Control · Stabilise · Correct.
A turnaround is a sequence, not a scramble.
Every red programme I take over runs through the same three moves, in the same order. It isn’t improvisation and it isn’t heroics — it’s a repeatable, governance-first method. Fix the deciding before the doing, and the delivery follows.
Truth, then plan, then delivery.
- Find the real scope of the mess, not the reported one.
- Map who’s accountable — and who actually decides.
- Say the unsayable early: recoverable, or stop it?
- Rebuild governance: clear rights, real accountability.
- Make the unpopular calls before the politics makes them.
- Reset vendor governance — obligations, not goodwill.
- Land an early win to prove it can move again.
- Reconnect governance to delivery so it stops being theatre.
- Report honestly, on cadence, in front of everyone.
Bending a red programme back to green.
Illustrative — the shape of the method, not figures from any engagement. The decline halts in Control, the line lifts through Stabilise, and Correct carries it into delivery.
Fix the deciding before the doing.
Most programmes don’t fail on technology. They fail because decision rights, accountability and risk ownership are unclear.
So the method refuses to start with a new plan. A plan built in week one is built on the fiction everyone has already agreed to. Control gets the truth and the map. Stabilise rebuilds the governance that decides. Only then does Correct deliver — because now there’s something solid to deliver against. Truth before plan; map before Gantt; decision rights before delivery. That order is the whole method.
Walk the method through a real scenario.
The turnaround playbook takes Control · Stabilise · Correct through the first 90 days of an inherited red programme — interactively, politics and all.
Open the interactive playbook →