Foundations for a 100-day plan.

An incoming CEO was appointed to lead a 600-person industrial company following the departure of a long-serving predecessor. The board wanted a structured 100-day plan.

The new CEO had limited prior exposure to the organization and needed to move quickly — without the luxury of months of informal relationship-building before making decisions.

Within the first two weeks of tenure, Cicuno was deployed across all management levels and a representative sample of operational staff. The question was framed around what respondents saw as the most important opportunities and challenges facing the company.

The process took less than a week from setup to completed responses — giving the CEO a full organizational picture before her first round of leadership meetings.

Three themes emerged with high consensus across the organization: a widely shared frustration with slow internal decision-making, strong engagement around a specific product area that leadership had considered deprioritizing, and a cluster of low-influence, high-negativity responses from one business unit pointing to an unresolved structural issue.

Crucially, the analysis also mapped which issues had high internal energy for change — giving the CEO a clear starting point for early wins rather than a list of every possible problem.

The 100-day plan was built directly on the Cicuno output, rather than on assumptions or selective conversations. The incoming CEO was able to address the decision-making theme in her first all-hands communication — demonstrating that she had listened before acting.

The at-risk business unit was identified early enough to include in the plan rather than discovered months later as a crisis. Early wins were selected where the internal energy was highest, not where they were easiest to describe.