Seventy percent of business transformations fail. It’s a number that has lingered across decades of management literature, and one that Lily Kyriacou finds not only frustrating but fundamentally avoidable. As a founder, executive, and transformation specialist, Kyriacou has spent over a decade embedded in high-growth tech scaleups and advising enterprise giants undergoing complex change. Her diagnosis of what’s gone wrong in the transformation playbook is blunt: “We’ve been operating on a lazy assumption that people just can’t keep up,” she says. “But the truth is, change hasn’t been designed with humans in mind.”
Organisations are not failing because people are incapable of change, but because their systems and strategies fail to tap into a far more complex and underutilised resource: the human capacity to adapt.
The Real Currency of Transformation: Adaptive Intelligence
While many organisations continue to pour resources into process and technology, only a fraction (less than 5%) of change budgets address the human dimension. And yet, it’s this human layer that Kyriacou argues holds the key to transformation success. “We’ve entered a post-skills economy,” she says. “AI can replicate hard skills at exponential speed. What’s left for humans is to drive value at the helm of AI through grit, resilience, adaptability, and learning agility.” These human qualities, what Kyriacou calls adaptive intelligence, are emerging as the defining competitive edge for organisations navigating constant disruption.
Drawing from this insight, Kyriacou launched Rezilien, a company that fuses human workforce intelligence with transformation strategy. “We’re not just building an AI product. We’re establishing a movement, one that empowers leaders to understand and steer human change, live and at scale.”
Organisational Stamina: The New Standard for Enduring Performance
To thrive amid continuous disruption, Kyriacou introduces a new concept: organisational stamina. “Resilience helps you bounce back. Agility helps you pivot. But stamina is what enables you to sustain high performance through volatility, to metabolise change without burning out,” she explains. Organisational stamina is the compound ability to adapt, align, and accelerate even as the goalposts move.
It’s not about enduring change. It’s about performing through it. Through Rezilien’s intelligence layer, organisations can now monitor team dynamics in real time, predict where change may stall, and identify untapped potential across their workforce. “It’s like having a live command centre for human change, surfacing behavioural risk, opportunity, and performance gaps before they derail your strategy.”
Building a Change-Ready Enterprise
Kyriacou doesn’t believe in surface-level fixes or motivational campaigns. Instead, she advocates for an operating model anchored in three core capabilities:
- Pulse captures the change profile of the workforce in real-time.
- Bridge uncovers misalignment and closes gaps that erode cohesion, clarity and execution.
- Command creates a system of sustained readiness that strengthens with every cycle and hardwires adaptability into the culture.
“This is how organisations move from reactive to responsive, from fragmented to aligned,” she explains. “And most critically, from change-weary to change-ready.” It’s a future-forward model grounded in deep practicality and by necessity. With AI and market pressures accelerating, leaders no longer have the luxury of treating transformation as a phase. “It’s no longer an initiative. It’s a permanent state of organisational being,” says Kyriacou.
Leading the Human Shift in the Future of Work
The businesses that survive the new market won’t be the most digitised or capital-rich. They’ll be the ones most fluent in human adaptive intelligence. Through Rezilien, she is laying the foundation for a new category: human change tech. This convergence of transformation strategy with workforce intelligence aims to become the golden standard of workforce evolution. “What we’re doing is giving leaders the foresight to act before their teams break down,” she says. “And giving employees the tools to build careers that are truly future-ready.”
To connect with Lily Kyriacou and learn more about building organisational stamina, follow her on LinkedIn.
