Myth #05
“When change makes sense, people will accept it.” Early in the morning, an email arrived from the CEO announcing a new way of working and a new organisational structure, effective immediately. Three paragraphs about revised processes, a new organisational structure, and a new operating model. Not a single sentence about what would change for specific people in specific roles. At two o’clock that afternoon, a town hall was held to provide more information. The CEO and COO explained the logic: faster decision-making, clearer accountability, fewer approval layers. It all connected neatly. The presentation was beautifully structured and clean, using the company’s new colours and branding, which were also introduced as part of the changes. The email received that day by one of the procurement managers was also sent to the warehouse, Finance, IT, and all the support functions. The same message for everyone. No one had done a change impact assessment for her team. No one had identified her as a key stakeholder, even though twelve people reported directly to her. The message was not designed for her or her team because no one had analysed what the change would specifically mean for her role and department. After the town hall, she quietly said to a colleague by the coffee machine: “I understand it. It makes sense. But I don’t know whether I’ll still be here in a month.” No one had lied to her. But no one had answered the questions she had not dared to ask out loud during the meeting. The brain does not process change simply as information. It processes it as risk, assessing that risk through five different sensors at the same time, not just one. In 2008, David Rock described these in the SCARF model: Status Certainty Autonomy Relatedness Fairness Many questions linked to these five areas run in the background of every workplace interaction. During a major change, whether it involves structure, processes, or ways of working, they all light up at once. Will I still be someone who knows what they are doing in the new way of working, or am I starting from zero? What will still apply tomorrow if the rules I have worked by until now are changing? How many decisions about how I do my work will I still be able to make? Will I continue working with the same people in the same way? Am I expected to change as much as everyone else, or not? And many more. The manager by the coffee machine did not need more logic. She needed an answer to one of those questions. She did not receive it, not because leadership deliberately ignored her, but because the process that should have produced that answer had never taken place for her. Fourteen days later, something changed. No, no one organised another town hall. She was contacted by a colleague from another department was appointed as a change ambassador for her area,. Someone who had been involved in an early engagement network from the beginning of the project. He told her what he knew before leadership formally announced it. The only issue was that this could have happened earlier. Before the email was sent. Before the town hall was broadcast. That same week, she received an invitation to a short conversation with her manager. The discussion was not based on the generic company-wide presentation, but on an impact assessment conducted specifically for her team. They discussed three things: – what would remain within her area of responsibility – who she would continue working with – and that the same criteria had been applied across the team when decisions were made about the new roles. Autonomy, relatedness, fairness, named openly, clearly, and factually. Someone had mapped them beforehand. They had not been estimated based on instinct. Those fourteen days of uncertainty had been somewhat unnecessary. She left that conversation feeling different. Not because the change had become smaller, but because it had stopped being a vague threat and had become a concrete situation she could work with. This is where most transformations stop. The project team delivers one intervention like this, presents it as evidence that “we are addressing the human side of change,” and then the next phase of the transformation, often the final one, continues without an intervention map and without support. SCARF describes what is happening in a person’s mind at that moment. It is an extremely valuable tool for helping people understand and embed change. But SCARF alone is not enough. A stakeholder map. Personas. Change impact assessment. A change ambassador network. Communication tailored to specific groups. A learning strategy. Adoption measurement after go-live. Each of these phases exists because SCARF sensors do not light up only once. They light up again and again during every project stage, for different people and with different intensity. Skip stakeholder mapping and persona identification, and you do not know who will be affected most. Skip the impact assessment, and you send a generic message where a specific one is needed. Skip adoption measurement, and you may never discover that those sensors have been activated again. One well-managed conversation does not mean the change has been accepted. It does not mean that SCARF has been resolved and ticked off either. The real work is to move through the entire change cycle, from the analytical phase through to the months after go-live. This is exactly where attention tends to disappear: during the post-launch period, when everyone believes the change is already behind them. But the sensors are still lighting up there too.
How to engage people in transformations?
