Before the company enters Mirkwood, Gandalf gives one instruction and then — infuriatingly — leaves: “Don’t leave the path.” Inside the forest there is no light and no sense of progress, and the path seems pointless. Off to the side, there are glimpses of fires and feasting. Every instinct says the shortcut is right there. The dwarves take it, and it nearly kills them all.
Every transformation programme I have worked on has a Mirkwood phase. It usually arrives a few months in. The kickoff energy is gone, the end state is not yet visible, and the disciplined path — the governance, the sequencing, the boring weekly rhythm — starts to feel like bureaucracy. That is exactly when someone senior proposes a shortcut.
Why the shortcut is so tempting — and so dangerous
The pressure is always understandable. The board wants visible results, and in the Mirkwood phase the value of the disciplined approach is largely invisible. Holding the line is uncomfortable for everyone, the consultant included. There are weeks when you ask yourself whether you are defending good method or just your own plan. But I have watched enough rushed transformations collapse into firefighting to trust the pattern. The teams that leave the path to chase the fires are the ones who end up lost among the spiders. Slower-looking in month three is very often sustainably faster by month twelve.
The forest of a hundred service levels
The deepest Mirkwood of my career was a large account in genuine crisis. Roughly fifteen priority-one fires a year. Customer managers escalating past everyone to our chief executive. A contract with more than a hundred service levels — as complex and difficult as contracts get — and penalties running past a million euros a year. Everyone in that forest was chasing the fires off to the side of the path: the heroic quick fix, the special task force of the week, the next escalation call.
We stopped chasing and went back to the path. Rebuild the delivery team properly. Spend unglamorous time with the client. Work through the backlog of open penalty negotiations one by one. Hold the boring weekly rhythm. Nothing about it felt fast, and for months it barely felt like progress at all. But the fires became rarer, the penalties fell to a fraction of what they had been, the relationship steadied, and the account came out of crisis mode for good. The team that walked out of that forest was stronger than the one that walked in — and stayed together long after.
And one honest counterpoint, because this series does not do fairy-tale endings. At a different account — one that was never in crisis; the service was good and got measurably better while I was there — we still lost the renewal. Not for anything in the current delivery, but for a badly handled transition years before my time, which the business had never forgotten. The path does not guarantee the treasure. Trust keeps its own calendar, and it is longer than yours.
Same discipline either way. Mirkwood never promises you the mountain — it only promises that leaving the path costs more. And the discipline decides what you walk out with even when the ending is not yours to choose: in the one case a turnaround, in the other a loss that closed as a clean commercial decision instead of a collapse.
What this means for your transformation
The Mirkwood phase is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a predictable stage of any long change, and knowing that changes how you lead through it.
- Name it in advance. At kickoff I now tell clients plainly: around month three or four, this will feel pointless, and someone will propose a shortcut. When it arrives on schedule, the team recognises it instead of panicking.
- Distinguish the path from the furniture. Holding the line doesn’t mean refusing all change. The discipline worth defending is the sequencing and the decision structure. Almost everything else can flex.
- Make progress visible in the dark. The deepest Mirkwood despair comes from invisible progress. Find the small, concrete markers — decisions made, risks retired — and report them relentlessly.
The enchanted river in Mirkwood makes those who drink from it forget their journey. Corporate Mirkwood does the same: teams forget why the transformation started. Part of the consultant’s job is simply to remember out loud.
“Go back? No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!”
— The Hobbit, Chapter 5
Part 4 of ten in There and Back Again — Transformation Lessons from an Unexpected Journey. Previous: Riddles in the Dark. Next: Barrel Riding — on the unconventional route nobody approves of until it works.
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