Incremental or all-in? Choosing your reinvention path

Reinvention changes how a business creates, delivers, and captures value. For most Irish organisations the live question is no longer whether to do it, but at what pace. PwC Ireland’s 2026 CEO Survey found that 47% of Irish CEOs say their company has begun competing in new sectors or industries over the past five years, up from 32% a year earlier. Moving process by process gives you control, visibility, and buy-in. Moving end to end gives you the chance to rethink the model rather than automate it. Both are legitimate choices. Making the choice by default is not.

Pace is the decision, not whether

For most Irish organisations, the argument about whether to reinvent is over. Our 2026 CEO Survey found that 47% of Irish CEOs say their company has begun competing in new sectors or industries over the past five years, up from 32% a year earlier and ahead of the global figure of 42%. Reinvention is already happening, and at scale.

What remains open is pace. An organisation can move process by process, redesigning specific workflows while the rest of the business runs as it is. Or it can move end to end, reimagining the operating model in one coordinated programme. Both routes work, and both fail in their own characteristic way.

The difficulty is that pace is rarely chosen. It’s inherited from the budget cycle, from how much disruption the executive team believes the organisation can absorb, or from whichever approach worked last time. A decision that shapes the return on reinvention deserves careful thought.

What an incremental approach buys you

A step-by-step approach to any reinvention gives the organisation the transparency to see exactly what the impact is, and to make adjustments along the way for a smoother journey overall. That visibility is not a minor administrative benefit. It’s the difference between discovering a design flaw in month three and discovering it in year two.

It also allows for greater flexibility and control, which reduces potential disruption to the business. The people involved see the benefits more clearly, which makes buy-in easier to win, and impact can be measured as the journey progresses rather than assessed at the end.

For organisations where change needs to be phased, where learning and adoption are critical, and where risk has to be actively managed, incremental is usually the better call.

The trap: automating a clunky process

There’s a real downside to the incremental route, and it’s not the one most business cases anticipate. By building on the current model, organisations can get caught up in automating clunky processes rather than taking the opportunity to step back and adopt a much more innovative approach to reinvention.

The result is a faster version of a process that shouldn’t exist. The efficiency metrics improve, the programme reports green, and the underlying design, built for a different market and a different technology base, is now embedded more deeply than before.

One question guards against it. If we were designing this today, with the technology available today, would we design it this way at all? If the answer is no, automating it is the expensive option, however incremental it looks.

Where each approach fits

Every organisation has its own set of circumstances, and organisations need to plan their approach to reinvention in the way that suits them best: their business, their people, their customers and their stakeholders. The degree of complexity and the scale of change being implemented will drive how the work is sequenced.

There’s always a balance to strike between designing for compliance and designing for efficiency and growth, and a permanent tension between optimising the current state and reimagining the future one. That tension resolves differently in different parts of the same organisation.

In the finance domain, an incremental approach to financial reporting often makes more sense, given the level of regulatory requirement involved; you don’t want to break existing controls. In a sales organisation, the benefits of redesigning from the customer experience back to how the operating model delivers on it could produce a significant uplift in market share, revenue, and margin.

That’s the practical point. Pace isn’t an organisation-wide setting. It’s a decision taken domain by domain, against six factors:

1.  Complexity                   
2.  Urgency
3. The scale of change required
4. Organisational readiness
5. Risk tolerance
6. The ability to absorb disruption

Full-blown reinvention is the right answer when the current model is no longer fit for purpose, when the benefits require end-to-end change, or when there is a compelling business imperative to move quickly.

Gradual is fine. Piecemeal isn’t

A gradual approach needs to sit inside an overall plan of transformation for the entire organisation. A piecemeal approach, if it’s not properly coordinated, can end up causing more disruption and more cost in the long run than the wholesale change it was meant to avoid.

Pace matters for a second reason. With the rate of development in technology, it’s easy to fall behind. Some global organisations are already rolling out AI agents for procurement. If your organisation can’t engage with that model using similar technology, it becomes harder to do business with them. Irish appetite here is measured: the 2026 CEO Survey found that 14% of Irish CEOs plan to invest in the technology sector in the year ahead, against 23% globally.

And it’s not only about technology. People capabilities and culture need to be ready to enable a transformation that’s increasingly being driven by external change rather than internal ambition. Reinvention can deliver exponential benefits, and a move into an adjacent market or a disruptive play in an existing one tends to favour the risk-takers.

What makes either route work

Whichever pace is chosen, the determinants of success are the same. Planning is critical: people need to understand what’s happening, to be involved in the process, and to have outcomes that are clearly understood and measurable. Everyone in the organisation needs to know what the reinvention is trying to achieve and how that will happen.

The best transformations combine a clear vision, strong leadership, engaged people, measurable outcomes, and the culture and capabilities to sustain change. Technology, including AI, acts as a critical enabler, but the benefits arrive only when an organisation adapts to new ways of working, and when leadership is prepared to make difficult but positive trade-offs for sustainable outcomes.

Incremental or all-in is a genuine choice. It’s worth making it deliberately.

Five ways to choose, and hold, the right pace

1. Start with the ten-year view, then work backwards

Define exactly what success looks like and why the reinvention is needed, so that everyone understands the purpose, the outcomes, and the benefits. It’s often powerful to begin with a long-term horizon, say ten years, and to imagine what would need to be true for the business to be thriving, given the pace of change in technology and markets. That exercise forces more expansive thinking and creates room for radical options, which then convert into medium- and short-term plans with more impact than incrementalism alone would produce.

2. Decide pace domain by domain, not organisation-wide

Run the six factors, namely complexity, urgency, scale, organisational readiness, risk tolerance, and capacity to absorb disruption, across each major domain separately. Expect different answers in regulated and growth-facing parts of the business, and record the reasoning. A single enterprise-wide pace usually means one part of the organisation is moving too slowly to compete while another is moving too fast to stay in control.

3. Involve people from the beginning

Buy-in depends on people understanding the purpose and the outcomes, and on their concerns being heard rather than managed. Transformations fail when change is done to people rather than with them. Build in the measurement of impact as the journey progresses, celebrate success along the way, and treat failures as learning that’s openly recognised rather than quietly absorbed.

4. Translate outcomes into measurable unit-level plans

Set clearly communicated targets that can be measured, then translate the desired business outcomes into functional or business unit implementation plans. Those plans should be built to break down silos between teams and to enable redesign of critical operating models from start to finish. Review progress regularly and adjust course when the evidence says to.

5. Ready the capability and the culture before the technology

People, skills, behaviours, and culture determine whether a reinvention sticks. New technologies and ways of working deliver value only where employees have the skills and the confidence to use them well, so upskilling is what converts adoption into benefit. The most successful programmes have increased employee engagement by reducing low-level, noisy work and increasing capacity for strategic thinking and delivery. Pair that with an open, collaborative culture and regular communication about why the change is happening.