Change is hard.
At Intevity we have spent two decades helping large, complex organizations transform; modernizing systems, redesigning processes, realigning teams, and unlocking real business value. We’ve seen firsthand how much friction there is in navigating the old and adopting the new. But we’ve also seen the payoff: agility, scale, and clarity on the other side.

For a boutique consultancy, the work of transforming ourselves can be just as difficult. Sometimes even harder.

And like many firms, we fall into the classic cobbler’s children have no shoes trap. We preach transformation externally yet tolerate clutter, legacy decisions, and status-quo processes internally.

Over the past year, we’ve forced ourselves to confront this. And in doing so, we realized a few truths about why boutique firms stay stuck (and how to break out of it without burning the place down).

1. The Small Things Add Up (And Create Invisible Drag)

Internal change doesn’t always fail because of massive decisions; it often fails because of the stuff we stopped noticing:

• The same project-planning template we’ve used for years
• The estimation spreadsheet everyone quietly complains about
• The staffing model that “still works well enough”
• The same types of capabilities and pricing that have worked well for years

These things sit in the category of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

This is familiarity blindness; once something becomes routine, you stop questioning it altogether. These “little legacy artifacts” compound over time and build friction into how the firm operates. When we finally started redesigning them, we realized how much value they were quietly suppressing.

Often, the smallest upgrades unlock the biggest improvements.

2. Most Process Redesign Spends Too Much Time Looking Back

We’ve all seen the classic consulting playbook:

• Spend weeks documenting the current-state (“as-is”) process
• Produce mountains of documentation
• Hold countless working sessions digging into edge cases
• Finally design the future state

I’ve found that for most processes, documenting the as-is is a waste of time.

In reality:

• The as-is is usually messy, inconsistent, and no one wants to own it
• When you dig into complications, you often hit the “because we always did it that way” wall
• People spend more time defending the current process than reimagining the next one
• It anchors thinking to the past instead of freeing it

We get better results when we run an “Imagine the Future” workshop instead. Put yourself 12 months ahead. Assume today’s constraints are gone. If we were starting fresh, what would the process look like? What would it unlock?

This mindset removes the politics, the nostalgia, and the sunk cost.

Once you design the future state, the path from as-is to to-be becomes obvious.

3. People Don’t Resist Change; They Resist Ambiguity

Resistance to change is real. But in practice, we’ve found that most people aren’t resisting the new… they’re resisting not knowing where they fit in the new, or they simply lack clarity on what “new” looks like.

It’s the same reason you can live in the same house for 20 years and never realize your living room layout is terrible until an interior designer shows you what it could look like.

You didn’t resist moving the couch.
You resisted imagining what was possible.

Inside organizations, it’s the same. People need to see the future state to trust it. For us, this meant bringing in outside facilitators, external benchmarking, and more visual storytelling.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is show people the other side of the change.

4. AI Isn’t the Point; It Is a Catalyst

Phew… I made it to point four before having to mention AI.

The problems above have existed for decades. New technologies have always served as catalysts: ERP systems, CRMs, cloud platforms, workflow automation. AI is simply the next one.

But here’s the difference:
AI makes designing the future state dramatically easier.

Instead of staring at a blank whiteboard:

• We prototype new workflows in minutes
• We generate multiple future-state variations
• We evaluate how a process could operate at 5× scale before changing anything
• We test and pressure-test new structures, templates, and models

And let’s be honest: no one wants to fix a spreadsheet when it requires a mountain of formulas, or rework a PowerPoint deck when the master slides are a Frankenstein patchwork of inherited templates.

Is AI overhyped? Absolutely.
Is the value real when applied to actual operational problems?
Also yes.

If AI is what nudges your firm past inertia, let it be the catalyst.

How We Are Making Internal Transformation Real

Here are the practical habits that are changing how we operate.

1. Daily Micro-Experiments (My Morning Gym Routine)

I block time every morning (ideally at the gym) to experiment with new tools and evaluate what has changed in the last day or two. Not theoretical AI; real workflows:

• Can this help with a deck I’m producing this week?
• Could it shorten a scoping process?
• Can it redesign a proposal or workflow?
• Does this improve how we staff a project?

This muscle keeps me aware of what’s possible and helps me see where legacy processes are quietly holding us back.

And the tools are improving quickly. Six months ago, AI-powered slide creation wasn’t usable for us. Now we’ve begun incorporating it into our workflow.

2. Regular “Re-Found the Company” Workshops

We force ourselves to step out of the day-to-day and run the same transformation workshop on ourselves that we would run for a client.

We ask:

• If we were founding this company today, how would it operate?
• What capabilities would we add? Remove?
• What would our staffing model look like?
• What processes would we design from scratch?
• Which legacy assumptions no longer hold true?

Doing this offsite, away from Slack, client fires, and travel, lets the team think clearly.

This shifts large transformations from daunting to inevitable. Once you paint a crisp picture of the future state, the next steps become obvious and achievable.

The Real Lesson: Boutique Firms Must Work Harder to Stay New

Big companies struggle to change because they’re complex.
Small companies struggle because they’re comfortable.

The danger for boutique firms isn’t chaos; it’s stagnation disguised as stability.

But here’s the opportunity:
When a small firm decides to reinvent itself, it can move faster than any enterprise.

We’ve been doing it, and the momentum is building quickly.

Internal transformation isn’t a project.
It’s a discipline.

And if we expect clients to embrace the future, we owe it to ourselves to do the same.