How to make organisational change work.
Most change programmes don't fail because the plan was wrong. They fall short because the honest conversation never happened.
I've watched it play out from the inside. The pattern is almost always the same. And once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.
Start with the future, not the present
When I was leading a technology transformation at a national healthcare organisation, I sat in a room full of smart, committed people who were about to make a very expensive mistake.
The brief was to build a new system. The approach was to map what everyone currently did and replicate it in the new technology.
They were digitising the past.
I got my team to ask a different question. What could be automated? What could be done in a completely different way? What did we actually want our working lives to look like once this system existed?
We mapped future ways of working before we touched a single specification. We pushed back hard on those who wanted specs completed by a deadline - because specs built on the wrong foundations just build the wrong thing faster.
We held firm. We ran multiple user journeys, step by step, before anything was committed to paper.
The result was technology built for the future, not the past. A team who already knew how to use it because they'd helped design it.
The three things that make change work
In my experience, successful change comes down to three things, and they're rarely the ones on the project plan.
The first is designing from what's needed, not what exists. Organisations that map their current processes and replicate them in a new structure or system wonder why nothing feels different. Real change starts with a clear picture of what success looks like, and works backwards from there.
The second is involving the people closest to the work, early, and genuinely. They know where the real friction is. Where the workarounds are. Where the system breaks down. Their knowledge is the most valuable thing in any change programme. The organisations that use it well are the ones that succeed.
The third is the leader's willingness to be honest. About what they don't know. About what they're willing to let go of. About whether they're truly ready for what they're asking their organisation to do.
Change asks leaders to release what made them successful. To be visibly uncertain in front of people who look to them for certainty. That's genuinely hard. The leaders who can do it, who create space for honest challenge rather than performance, are the ones whose change programmes actually land.
The question that changes everything
Before the plan. Before the project team. Before the timeline.
One question: what actually needs to change, and why?
Every successful change programme I've been part of started there. With the honest answer to that question. With a leader willing to hear it, and a team willing to say it.
Change is rarely as complicated as we make it. It just requires the one thing most organisations find genuinely difficult.
The truth.
