Carl von Clausewitz gave the problem its lasting name two centuries ago. War, he wrote in On War, is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action rests are wrapped in a kind of fog. He meant battlefields. He could just as easily have meant the modern enterprise transformation, where the stakes run to billions, the systems are too tangled for any one person to hold in their head, and the picture is never complete by the time a decision comes due.
Branden Pearson works in that fog for a living. A project leader at a top-tier global consulting firm, he advises on large-scale transformation in the aerospace and defense sector, where Clausewitz’s line isn’t a metaphor so much as a daily operating condition. And the pattern he keeps running into is the one the numbers keep confirming. Roughly 70 percent of organizational transformations fail to meet their objectives, a figure reaffirmed in 2026 by a survey of 6,000 executives and employees across fifteen countries, and one that has held with uncomfortable consistency across decades of new industries and new methodologies.
The standard diagnosis blames complexity, or resistance, or the plan itself. Pearson’s is less flattering to the people in charge. The failures, the way he sees it, rarely come from a shortage of information. They come from what leaders do when the information stops short of certainty, which is to say when it stops at all. The hardest part of his job, he told me, isn’t the analysis. It’s the moment the analysis runs out and a decision still has to be made.
The price of waiting
Organizations tend to respond to fog the way Clausewitz’s cautious generals did. They wait for the fog to lift. More analysis, more alignment, one more round of validation before anyone signs their name. Pearson’s warning is that certainty carries a price most teams never read. Every week spent waiting for clarity is a week the underlying problem compounds, and at some point the refusal to choose hardens into a choice of its own. Usually the worst one available.
The discipline he teaches is calibration, not nerve, and he’s upfront that the core distinction isn’t his invention. It’s circulated in decision-making circles for years, most famously as the language of one-way and two-way doors. The useful question is never whether you feel sure. You won’t. The useful question is whether the decision can be undone. Reversible calls reward speed, because the cost of being wrong is just a course correction. Irreversible ones earn their deliberation. What Pearson brings to it is what he’s watched happen in the field: how rarely that distinction survives contact with a real organization. Under pressure, leaders start treating a vendor selection with the same gravity as a plant closure. Every door becomes one-way. And a capable enterprise reasons itself into paralysis.
What the model can’t hold
There’s a second failure mode, and it’s the one the frameworks handle worst. When transformations collapse, the spreadsheet is rarely the culprit. The pattern Pearson keeps coming back to, and the research bears it out, is that efforts stall when leaders win the analysis and lose the room. A model can tell a team what to do. It can’t make a tired, skeptical group believe the disruption is worth it. And belief, not logic, is what carries an initiative through the long middle stretch, after the launch energy burns off and before the results show up.
On the limits of his own trade, Pearson is unusually direct. “I build models for a living,” he says. “None of them have a line for the soul.” A Christian who doesn’t partition his faith off from his professional thinking, he credits consulting with teaching him plenty about acting without certainty, and faith with teaching him the thing the frameworks couldn’t: that you can move forward in good conscience without controlling how it ends.
It’s a strange thing to hear from a man whose industry sells certainty by the hour, which may be why he keeps saying it. Two hundred years on, the fog hasn’t lifted, and it isn’t going to. The leaders who beat the 70 percent, in Pearson’s experience, aren’t the ones who finally got sure.
They’re the ones who learned to decide without certainty.
Branden Pearson is a management consultant specializing in large-scale transformation in the aerospace and defense sector. He writes about faith, ambition, and staying unhurried inside a high-intensity profession at Branden Pearson’s Substack. The views expressed here are his own and do not represent those of his employer or its clients.