Why do we need to involve people in change? Because presentations do not change behaviour. People do. In my earlier HR leadership roles, I experienced changes that were designed without the people affected by them. A small group created the solution behind closed doors. Everyone else learned about it only a few days before launch, when the decisions had already been made and there was almost no opportunity to influence anything. Today, I design change differently. I involve different groups at different stages, based on the knowledge, experience, and influence they can bring to the change: – Senior leaders from the very beginning We align on the why, the direction, and the non-negotiables. If leaders do not genuinely stand behind the change, the rest of the organisation will notice immediately. – Experts and people who actually do the work during solution design They see the exceptions, risks, and everyday realities that no steering committee can identify from behind a desk. Their involvement helps ensure that the solution is not only well designed, but also workable in practice. – The HR community throughout the entire change HR often hears concerns and questions before the project leadership does. Its role is therefore not limited to distributing communication. HR can help capture signals from the organisation and respond to them more quickly and sensitively. – Change ambassadors from design through implementation They are close to the teams and have a direct sense of what is happening within them. They test messages, gather feedback, and translate the change into the language of everyday work. When involved early, they become trusted guides for their colleagues. – Managers before and during implementation They are the translators of change for their teams. If they do not understand the change, do not believe in it, or have no space to ask their own questions, the message will be lost or distorted on its way to employees. Different roles. Different stages. The same principle. Involve people while they can still influence the change, not only when they are expected to accept it. When working with clients, I therefore ask: Who needs to be at the table now, not later? Where are we merely informing people instead of genuinely involving them? How can we use their experience to make the change more practical and effective? Because when people first see the change only after it has already been finalised, it is too late for genuine co-creation.
How to apply system thinking in change management
You never introduce change into a vacuum. When you change one part of a system or organisation, it is never only that one part that changes. In a leadership meeting or presentation, it often looks simple. We implement a new system. Adjust a process. Redesign the organisational structure. Train people. Then reality enters the picture. The new solution affects roles, decision-making, capacity, mindset, collaboration, motivation, informal relationships, and even what people are actually rewarded for. Systems thinking in change means stopping looking at individual activities in isolation and starting to see the organisation as an interconnected system. What does that mean in practice? Do not ask only: “How do we convince people to accept the change?” Consider instead: “What across the organisation supports, or blocks, the new way of working?” In practice, this means looking at change from several perspectives: – Change never impacts only one area. Technology impacts processes. Processes change roles. Roles change relationships and decision-making. And all of this shapes the way people think and behave. – People’s behaviour is shaped by their environment. What we label as resistance may be a logical response to conflicting goals, poor processes, overload, or unclear priorities. – Strategy and everyday reality must be connected. Leadership may support the change, while pressure on middle management, local habits, or operational realities block it. Systems thinking connects strategy, governance, managerial behaviour, and employees’ everyday experience. – Every intervention can create side effects. A company introduces AI expecting higher productivity. But if its processes have not been mapped and people do not know in which situations AI can genuinely help them, they will use it inconsistently, or not at all. The result is not time saved, but more experimentation, uncertainty, and different ways of working. Technology alone will not increase productivity. It must be clear where, why, and how it should be used. – Context matters more than blindly following a methodology. The same approach will not work equally well across countries, teams, and divisions. Organisational history, trust, culture, change fatigue, and parallel initiatives all shape how people respond to change. Systems thinking in change management regularly reminds us of an uncomfortable truth: People are not a problem that needs to be fixed. They are often simply responding to the system we have created for them, while being given no space for feedback, discussion, or involvement. Where do you most often look for the root cause of problems in your change initiatives, in people or in the system?
How I participated in research by Birkbeck, University of London, focused on managing change in multicultural settings.
In a global, multicultural transformation, translating the same plan into several languages is not enough. This year, together with 19 other change experts working in international environments, I took part in research organised by the Change Management Institute and Birkbeck, University of London, focused on managing change in multicultural settings. Many of the findings confirmed exactly what I experience in practice. A one-size-fits-all approach does not work. The global strategy can remain the same. The way it is implemented, however, needs to be adapted to the local context. Communication, stakeholder engagement, work with managers, workshop formats, the pace of decision-making, and the level of autonomy given to local teams may all need to differ. This does not weaken the global direction. It creates the conditions in which the change can genuinely work within a specific context. The research also reinforced something else for me: a change practitioner cannot enter every country as the expert who already has all the answers. They need to be ready to challenge their own assumptions. Listen before explaining. Ask before proposing a solution. Understand the context before applying a methodology. What stood out to me most in the research findings? 1. A multicultural environment is not only a source of complexity “Cultural differences and constraints” can support creativity. Different perspectives can reveal weaknesses in the original design. Local teams can significantly improve the change, provided we do not treat them merely as recipients of a global decision. 2. Not everything we label as “national culture” is actually national culture Corporate culture, organisational history, leadership style, or the habits of a particular team can influence people’s behaviour just as much, and sometimes even more. So where should we begin when managing change in a multicultural environment? By setting aside assumptions and automatic judgements. By listening actively. By communicating without imposing. And by being genuinely willing to accept that a different approach is not necessarily worse. It may simply be better suited to that particular context.
