What fusion cooking taught me about Business Transformation

Most of us who have worked for organisations have lived through at least one "big transformation", which promised everything but quietly faded away. 

New platforms launched, consultants turned up, ran workshops, and disappeared. Slide decks multiplied, and a year or two later, people were still emailing spreadsheets around and wondering what, if anything, had actually changed. That usually isn’t because the tech was bad. The deeper issue is that transformation isn’t really a technical problem at all. It’s a human one. That tension lies beneath many of today’s arguments about governance, innovation, and culture. And oddly enough, one of the clearest ways to make sense of it doesn’t come from IT manuals but from my Punjabi grandma’s home cooking.

Governance: Necessary Structure or Creative Stranglehold?

Ask a group of people what “governance” means, and you’ll usually hear two very different views. Some will say it’s essential. Clear rules create trust. They protect data, customers, and the organisation itself. Without that structure, things can fall apart very quickly and very publicly. Others will say governance is why nothing ever moves. Endless approvals, forms nobody reads, rules that feel like they exist mainly to slow things down, not to help anyone. Both perspectives have a point. The real issue isn’t governance as a concept. It’s governance without understanding. Rules that are still on the books, but whose purpose no one can remember. Controls that must be followed but are never really explained. When the pressure is on, those are the first things people work around. That’s not a failure of discipline. It’s a failure of meaning.

Culture Isn’t a “Soft” Issue. It’s Holding the Whole Thing Up.

There’s a line you hear a lot in transformation work: “The technology is ready. The people aren’t.” What that usually means is organisations are pouring money into systems, but not nearly enough into capability. People get handed new tools with very little context for why they’re built the way they are. Accountability, audit trails, and controls often feel like barriers rather than safeguards. So teams improvise; they build their own shadow systems, duplicate data, and quietly sidestep controls just to get the job done. Compliance gaps open silently and are uncovered, but very noisily down the line. This is where culture actually shows up in practice. It is not a value printed on a poster, but rather a shared understanding. When people genuinely know why something exists, they’re much more likely to defend it when it’s under strain.

What My Punjabi Grandma’s Cooking Can Tell Us About Rules

Our grandma’s cooking is packed with rules. Don’t rush the onions. Let the spices bloom properly. Reduce the sauce slowly. Seal the pot and leave it alone. To someone on the outside, those rules can look picky or old-fashioned. They’re not. Each one exists because someone, at some point, learned the hard way as to what happens when you skip it. Take bhunao, the slow cooking of onions, ginger, garlic, and spices until the oil separates. It isn’t about tradition just for the sake of it. It’s about building a depth of flavour you simply can’t fake or hurry. Skip that step, and the dish will taste flat, no matter what you throw in later. Governance works in much the same way. Controls exist because something once went wrong. When you lose the story behind them, all that’s left is annoyance instead of insight.

Fusion Only Works When You Know the Roots

Fusion food has a bad reputation when it’s careless. Just mixing flavours without understanding where they come from usually yields noise rather than harmony. The best fusion tends to come from people who’ve grown up between cultures. They know the original rules well enough to bend them without breaking the dish. Digital transformation isn’t that different. Borrowing agile methods, cloud platforms, or regulatory frameworks without understanding the context they came from often leads to very expensive disappointment. Rebranding old habits with new language doesn’t change how work is actually done. Real transformation happens when people understand both the systems they’re moving away from and the ones they’re building towards. Not just as translators, but as people who are fluent in both worlds.

Why So Many Transformations Fall Apart in Year Two

There’s a pattern a lot of practitioners recognise straight away. Year one looks good. Quick wins land. Energy is high. Senior leaders are paying attention. Then reality bites. The harder work of changing day-to-day behaviour begins. Early champions leave or get moved. Ownership gets fuzzy. Governance starts to feel heavier because the easy shortcuts are gone. Momentum stalls. That doesn’t come from a lack of ambition. It comes from treating people, processes, and technology as if they can move on different timelines. You can’t drag one forward and leave the others behind without shaking the whole system.

A Better Way Forward: Principles, Not Just Checklists

The organisations that cope best with change are gradually shifting away from rigid, rule-bound governance towards governance grounded in principles. Instead of only asking, “Did you follow the process?” they also ask, “Did you achieve the outcome safely, fairly, and transparently?” It’s a lot like how good cooks teach. You don’t just learn a recipe by rote. You learn why each step matters. Once you understand the principle, you can adapt it to your dish without losing its essence. In that kind of environment:

• Capability becomes part of governance, not an afterthought for a training team.

• Transparency is built into the process, rather than being treated as an additional administrative task.

• Rules start to do what they were meant to do in the first place: protect what’s important without choking progress.

Craft, Not Just Compliance

At its best, governance is a craft. So is cooking. Both depend on hard-won knowledge that has survived because, over time, it has proven to work. When organisations treat governance as nothing more than bureaucracy, people will push back. When they treat it as a kind of shared wisdom, people are more inclined to look after it. That shift in mindset is often where digital transformation either quietly embeds itself or falls apart in full view. So the real question isn’t whether we need more or fewer rules. It’s whether we still remember why those rules were created in the first place.