Healthcare strategy rarely fails on paper. It fails in the follow-through, when a well-designed initiative loses momentum somewhere between the boardroom and the unit floor. That’s the problem Warbird Healthcare Advisors is targeting with Enterprise Performance ARC, a new program the national healthcare advisory firm launched this week as an extension of its Transitional Leadership Solutions practice. Rather than offering another strategic framework, Warbird is positioning ARC as an execution layer, a structured, behavioral-science-driven approach meant to determine whether healthcare organizations can actually carry a strategy through to sustained clinical, operational and financial results.
The premise behind Enterprise Performance ARC starts from a well-documented industry pain point. A McKinsey survey of more than 2,200 hospital and health system executives found that roughly 70% reported their strategic initiatives had failed, ResearchGate a figure consistent with McKinsey’s broader research on organizational change, which has long pointed to a stubborn 70% failure rate across industries. That gap between strategic intent and delivered results is precisely what Warbird says its new program is built to close.
Enterprise Performance ARC applies research in behavioral science and change management to what Warbird calls “execution architecture,” the organizational scaffolding that determines whether a workforce can absorb and sustain a major initiative rather than quietly reverting to old habits once leadership attention moves elsewhere. The program is structured around three levers: alignment, readiness and change. It’s explicitly framed as an alternative to conventional training and academic-style change models, leaning instead toward what Warbird describes as an empirical risk assessment that centralizes teams around a shared execution framework.
Richard Woods, Executive Vice President of Warbird’s Transitional Leadership Solutions practice, described the program as addressing a gap that’s often overlooked in healthcare transformation work: the difference between setting a strategic priority and building the organizational muscle to carry it out. That distinction matters in an industry where margin pressure, workforce shortages and the operational complexity of clinical delivery make follow-through unusually difficult, and where a stalled initiative doesn’t just cost money, it can directly affect patient care.
The program is led by two of Warbird’s Change and Transition Experts: Melody Trimble, a former health system CEO, clinician and leadership consultant, and Jennifer Matthews, a certified behavioral coach with a background in instructional design. Their role, according to Warbird, is to work directly alongside client leadership teams to identify execution risks before those risks derail a priority, rather than diagnosing failure after the fact. Trimble framed the core issue as one of reliability rather than ambition. Even highly skilled healthcare leaders, she noted, routinely see major initiatives stall or fade when teams lack the alignment and clarity needed to execute consistently over time.
That framing lines up with what change-management research has found more broadly. Organizations that identify and address the underlying beliefs and assumptions driving resistance to change, rather than treating change as a purely procedural rollout, are roughly four times more likely to report their programs as successful, according to McKinsey’s Transformational Change research. Surface-level process updates without a corresponding shift in mindset tend not to stick, which is part of why so many change efforts quietly regress even after an initial launch.
Enterprise Performance ARC arrives as an addition to, not a replacement for, Warbird’s existing advisory work. The firm has long supplied hospitals and health systems with both strategic analysis and interim or permanent leadership placements, spanning CEO, CFO and COO roles down to director-level positions in finance, operations and nursing administration. Layering a dedicated execution and change-management program on top of that leadership bench gives Warbird a more complete offering: it can now help place the right leaders and build the organizational conditions that let those leaders’ strategies actually take hold.
Michael Draa, Warbird’s CEO, tied the launch back to that broader thesis, arguing that while Warbird’s practitioners are skilled at tailoring solutions to a given organization’s challenges, long-term success ultimately depends on local leadership having the right people, aptitudes, support and training in place to sustain the work after the advisors leave.
For healthcare executives evaluating whether a program like this is worth adopting, the value proposition is less about generating new strategic ideas and more about de-risking the ones already on the table. Hospitals and health systems don’t typically lack ambition, they lack the connective tissue between a board-approved priority and a nursing unit’s day-to-day workflow. A structured risk assessment aimed at that gap, delivered by people with direct clinical and behavioral-science backgrounds rather than generalist management consultants, is a meaningfully different pitch than the strategy decks most systems are accustomed to receiving.
Market Landscape
Enterprise Performance ARC enters a healthcare advisory market increasingly crowded with change-management and workforce-transformation offerings, as firms compete to help hospital systems translate digital health investments, staffing model changes and value-based care transitions into durable results. As health systems layer in new technology from partners across the broader enterprise software ecosystem, including workforce and clinical platforms tied to cloud infrastructure providers like Microsoft and Google, the execution gap Warbird is targeting is likely to widen before it narrows, giving specialized change-management programs a growing role in healthcare’s operational playbook.
Top Insights
- Warbird Healthcare Advisors launched Enterprise Performance ARC, a behavioral-science-based program designed to convert healthcare strategic priorities into sustained execution and financial results.
- McKinsey research found roughly 70% of hospital executives report their strategic initiatives fail, underscoring the execution gap the program is built to address.
- The program is led by Melody Trimble and Jennifer Matthews, combining clinical leadership experience with certified behavioral coaching and instructional design expertise.
- ARC centers on three levers, alignment, readiness and change, offered as a structured alternative to traditional academic-style change training.
- The launch expands Warbird’s existing transitional leadership placement business, pairing interim executive talent with a formal execution and change-management framework.
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