Transition Intelligence eBook

Transition Intelligence: Beyond Ninety Days

The First Eighteen Months That Decide a Senior Leader

Between forty and sixty percent of senior executive appointments fail within eighteen months. Almost none of them fail on ability.

The leader was capable. They were chosen with care, by people who are good at choosing. The search was rigorous, the assessment sophisticated, the due diligence thorough. And still, within a year and a half, something came apart. This is the paradox at the heart of senior appointment, and the failure rate has barely moved in thirty years despite all our improvements at the front end. If the problem were one of selection, better selection would have solved it. It has not. The problem lies elsewhere.

Transition Intelligence offers a new way of seeing why. Drawing together established traditions of developmental, depth, systems and attachment psychology, Dr Tony Fusco argues that every senior transition runs as three concurrent arcs across eighteen months: performance, authority, and identity. None of them moves in a straight line. Each has its own logic, its own demands, and its own hardest phase, and by a kind of structural coincidence those hardest phases converge in the same window, somewhere between the third month and the ninth. He calls that convergence the Crucible. It is there, in the middle months that no one prepares for, that most appointments are quietly won or lost.

The book's central claim is that this is a structural problem rather than a content one. Leaders rarely fail because the passage is impossible. They fail because they meet a structured and navigable passage without knowing that it is structured, and so read the ordinary difficulty of the middle months as evidence of personal inadequacy. The dip in effectiveness becomes proof of decline. The system's testing becomes rejection. The loosening of the old professional self becomes breakdown. Each misreading invites the response most likely to deepen it.

Ninety days is not enough time to know whether an appointment has worked. Eighteen months is. This book maps that hidden terrain, and shows what becomes possible when a leader is supported across the whole of the arc rather than left alone at the moment of greatest need.

Rigorous, humane, and clear, it is a book for those who appoint senior leaders, for those who place them, and for every leader making the passage themselves.