Before Platforms: Clean Your Own House

The hidden first step of transformation

Introduction
Every transformation begins with grand ambitions. Executives talk about agility, speed, and scale. Teams dream of fewer dependencies and smoother delivery. Platforms are expected to provide the leverage that makes all this possible. Yet there is a truth few want to face: platforms do not fix chaos, they amplify it. Before any system can deliver value, there is a painful but essential first step: Phase 0. This is the moment when each team must confront its own disorder and clean its own house. Without it, transformation is nothing more than theatre, and every weakness will soon be multiplied.

Why Phase 0 Exists
The paradox of systemic transformation remains clear: platforms amplify whatever already exists. A team that operates with well-defined ownership, visible work, and closed feedback loops will find that a platform accelerates and strengthens those qualities. A team mired in blurred responsibilities, hidden dependencies, and unmanaged queues will discover that platforms only expand the chaos. Phase 0 exists because the effectiveness of systemic change depends entirely on the local integrity of the units connecting to it.

Platforms are amplifiers, not saviours.

They multiply order and dysfunction alike. Skipping Phase 0 is like building a skyscraper on sand: collapse may not be immediate, but will prove inevitable.

The Jordan Peterson Parallel
Jordan Peterson’s well-known maxim, “Clean your room,” resonates in this context. His argument is that before you attempt to reshape the world, you must accept responsibility for your immediate environment.

Applied to teams, the lesson is unavoidable: before demanding platform leverage or organisational synchronisation, first bring clarity and discipline to your own operations. Cleaning your room, or in this case, your team's house, is not about perfection, but about creating the minimal level of order required for wider alignment.

This principle is not unique to management theory. Aviation demands rigorous pre-flight checks before take-off. Medicine requires sterilisation before surgery. Engineering insists on soil testing before foundations.

Disciplined systems everywhere begin with order at the smallest scale.

What Cleaning Looks Like in Practice
Cleaning a team’s house is not an abstract principle. It takes tangible form:

• Clarifying ownership: end the blurring of boundaries between engineering, product, and design. Establish who owns what and why.
• Eliminating invisible work: make every activity visible, particularly the ad-hoc commitments that silently drain energy.
• Measuring the basics: track throughput, lead time, and quality. These measures are not for vanity but for exposing reality.
• Closing feedback loops: shorten the cycle between action and response, both internally and with users.
• Building trustable foundations: do not expect systemic reliability until you can depend on your own local practices.

These steps are not glamorous. They lack the appeal of grand strategies or bold architectural changes. Yet they are the bedrock of Phase 0. Without them, the promise of a fluid organisation remains an illusion.

The Fork in the Road: Shift or Fake
Phase 0 is critical because it presents teams with a choice. Consider two archetypes:

• The shift team. Faced with its own chaos, it chose honesty. It acknowledged inefficiencies, took responsibility, and began making small but real changes. It hurt, but the pain was upfront. Over time, the benefits compounded. When the platform arrived, it became an accelerator rather than a mirror of dysfunction.
• The fake team. Under pressure to look mature, it created the theatre of improvement: dashboards with no meaning, rituals with no discipline, and jargon in place of ownership. The facade held until the platform exposed every weakness. Pain was postponed, but when it came, it was systemic and devastating.

Phase 0 is therefore the first true stress test of an organisation’s character. It asks whether teams are willing to shift or whether they will fake. The answer determines the trajectory of the transformation.

Why Leaders Must Protect Phase 0
Leaders are frequently tempted to bypass Phase 0. Under the pressure of speed and visible results, it is easy to believe that systemic solutions can compensate for local disarray. This is a costly mistake. Ignoring Phase 0 means scaling dysfunction across the organisation. True leadership involves resisting this temptation. It means holding the line and insisting that responsibility must begin at home before it can extend outward. Protecting Phase 0 is not simply an act of discipline, but a safeguard for the integrity of the entire transformation.

The Work of Shared Language and Strategy
Phase 0 is also the moment to begin shaping master plans and strategies. As teams clean their own houses, they must also start aligning ambitions. This painful process involves developing and adopting a common language that will allow everyone to understand one another.

It requires the use of universal tools such as objectives and key results, transparent, sometimes frustrating, health metrics, and even the uncomfortable visibility of failing key performance indicators. By establishing this shared vocabulary, organisations create the basis for synchronisation across teams and platforms. Without it, alignment remains rhetorical rather than operational.

Conclusion
Phase 0 is not dramatic, but it is decisive. It is the organisational equivalent of cleaning your room: the unavoidable foundation for any broader change. At this stage, teams reveal their true nature. They either embrace responsibility and begin a genuine shift in mindset, or they adopt the theatre of maturity and postpone their reckoning.

Equally important, Phase 0 is when organisations must begin to speak a shared language of strategy, objectives, and measures. Without this, ambitions remain abstract and alignment remains fragile.

The choice is stark. Clean your house, or have the platform expose your mess at scale. There is no middle ground. No platform, however well designed, can bypass this requirement. Before building a fluid organisation, every team must confront its disorder, and every organisation must decide whether it will shift honestly or fake maturity until collapse.