When the Pilot Survives the Audit
Why the successful pilot is so often the thing that kills the rollout, and the governance move that breaks the pattern.
Advancing the science and practice of organizational transformation.
We research how governance, leadership, and institutional decision-making shape organizational resilience. We publish evidence, advise leaders, develop analytical tools, and provide expert analysis that helps organizations, and the legal system, understand why complex transformations succeed or fail.
Publish evidence
Case files, white papers, and reports that put governance findings on the record.
Advise leaders
Direct counsel to boards and executives carrying transformation of their own.
Develop tools
Analytics and benchmarks that turn the research into instruments you can run.
Provide expert analysis
Independent analysis for organizations and the legal system when transformations are contested.
The agenda
Five questions the research sets out to answer.
Governance
How do governance decisions influence organizational outcomes?
Tracing outcomes back to the decisions, and the decision rights, that produced them.
Leadership
What leadership behaviors enable successful transformation?
The observable behaviors that move change from announced to sustained.
Institutions
Why do some organizations become resilient while others fail?
What resilient organizations build before the stress event ever arrives.
Technology
How is technology actually governed, independent of outcome?
Oversight for systems that outpace the structures meant to govern them.
Evidence
What does the public record reveal about governance and outcomes?
Reading litigation, audits, and public records for the decisions that shaped what happened next.
The research agenda, in full. Five threads, one body of evidence.
Explore the agendaContents
The work, in five parts.
Est. 2026
Research
The evidence base. Primary study of governance in the field.
Research AgendaDatasetsResearch Projects
02Publications
What the research becomes. Argued, edited, and on the record.
Case FilesArticlesWhite PapersResearch NotesAnnual Reports
03Briefings
The research, in conversation. Watch and listen.
The Governance FilesTransformidable BriefingWebinar ArchiveLive Sessions
04Tools
The research, turned outward. Instruments you can run on yourself.
Governance CodebookGovernance WatchBenchmarksRisk Models
05Events
Where the findings are argued in the room. Roundtables and briefings.
RoundtablesBriefings
06About
Who does the work, how it is funded, and the standards it is held to.
MissionPeopleStandards
Case File No. 001 · From the field
UCPath
An ordinary payroll modernization that became a near-billion-dollar case study in governance that could deliver but could not see itself.
Read the case fileExhibit AThe UCPath Governance
UCPath Conceived
2009
UCPath is conceived as part of UC's "Working Smarter" efficiency initiative. [CSA 2016-125.2, p. 5–6]
Initiation
2011
UC awards Oracle a contract to build UCPath. Business case: $170M to build / $306M all-in, live by August 2014, $753M in savings (≈90% from cutting payroll/HR headcount from ~2,743 to ~1,224). [p. 1, 6, 7]
March 2013
Status Update
Status update describes the project as "7 or 8 percent over budget"; it is actually 30 percent over. [p. 21]
2013
Oracle Released as Lead
UC releases Oracle as implementation lead for failure to perform and takes project management in-house. [p. 7]
July 2014
Budget Discrepancy
Project director tells the Regents the estimate is $220M; UC's internal records one month earlier show $345M. [p. 21]
2014
Bond Financing
Regents approve $221M in bond financing; UC begins levying assessments on campuses to fund the shortfall. [p. 10]
July 2015
Status Request
Regents direct the Office of the President to keep them informed. The next substantive update does not come until April 2017. [p. 22]
November 2015
First Deployment
First deployment (UCPath Center + Office of the President), nearly three years behind the original schedule. [p. 8]
2017
Project Savings
Reported build cost reaches $504M; true all-in ~$942M; completion pushed to June 2019; projected savings no longer expected. [p. 1, 16, 18]
July 2017
Regents Communication
UC adds the Regents to the UCPath governance document (triggers: cost impact >$20M or delay >3 months) — but as one-way communication only. [p. 23]
August 2017
Auditor Report
California State Auditor issues Report 2016-125.2.
2018
Auditor Report
Follow-up (Report 2018-406) finds most IT-governance recommendations still Pending, Partially Implemented, or No Action Taken. [CSA 2018-406, p. 39–40]
June 2019
Full Deployment
Planned full deployment / end of post-deployment support. [CSA 2016-125.2, p. 1]
Tools · Governance Analytics
Turn the research into a number you can track.
Coming soonThe Governance Resilience Index
A standing benchmark built from the case files, scoring how well a sector’s governance is set up to carry transformation without breaking. Run it on your own organization, then see where you sit against your peers.
Coming soonResilience Index, all sectors
Rolling, indexed to 100 at launch
68 ↑6
Q3 2026
Credit unions74
Community banks61
Public agencies48
Healthcare systems43
Figure 1 · Illustrative index values, pending first release.
Latest publications
A Governance Resilience Index: Methodology and First Findings
The full construction of the index: what it measures, what it deliberately does not, and how the first sector scores were derived.
Resilience Is a Governance Property, Not an Operational One
Organizations keep trying to buy resilience with tooling. The evidence says it is decided upstream, in how oversight is structured.
The State of Governance 2025
One year of case files, read together: where transformation held, where it reverted, and what the difference kept coming down to.