Strategic Negotiation in Organizational Transformation

"Programs don't stall because the strategy was wrong. They stall because the right conversations never happened."

Most transformation programs do not fail loudly. They erode quietly, in the distance between what people agreed to in a steering committee and what they are actually doing three months later. No open opposition. No visible crisis. Just a slow divergence between stated commitment and real behavior, until momentum is gone and no one can explain exactly when it left.

Strategic Negotiation in Organizational Transformation is built around a single observation: the conversations that determine whether change succeeds are not the ones on the agenda. They happen before the meeting, after it, and in the one-on-ones that never make it into the governance record. Conducting them well is a discipline, and most transformation professionals have never been given it directly.

Drawing on more than fifteen years of practitioner experience across financial services, medical technology, and enterprise consulting, Adolfo M. Carreño offers a structured approach to the negotiation that transformation actually requires: not deal-making with external counterparties, but the ongoing internal work of surfacing hidden interests, reading resistance before it hardens, and building agreements durable enough to hold under real organizational pressure.

• How resistance operates as a system, not as individual opposition.
• How to distinguish what stakeholders say from what they are protecting.
• How leverage, BATNA, and ZOPA function inside organizations where no one walks away.
• How behavioral bias and coalition dynamics create patterns rational plans cannot resolve.
• How to rebuild alignment when a crisis has already fractured it.
• How to scale negotiation capability across teams so it does not depend on two or three people.

• Program managers carrying accountability for large-scale change.
• Change leaders who work inside the politics of transformation daily.
• Functional heads navigating competing organizational interests.
• Senior sponsors who understand that formal authority only reaches so far.

Adolfo M. Carreño is a partner at Pudu Labs Consulting and a transformation and change leadership practitioner with more than fifteen years of experience leading transformation programs and building transformation capabilities inside large, global organizations across banking, medical technology, and enterprise consulting. He has held senior roles in enterprise transformation, program management, and organizational change at the enterprise level in Latin America and the United States.

The frameworks presented in this book were built inside real programs and tested against the kind of organizational pressure that textbook models rarely anticipate. As a consultant, he advises organizations on structural transformation, governance design, and program leadership. His work focuses on helping leaders, professionals, and organizations understand the human and organizational dynamics of change, and on developing the capabilities required for transformation that is sustainable and lasting.

He holds a Master's degree from the Universidad de Salamanca and is pursuing a doctoral degree at Universidad Internacional Iberoamericana de México, with a focus on organizational change, enterprise transformation, and program leadership. He also serves as a Doctoral Research Fellow at Universidad Europea del Atlántico in Santander, Spain. His scholarly work includes peer-reviewed publications, working papers, and professional articles with over 100 verified citations.

His writing is published at adolfocarreno.com.

"The success of a transformation rarely depends on the design of the plan. It depends on how well the conversations beneath the plan are handled."

— Adolfo M. Carreño