A few months ago, a Swiss company with 2,000 employees shared its ambition with us: to expand beyond the canton of Geneva.
The vision was clear and the resources were there.
Yet something was holding the expansion back, without anyone being able to clearly identify the root cause.
If you’ve ever had the feeling that “everything is in place, but it’s still not moving forward,” you know what this looks like.
During our first conversation, the director told us something we hear quite often:
We have everything we need. But it’s not moving.
You could sense the fatigue. For months, the teams had felt like they were going in circles.
This situation is more common than we think:
organizations with strong ambitions and real resources, yet facing an invisible constraint.
We didn’t propose a solution right away. Instead, we asked a simple question:
“What, concretely, is blocking you when you try to expand into a new canton?”
Silence.
Then: “Honestly? We don’t really know.”
So we explored further. Not the high-level strategy, but the details, the operational friction points.
After 45 minutes, the answer emerged, almost naturally:
“Every time we try to replicate our operations elsewhere, our IT doesn’t keep up. We end up improvising.”
That was it.
The issue wasn’t purely strategic. It was also structural. Their IT system wasn’t designed to scale, and that had never been clearly articulated.
That’s often the case.
The real constraint isn’t always where you first look. It sits in the blind spots, in what has always been taken for granted.
The next step was to identify the right expertise., not just profiles that look good on paper.
This is a family-owned business, with a strong culture, clear values, and disciplined resource management.
We activated our network. We screened out many profiles: too corporate, too rigid, or simply not aligned with their context.
Then we identified a complementary duo: a strategy expert and an IT expert who had already worked together.
We presented 4 options. They chose that combination. In our last exchange, the director told us:
“The most surprising part is that we were looking for the solution in the wrong place from the start.”
What this experience reminds us:
Organizations often know where they want to go. But the real constraint sometimes lies elsewhere, where no one thinks to look.
And more often than not, it starts with asking the right questions.
Juliette Jain
The Links