projects are done right, time after time (Cooke-Davies 2003b; Dinsmore and Cooke-Davies 2005). Responsible transformation adds a fourth question: are we still answering for what our projects did?

5. What answerability needs in practice

For a consequence to correct anything, it has to get back to someone who can act on it. That journey can fail at several points, and each point needs different attention (Cooke-Davies 2026e).

First, the consequence has to occur and reach someone. Many arrangements are set up, whether intentionally or not, so that consequences land on people other than those who made the decision. A contractor who has been paid and has left the site will not feel what happens to the building ten years later.

Second, it has to be noticed. Some consequences are hard to notice because they are absences: something that used to be there and no longer is. Only someone who remembers what should be there can see what is missing.

Third, it has to be traced to the act. This does not need a complete causal map. It needs only that someone can see that this consequence has something to do with that decision.

Fourth, it has to meet someone with standing to respond: someone who can change what happens next. A consequence that is noticed and traced by someone with no standing produces frustration, not correction.

These are principles, not a procedure. Applied to the four layers, they suggest questions rather than steps. For a project: whose consequences will arrive after we close, and who will receive them? Will the sponsor still be answerable to the bearers? For a programme: how long do we stay open after delivery, and what are we looking for? For a portfolio: where in the organisation can the consequences of change be heard, and does anyone with authority hear them? For business as usual: are the people who live with the change asked what they are noticing, and does what they say reach anyone who can act? And for all of them: which consequences will land beyond the organisation, and is there any route by which they can come back?

One further test is useful. Some evidence can be made to look better without anything actually getting better; other evidence cannot. A project can report a milestone as met by quietly redefining the milestone. But if customers stop complaining because the problem has really been fixed, nothing on paper could have produced that result. The second kind of evidence deserves more weight, because it can only improve when the situation itself improves.

6. Personal transformation

When a person changes, the one who acts and the one who bears the consequences are the same. Nothing disbands. Someone who sets out to change a habit, finds it harder than expected, and adjusts, has gone through a discontinuity without losing touch with what follows from it. That makes personal transformation a useful standard. An organisation is not a person, but its arrangements can be judged by how closely they keep the people who decide in touch with what follows.

I learned this early, and not comfortably. In 1985 I was asked to manage a project for a subsidiary of a European computer manufacturer. It involved developing new systems and also changing the way people did business. The client liked the work and asked me to train their software project managers. My colleagues and I developed a project management toolkit and trained every project manager and potential project manager in its use. Each left the course with a fully documented plan for a live project. The client regarded the programme as a great success.

I was not so sure. I carried out an informal audit of project performance and could see no appreciable improvement. When I asked why, I found first that project managers had too little control over their own time and resources because of how the organisation was structured. It was some two years later before I saw what had been in front of me all along: the culture rewarded activity and quick fixes, and training alone would not change that (Cooke-Davies 1990a).

I tell this story because the client’s judgement of success was made at the point of delivery. The training was delivered well. Its consequences, or the absence of them, arrived later. I happened still to be there, and curious enough to look. Nothing in the arrangement required me to. If I had moved on to the next assignment, as consultants usually do, the programme would have remained a success on paper.

The same 1990 paper contained a sentence I would still stand by: culture change does not happen to him or to her; it happens to me. Every organisational transformation is made of many personal ones. People who are asked to change how they work will notice consequences that no report records. Responsible transformation means treating what they notice as evidence, not as resistance.

7. What this asks of each role

Of project professionals: plan for the return of consequences as well as for delivery. Before closure, identify which consequences will arrive after the team has gone, and name who will receive them. Make that part of the handover.

Of sponsors: treat benefits realisation as the start of a period of finding out what has happened, not the end of a reporting obligation. Remain answerable for the consequences of the project you sponsored, including those nobody expected.

Of portfolio boards and governance bodies: create a place where the consequences of change can be heard across the whole organisation, and give it standing. Ask how much discontinuous change business as usual can absorb, and ask the people who work in business as usual.

Of line managers: most consequences of change land on you and your teams. What you notice is information the organisation cannot get any other way. Make sure it reaches someone who can act on it.

Of all of us: be clear about which consequences will land beyond the organisation, on communities, on future people and on the natural world, and about whether any route exists by which they can come back. Where none exists, say so.

References

Cooke-Davies, T. J. (1990a) Changing corporate culture to improve project performance. IPMA (formerly INTERNET) Conference, Vienna.

Cooke-Davies, T. J. (1990b) Return of the project managers. Management Today, May 1990, 119ff.

Cooke-Davies, T. J. (2000) Towards improved project management practice: uncovering the evidence for effective practices through empirical research. PhD thesis, Leeds Metropolitan University. Published 2001, USA: Dissertation.com.

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Cooke-Davies, T. J. (2003a) Do “business change” projects really change the business? PMI Global Congress Europe, The Hague, Netherlands.

Cooke-Davies, T. J. (2003b) Delivering change. Project Manager Today, November 2003.

Cooke-Davies, T. J. (2005) The executive sponsor – the hinge upon which organisational project management maturity turns? PMI Global Congress EMEA, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Cooke-Davies, T. J. (2026a) Beyond override. Paper presented at the EURAM 2026 Conference, Kristiansand, Norway.

Cooke-Davies, T. J. (2026b) How the layers were laid down. insearchofwisdom.online, October 2026.

Cooke-Davies, T. J. (2026c) What travels and what stays behind. Briefing Three, working paper, fourth draft, 13 October 2026.

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Cooke-Davies, T. J. (2026e) Before we say ‘consequence’. Working paper, first draft, 22 October 2026.

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Vo, H., Kirkham, R. J., Williams, T. M., Howells, A., Forster, R. and Cooke-Davies, T. (2021) An empirical study of assurance in the UK government major projects portfolio. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 14(4), 865–897.