Which pillar should I fix first?
Not the one you like to show off. Start with the pillar you are worst at, and it is usually People.
Grade yourself honestly on all three, then start with your weakest, not your favorite. Almost everyone wants to start with Permission, because writing a policy feels like progress and it threatens no one. But a clean policy sitting on top of people who work exactly the way they did last year has changed nothing.
The pillar that decides the outcome is almost always People, because behavior is the hardest and least visible part. Someone can have the tool, the training, and the policy in front of them and still not change how they do the job. If your governance is tidy but adoption is flat, you have Permission without People, and no amount of new policy will fix it.
So the honest first move is to find one place a respected person on your team would change their Tuesday, and make that real. Then the other two pillars have something to grow around.
The full model is on Permission, People, Programs.
Cheers,
-Titus
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