Myth #04
Managers are the bottleneck. They are the reason why our transformation is failing. The organisation was changing its structure. New teams, new roles, a new operating model. On the slides, it all looked logical. At an offsite leadership meeting, the design was approved in a single day. The next morning, managers received an email. Subject: Changes to the organisational structure — effective as ofJuly 1. The sales team manager read the email on the train. Then again in the office. Then waited to see if anything else would follow. Nothing did. That afternoon, he had a team meeting. Seven people. Several questions he could not answer. Who approves priorities now? How is my role changing? What will I be measured on? What tools will we get to handle the extra work you now expect from us? He answered carefully. Said it would be clarified. That details were still being finalised. That more information would come soon. Three weeks passed. Nothing came. But he did hear one thing. A message spreading among leadership: “Middle management is the bottleneck. They are holding this transformation back” You have probably heard this before: resistance to change comes from below. From people who do not understand the strategy. From those who are not change-positive enough. But resistance often does not start with employees. Without a briefing. Without a mandate. Without the space to say: “This will not work like this in real operations.” Statistically, people managers are often described as the biggest bottleneck in organisational change. Prosci, McKinsey and Gartner all point to their critical role in whether change succeeds or stalls. McKinsey found that the likelihood of a transformation succeeding increases 5.2 times when managers can explain the meaning of the change to their teams. Not if they are asked to forward a slide deck. Not if they just repeat lines from a town hall. But actually if translate what is changing in people’s daily work — and why it matters. And to do that, they need If they do not get that, they improvise. They go quiet. They soften the message. They delay. They translate the change in a way that at least helps the team survive the next quarter. From the outside, it looks like resistance. From close up, it looks like someone who protects their team from the ambiguity of the system. Before you label managers as the bottleneck, do two things. A manager in change is not a distribution channel for leadership decisions. They are a translator of reality. And a translator cannot translate anything without the original content. So before you call managers the bottleneck, ask one question: What exactly did you give them and what did you simply assume they would figure out on their own? Managers do not hold change back. The system does – when it fails to prepare them for it.
Seven Layers of Context That Decide Whether Your Transformation Succeeds
Why one methodology isn’t enough and how cargo cult change management is born Two transformations. Two organizations. Essentially the same change – a technology transformation. And yet, two completely different approaches. Another example: one organization, one global strategy, impact across five countries. One change strategy – five adaptations. Different environments, different cultures, different operating models, different numbers of parallel initiatives, different change histories, different levels of change fatigue. This is where I find myself as a Change Management consultant. And in these situations, one theory isn’t enough. One framework isn’t enough. One methodology isn’t enough. I have to know more than theory. I have to read context. And understand people. You won’t learn this from books or theoretical training. Only from practice. Seven layers to pause on before pushing one approach for everyone 1. History of change How many times have these employees already been “transformed”? What survived, and what crept back? Change fatigue is a very real currency. 2. Trust in the change sponsor The same message from the same person carries different weight after five years of consistent action than after recently cancelled bonuses. 3. Cultural element National, professional (manufacturing vs. sales), and corporate culture, including formal and informal power networks. 4. Change saturation How many initiatives are running in parallel? People have a capacity for absorbing change and it isn’t infinite. 5. Timing in the business cycle Year-end close, seasonal peak, fresh layoffs. This determines what’s realistically feasible. 6. Political terrain Who wins in this change, who loses and who thinks they lose, even when they don’t. 7. Emotional state Hope, cynicism, exhaustion. The same message lands differently in a different context. Without context, you get cargo cult Without this understanding of context, cargo cult change management emerges: blindly following one approach for every transformation and every group of people. Carbon copy. Same communication. Same training. Same timeline. Same expectations across every group. This is where the famous “70% of transformations fail” is also born. The framework usually isn’t what failed. What failed is the assumption that any framework, on its own, is enough. Contextualization translates generic change into the specific reality of each group. And this is the core craft of change management. How often do you really adapt change to context in your organization — and how often do you just copy the approach from the last project?
