Exit Design

Change doesn’t fail at the start. It fails at the exit

The plan is delivered. The work is done. Momentum is visible.

Then the engagement ends and that’s when you find out whether anything actually stuck.

Does the organisation pick it up and run? Or does it quietly drift? Is a contract extension a sign of genuine appetite, or is it filling a gap that nobody wants to name?

The honest version of this is that exit design rarely gets the attention it deserves. From either party. It tends to be treated as a formality rather than a discipline. Something to sort in the final fortnight, once the real work is done.

In practice, the engagements that embed most durably are the ones where the question of who carries this forward was asked early and answered specifically. Not “the team” but a named person with a real mandate. Not “we’ll document everything” but a tested transfer of capability, with someone on the other side who actually owns it.

When that discipline is missing, the work tends to lose altitude after the consultant leaves. Not dramatically, just gradually. It’s rarely visible until someone looks back and wonders what happened to it. By then, the engagement is long closed.

The uncomfortable part isn’t that organisations sometimes struggle to absorb change. It’s that exit design is too often an afterthought. The exit should be as deliberate as the entry. Independence should be defined before it’s needed. Responsibility should be named, not assumed.

That’s not just good practice. It’s the point.