My trainer has been trying to teach me this for years. Every time something felt hard, my instinct was the same: I’m not strong enough yet.
And every time, he would stop me and say—almost patiently, sometimes not—
“It’s not strength. It’s form. Strength shows up fast. Form shows up when you’re tired.”
It took time for that to sink in.
Form, he explained, is alignment. Stability. Balance. It’s how the body holds itself under load, rep after rep, especially when tired.
Technique is different.
Technique is instruction—where to place your feet, how to breathe, the sequence of movement. Technique can be taught quickly. Form has to be built.
You can lift heavy with imperfect technique for a while.
But if form is weak, strength will eventually expose it.
That distinction took years for me to truly understand.
And once it did, I started seeing it everywhere—especially in ERP implementations.
ERP programs are excellent at teaching technique:
- How to post a transaction
- Which screen to use
- What steps to follow
But when implementations struggle, it’s rarely because users don’t know how to use the system.
A user once said to us, “I know how to use the system—but I don’t know who decides when it breaks the process.”
That’s not a training problem. That’s a form problem.
In ERP terms, form is structure:
- Clear process ownership
- Stable decision rights
- Governance that resolves exceptions instead of encouraging workarounds
- A culture that trusts data over hierarchy
When form is weak, leaders often misread what they’re seeing.
A client summed it up perfectly: “The system works, but people keep going around it.” That’s what weak form looks like under pressure.
Just like in the gym, poor form doesn’t fail immediately. It fails with repetition. With scale and fatigue,
ERP systems don’t break when volumes are low. They break when ambiguity meets speed.
That’s also why the strongest ERP implementations I’ve seen deliberately focus on form before force.
They stabilise processes before automating them.
They clarify governance before scaling adoption.
They work on culture before demanding compliance.
It took my trainer years to get me to understand this: strength is never the starting point. Form is.
Strong ERP programs scale on form, not force.
Processes, governance, and culture carry the load.
When form fails, strength gets blamed—but unfairly.
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