Stakeholder Maps Aren’t Enough: Why Your Transformation Needs Personas Too
For years, I was convinced that a well-built stakeholder map was a sufficient foundation for any transformation. Most projects do settle for this approach and on the surface, it works. You identify the key players, plot them by power and interest, plan your communications. Done. But after years working in change management, I’ve learned that this simply isn’t enough. What a Stakeholder Map Does Well Make no mistake – a stakeholder map is an indispensable tool. It shows you: – Who holds the power to decide and steer direction. – Who has influence across the organisation. – Who has a stake in the outcome of the change. – Who you need to manage, mobilise, or simply monitor. This information is foundational. Without it, you’re navigating blind. But it only gives you half the picture. When Personas Entered the Picture A few years ago, I started systematically bringing personas into my practice and it was an absolute game changer. Suddenly we weren’t just looking at roles and organisational positions. We started seeing people. – Their everyday experience. – The motivations that drive them. – The fears that hold them back. – The reality they actually work in. – And most importantly: what they need to feel, know, and be able to do in order to truly embrace the change. Personas shifted the conversation from “who’s on the project plan” to “who are we actually building this for”. The Critical Difference If I had to capture it in a single sentence: A stakeholder map shows you who you need to engage. Personas show you how the change will actually land for them. And that distinction is where it gets decided whether you’re designing a change for a checkbox on a project plan, or for real human beings who have to live with it. What Happens When Personas Are Missing You can have all the right people in the room. You can have your sponsors, ambassadors, and resistors perfectly mapped. And it can still fall flat. Because without personas, you’re often speaking to your stakeholders in completely the wrong language. The results are predictable: – Communication that doesn’t land. You send messages that are technically correct but say nothing to the people receiving them. – Training that never transfers into practice. People walk away with knowledge they can’t apply in their reality. – Engagement activities that look great on paper but miss the people they’re meant for. The workshop runs, attendance is recorded and nothing actually changes. The Power of Combining Both What I know now is that the real strength lies in combining the two: – Stakeholder maps reveal influence, power, and political dynamics. – Personas reveal human experience, needs, and everyday reality. Change needs both. Strategic navigation through the stakeholder map and empathy built on personas. Lose the first and you lose direction. Lose the second and you lose the people. Do you work with both of these concepts in your transformations? Or do you tend to lean on one more than the other?
Why your transformation hurts and 4 ways to ease the pain.
“We’re preparing for a big bang in the company. How will people accept it quickly and painlessly?” This was a question I was asked during a LinkedIn Live on the topic: Change management – an unnecessary luxury, or a necessity you can’t afford to ignore? I’ll be brutally honest. It cannot be completely painless. Even if you have built change management capability in your organisation and have an experienced expert on the project, change will always hurt. Change will always hurt. Someone. In some way. To some extent. It is scientifically proven that changing habits and ways of thinking causes the same physical pain as a physical injury. Change affects habits. Certainty. Ways of working. People’s identity. What they know and what they believe in. Some people are open to change. Others are perpetual resisters. And the more changes are happening in an organisation at the same time, the more fatigue, resistance, and silent pushback grow. The pain can be reduced. It cannot be eliminated. How? Clarify the WHY. Not in general terms – “we will be more efficient, agile, and modern.” But specifically – what does this change mean for leaders, for managers, for employees? It will be different for each group. Build TRANSPARENCY and COLLABORATION across projects. Align with other projects – how you will inform each other about progress, risks, and resistance. Where are the overlaps, and where can you work together? Name what is NOT CHANGING. People need to know what they can rely on. What in their established ways of working and thinking will remain. Communicate that regularly. Set the RIGHT EXPECTATIONS. For yourself, for leadership, for managers, for employees. How? Have success metrics for the change. What does “accepted and adopted” mean for each group? Measure it regularly. Communicate it regularly. This is what I consider the foundation. It is not everything. I’ll share more techniques next time. They also form the backbone of the Change Essentials programme, which I built on my own experience in change management.
