Essay · What we read
The Catch-22 of SAP transformation
An original sapperment essay · on Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961).
Joseph Heller's novel is set on a small Mediterranean island in the Second World War, where a bomber squadron flies missions nobody believes in anymore. Its hero, Captain Yossarian, has discovered something important: people are trying to kill him, and the sensible response is to stop flying. The rules even agree — a pilot who is insane must be grounded. He only has to ask. But there is a catch, and it is the best there is: asking to be grounded proves you are sane, because only a sane man would want to stop. So you fly. And whenever the men approach the number of missions that would send them home, Colonel Cathcart — who wants to look good to his superiors — raises the number.
Around this machinery orbits Milo Minderbinder, the mess officer who builds a trading syndicate so profitable and so perfectly logical that he ends up contracting to bomb his own airfield — and defends it with accounting. Everybody, he explains, has a share.
I first read it decades ago and thought it was about war. Then I spent twenty-five years in enterprise transformations, several of them as the person boards call when a programme is on fire, and I understood: Heller wrote a management book. The circular logic that keeps Yossarian flying is alive and well in transformation programmes — it just wears a steering-committee lanyard now. Five catches, from the field:
The data catch
We will clean the data after go-live, because before go-live there is no time. But go-live fails without clean data — which will be cleaned after go-live. Every migration postponed "to the hypercare phase" flies this mission again.
The governance catch
There is no budget for governance while the programme is green — governance is overhead, and green programmes don't need overhead. The budget appears the day after the escalation that governance would have prevented. I ran board-level de-escalations for years; every one of them was, in effect, a governance budget approved retroactively, at ten times the price.
The standard catch
Everyone commits to fit-to-standard — the whole business case rests on it. And every department that asks for an exception has, by asking, demonstrated deep understanding of its own process — which is treated as the qualification for deserving one. The truth is the reverse: if you can articulate precisely why you deserve an exception, you understand the standard well enough to live in it.
The mission-count catch
The cutover date is Colonel Cathcart's mission count. Each slip raises the number — one more test cycle, one more workstream, one more parallel phase — and the person who objects has proven they are "not committed to the programme." Commitment, in this logic, is measured by your willingness to keep flying missions that the plan keeps adding.
Milo's syndicate
And then there are the incentives. A partner whose margin lives in managing complexity will manage complexity — thoroughly, expertly, indefinitely. This does not require villains; Milo is the most cheerful character in the book. It requires only that nobody reads the syndicate's books. (Reading them is a discipline you can learn: start with the partner's incentives, then read the partner's package.)
The way out
Yossarian's answer is to refuse the frame entirely and row for Sweden. Enterprises do not have that option — the ECC clock is real, and it is running. But the executive version of rowing for Sweden exists, and it is simpler than it looks: name the catch out loud, in the steering committee, in plain language. Circular logic survives only while it stays implicit. "We are postponing data quality to a phase that depends on data quality" — said aloud, the catch collapses into a decision someone must now own. That is the entire trick, and it is why the best transformation governance is mostly a place where catches get named — and why a disciplined discovery names the biggest ones before anyone signs.
Heller's men never get a forum where the catch can be said out loud and survive as a sentence. Your programme has one — it meets monthly, and it is called a steering committee. Use it for this, or it is just Colonel Cathcart's briefing room.
Written by Andreas BORN · Back to the sapperment library