What it looks like
The stand-ups happen. The boards are full of cards. The quarterly planning event runs like clockwork. And yet the thing the transformation was supposed to buy you, faster decisions, faster learning, faster delivery, never arrived. Eighteen months in, the honest people in the room admit that work moves through the organisation at roughly the speed it did before, just with more meetings describing it.
By this point there is usually a second consultancy on site, recommending a refinement of what the first one installed.
What is actually happening
Ceremonies are the visible layer of a transformation, so they get adopted first and measured most. But the thing that determines speed is invisible: who can decide what, with whose information, and how long it takes a lesson learned at the edge to change behaviour at the centre.
If decision rights did not move, the transformation did not happen. Teams perform autonomy in the ceremony and queue for permission afterwards. The friction reads as a people problem, so the organisation responds with more training, which changes nothing, because the constraint was never knowledge.
The framework was not the problem. The operating model underneath it was, and the framework was laid on top like new carpet over a broken floor.
The intervention shape
Not another framework. A diagnosis first: trace three or four recent pieces of work end to end and find where they actually waited. The wait points map the real constraint, and it is almost never where the org chart says it should be. Then redesign the smallest set of decision rights and feedback loops that unblocks the flow, and prove it on real work before rolling anything out.