A programme gets a new reporting system. Someone spent weeks designing it. It covers all the right data points. It goes live. Six weeks later, half the team are still using the old spreadsheet, and the other half is filling in the new system incorrectly. The instinct is to blame adoption. Run more training. Get leadership to reinforce the message. Chase compliance harder. But that diagnosis is wrong. And applying the wrong fix to a structural problem doesn’t just fail to solve it. It usually makes the next attempt harder.
The real issue started before the reporting system arrived. The programme wasn’t structurally ready to receive it.
What a study about social entrepreneurs got exactly right
Earlier this year, a team of researchers published a paper in the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research examining whether university training actually helps social entrepreneurs believe they can scale their ventures. They surveyed 446 social entrepreneurs across 11 universities in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. The finding was not what most people in entrepreneurship education would want to hear. Training on its own didn’t produce the belief that scaling was possible. That belief only emerged when training first strengthened four specific competencies: raising finance, understanding markets, persuading stakeholders, and building networks. Without those competencies already developing, the training existed, but couldn’t be absorbed. The knowledge was available. The capacity to use it wasn’t there yet. The researchers framed this through the concept of absorptive capacity, a term first developed by Cohen and Levinthal in 1990 to describe a firm’s ability to recognise the value of new knowledge, assimilate it, and apply it to productive ends. Zahra and George later extended this concept, distinguishing between a potential absorptive capacity, the ability to acquire and assimilate knowledge, and a realised absorptive capacity, the ability to transform and exploit it. In both formulations, the underlying logic is the same: you cannot take in and apply what you are not yet structured to receive.
I read that finding and recognised something immediately. The same dynamic plays out in funded research programme governance, and it plays out constantly.
The governance version of the same problem
When I joined a nationally funded multi-partner research programme, one of the first things I noticed was that reporting happened in retrospect. After a period closed, someone would spend days reconstructing what had happened: what money had been spent, which partners had delivered what, which milestones had been reached or missed. The data existed in fragments across emails, spreadsheets, and meeting notes. Pulling it together was a significant exercise every single time. The programme wasn’t struggling because people weren’t trying. It was struggling because no one had built the continuous visibility infrastructure that makes real-time accountability possible. Reporting was being reconstructed after the fact because there was no system that captured it as it happened.
Within weeks of joining, the diagnosis was clear. Before any governance intervention could land and stay, the programme needed a structural foundation that didn’t yet exist. That meant building a shared tracking system, establishing a monthly reconciliation rhythm, and embedding reporting checkpoints into existing workflows rather than treating them as a separate annual task. Once that foundation was in place, the governance layer worked. NIHR reporting compliance reached 100% and stayed there. The annual Researchfish submission, which had previously required one to two months of data chasing across the team, was completed in under a week. Reporting preparation time dropped by over 70%. Not because people changed their behaviour out of nowhere. Because the structure that made the right behaviour easy finally existed. That is the governance equivalent of what the researchers found with training and entrepreneurial competencies. The intervention only lands when the programme is structurally ready to receive it.
This isn’t unique to research programmes
The same pattern appears in banking.
At a financial services organisation managing loan processing across 150 to 180 files per month, the turnaround time was inconsistent and getting worse. The instinct was to push for faster processing and tighter deadlines. But the underlying problem was structural: there was no standardised intake process, no clear accountability for each stage, and no visibility across the pipeline until something went wrong. The diagnosis came first. Before any process change was introduced, the workflow had to be mapped, the accountability gaps had to be named, and the team needed to understand what they were actually being measured against. That diagnostic work took the first few weeks. The process change followed. Turnaround time was reduced 33% within the first quarter and stayed there for three years.
Same pattern. Different sector. The intervention didn’t land until the foundation was ready for it.
This cross-sector consistency matters. When the same structural failure recurs in nationally funded research, in banking operations, and in large-scale e-commerce, it stops looking like a context-specific problem. It starts looking like a property of complex organisations. The absorptive capacity literature has been making this argument at the firm level since 1990. The governance parallel at the programme level is, I would argue, the same principle operating one level down.
The uncomfortable consequence of skipping diagnosis
Here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough.
When a governance or process intervention fails because the programme wasn’t ready for it, two things happen. The obvious one is that the intervention doesn’t work. The less obvious one is that the failed intervention becomes part of the programme’s institutional memory. People remember that ‘we tried that and it didn’t stick.’ The next time someone proposes a similar change, they face not just the original structural problem but the scepticism that built up around the previous attempt.
Skipping diagnosis doesn’t just delay results. It creates a second problem that compounds the first.
This is why, in the framework I introduced in my May 2026 article in PM World Journal, Diagnose comes before Design, and both come before Sustain. That sequencing isn’t arbitrary. Governance infrastructure that is designed before the programme is diagnosed tends to be designed for an imagined programme, not the actual one. It doesn’t account for how decisions are actually being made informally, where accountability has already defaulted to habit, or which relationships carry real authority regardless of what the org chart says.
The diagnosis isn’t preliminary. It’s load-bearing. Everything that comes after depends on getting it right.
What this means in practice
If you’re responsible for a funded research programme that isn’t delivering the way it should, the question worth sitting with is not ‘what governance framework should we adopt?’ It’s ‘what would have to be true about this programme’s current structure before any governance framework could actually hold?’ That question is harder to answer. It requires looking at how decisions are really made, not how they’re supposed to be made. It requires mapping where accountability is genuinely tracked versus where it’s assumed. It requires someone willing to name what’s missing before proposing what should replace it.
Most programmes skip that step, not because they don’t see the value but because a funder is waiting, a PI is asking for progress, and a governance audit is six weeks away. The pressure isn’t abstract. It’s a calendar. And in that environment, installing something visible feels like progress, even when the foundation for it hasn’t been built yet. That gap, between what looks like action and what actually constitutes readiness, is where most governance failures begin.
Readiness precedes impact. That’s what the evidence shows, across sectors, across contexts, at different scales.
This article draws on themes I have developed in more detail in a conceptual paper currently under review and on themes explored in my May 2026 publication in PM World Journal: “When There Is No Framework: Building Programme Governance From Scratch in Funded Research Environments.” The Diagnose-Design-Sustain framework is introduced and developed in full there.
Reference
Leyen, B., Dentchev, N. A., Roncancio, J., & Diaz Gonzalez, A. (2026). How entrepreneurial universities shape perceived scalability for social entrepreneurs: the interplay of competencies and training. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 1-24.
Cohen, W. M. and Levinthal, D. A. (1990). Absorptive capacity: a new perspective on learning and innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35(1), pp. 128-152.
Zahra, S. A. and George, G. (2002). Absorptive capacity: a review, reconceptualization, and extension. Academy of Management Review, 27(2), pp. 185-203.
Taneja, S. (2026). When there is no framework: building programme governance from scratch in funded research environments. PM World Journal, Vol. XV, Issue V, May 2026. Available at: https://pmworldjournal.com/article/when-there-is-no-framework
