Adolfo M. Carreño

Enterprise Transformation Leader · Scholar-Practitioner

Twenty years governing large-scale transformation produced a specific and uncomfortable conclusion: most transformation programs succeed on their own terms and fail on the organization’s. The pattern is structural. It lives in how organizations distribute decision authority, design accountability, and absorb, or quietly route around, the changes they nominally commit to.

The work that follows from that conclusion runs in two registers at once: large-scale delivery inside organizations where the structural pressures are unforgiving, and conceptual work that tries to make the patterns underneath visible.

The problems I keep encountering

Three problems surface consistently across industries and program types, and they tend to resist the same interventions.

The first is programs technically on track but losing organizational support. That friction almost never comes from pace. It sits between what leadership endorsed and what the organization actually committed to, and adding velocity to that gap just widens it.

The second is governance architectures that produce reporting without decision quality. Dashboards run, status updates arrive, but nobody with real authority resolves the choices that require actual trade-offs. Better reporting tells people what they already suspected; decision-rights redesign changes who can act.

The third is post-M&A and post-spin-off environments where the new entity has structure but not yet an operating identity. Organizations that sequence identity work after integration are still relitigating the merger five years in.

These three problems share a structure: a gap between the governance architecture as designed and the organizational conditions it operates in. They sit upstream of most of what executive teams recognize as transformation difficulty, and they are routinely misread as execution problems when they are governance problems.

The delivery record

The work that produced this perspective happened at scale. A $750M, 200-initiative transformation portfolio at Citi, governed across regulated multi-business-unit environments. The Latin America Enterprise PMO at Becton Dickinson, built from a greenfield mandate across 12 countries. The IT capability separation that took Cordis to a standalone enterprise. Technology risk capability deployment at Deloitte across four geographies and six service lines.

Each of those environments had its own form of complexity. What they shared was the same underlying question: how do you build governance structures that survive contact with the actual organization, not the organization the program plan assumed.

Research and writing

Research and practice feed each other. Advisory and delivery work surface the structural patterns. Doctoral research develops the frameworks that make those patterns legible to other practitioners.

Strategic Negotiation in Organizational Transformation (Omou Press, 2026) is the longer treatment of a related observation: most programs that stall do not stall on the strategy, they stall on a conversation that needed to happen and didn’t, or happened too late. It is a practitioner’s guide to the conversations that hold transformation together when the formal governance cannot reach them.

Two conceptual models, each developed in a working paper, sit at the center of the current research line: Transformation Immunity™ and Alignment Saturation. Each one specifies a mechanism that operates upstream of what most transformation programs treat as the problem. Both are part of a larger argument about why structurally similar failures keep repeating across industries that otherwise have very little in common.

Adjacent work, published in peer-reviewed journals, covers dynamic alignment, change governance, and regenerative transformation. Research Fellow, Universidad Europea del Atlántico.

What this site is for

The mandates worth taking on are the ones where the complexity is real, the stakeholder landscape is political, and the organization is serious about the change it says it wants. That is where governance architecture, organizational change, and transformation program leadership actually meet. This site is the public record of the thinking that comes out of that intersection: the published research, the working papers, the book, and the articles in English and Spanish.