Myth #03
We launched the change. Adoption is done. Three weeks after the launch of a new CRM system. Leadership is looking at the adoption dashboard and one of them raises says: “Why aren’t they using it yet?” The room goes silent for about two seconds. Then someone says the thing that always gets said: “People are resisting the change. They don’t want to accept it.” Everyone nods. An action is noted down – strengthen communication, add more training. The meeting moves on to the next agenda item. But that is a lie. A small, comfortable one that everyone in that room needs so they can move on. People are not resisting change. They are learning. And that is not the same thing. Have you ever learned a new skill? Driving a car. Skiing. Speaking a new language. Using AI tools. How long did it take before you could do it fluently? Without thinking. Without uncertainty. Without having to consciously focus on every step each time. Definitely not one week. And often not even two months. Research on habit formation shows that creating a new automatic behaviour takes, on average, 66 days, but across different people and different habits the range was from 18 to 254 days. And that is for relatively simple personal habits – not for a complex organisational change involving processes, systems, roles, emotions, and politics. Now take something bigger. A new life after a breakup or divorce. How long did it take before you truly got used to it? To a new way of living. New daily rhythms. The emotional and physical emptiness in your life. These are all changes we experience in our personal lives. Now add to those personal-life changes four systems, two reorganisations, and a new operating model at work. Over two years. And then someone says after launch: “Why aren’t people using it yet?” “Why are they still asking questions?” “Why are they going back to the old way of working?” “But we sent them communication.” “But the training happened.” Because implementing a change is not the same as adopting a change. The date tranformation goes live means that something has been launched. Adoption means that people have changed their everyday behaviour. And that is a completely different discipline. What you see on the dashboard three weeks after launch is not resistance. It is the neutral zone. William Bridges described it very simply: the old way no longer applies, the new way does not yet fit. People are functioning, but performance drops signifcantly. They make mistakes they did not make before. They ask questions that are already in the manual. This is not a training failure. This is the shape of adoption. The Satir curve says the same thing in different language: after every significant change, productivity drops before it rises. That dip is predictable. It appears in every change model. And then there is one more thing: people do not adopt change at the same speed. Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory works with the idea that adoption spreads gradually through different groups: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Not everyone is ready at the same moment. And that is exactly why the expectation that “everyone will work in the new way from Monday” may feel managerially convenient, but it is humanly unrealistic. The problem is not impatience. The problem is badly set expectations. Leadership often expects change to start delivering results immediately after launch. The new system is live. The new structure has been announced. The new process has been published. The training took place. The communication went out. Done? No. That is the beginning. The real work starts the moment people have to use the change in a real working day. The moment they have a customer on the phone. The moment they are behind the deadline. The moment the new system does not work as smoothly as it did in the demo. The moment the manager does not know how to answer the team’s questions. The moment the old Excel sheet still looks faster than the new process. So what should you say in that room, where leaders are staring at the dashboard in disbelief? Five things that work better than “let’s strengthen communication” 1. Set expectations. Before launch, not after. Leaders who hear about the adoption curve for the first time in the week productivity drops hear an excuse. Leaders who saw that curve when they approved the plan hear confirmation. That difference determines whether they will push harder or show understanding. Ask your leaders: “What exactly do we expect people to be doing differently 30, 60, and 90 days after launch?” 2. Plan for the dip. When you build the expected productivity drop and the adjustment period into the plan, it stops being a surprise. Leadership, that knows the dip is coming, does not interpret it as failure. A performance drop does not have to mean the change has failed. 3. Talk about the adoption curve before you talk about the Go Live date. The implementation date is an administrative fact. The adoption curve is the operational reality. If leadership only knows the date, they will measure success against the wrong day. The months after launch are decisive for success. 4. Set adoption metrics, not just activity metrics. The number of people trained is not adoption. The number of people logging into the system is not adoption. Adoption is when people stop doing something the old way and start doing it the new way – reliably, without hand-holding, without exceptions. Measure behaviour change. Are people using the new process correctly? Is the number of workarounds going down? Do managers understand their role? Can people make decisions using the new rules? Are they stopping their return to the old way of working? Is data quality improving? Is the number of escalations decreasing? Is the
Why your stakeholders leave meetings confused and what to do about it.
Have you ever sat in a meeting where you understood only half of what was being said? Acronyms. Charts. Status updates. Slides full of technical jargon. And you sit there thinking: Why am I here? What do they actually want from me? And what of this is even relevant to me? It feels like you are speaking two different languages. And that is exactly what meetings with business stakeholders in projects and transformations often look like. We invite people from the business. We explain what we are doing. But we stay inside our own bubble. We do not say why we invited them. We do not say what we need from them. And sometimes we do not even ask for the decision we urgently need. We simply keep walking down our own well-worn path. It is not bad intent. It is professional blindness. We are so immersed in our expertise that we stop noticing what is unclear to the other side. We do not build bridges to the other side of the river. We do not extend a hand to help them cross successfully. We do not explain the change from the user’s perspective. We do not explain what it means for the business. We are missing a basic skill that anyone introducing innovation, change, or new processes needs. I call it Common Language. The language most people speak. A skill that requires empathy, not just expertise. The ability to translate the complex into something clear. The ability to leave out what is interesting to the project but irrelevant to the other side. The ability to say: “I need this and this from you…” — instead of hoping the other person will guess your intention. From my experience, HR people tend to do this naturally. Communication professionals too. For others, it is often quite a challenge. But it can be learned. Like any skill, it is a matter of practice and willingness. And also of empathy and self-awareness in the moment. Once you start speaking common language, you begin to…