“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.