Why having second thoughts on change is a good thing.

On training retreats, Wonder Woman, and twelve years of second-guessing the framework.

Somewhere in four days at a Daylesford training retreat in 2014, a small thought crept into my brain and didn't leave: how does what I’m learning help people. I mean, really help them through change.

Don’t get me wrong, the overall experience was amazing. The paddock to plate food knocked your socks off. The estate gardens were stunning. The weather was Spring perfect. There I was, the only HR person in a room full of project professionals, getting our accreditation in Prosci’s change framework. And I was struggling to see how I'd apply it in the restructures I was running at the time.

The framework was solid. It would end up becoming a stable tool I used time and time again. Prosci is arguably one of the better ones to have. That isn't the problem.

It's taken me twelve years to name what I sensed in that room. And it’s a problem I've watched happen time and again: when a good framework meets the actual work of changing how humans behave, including the humans we're asking to lead the change.

And it’s why having second thoughts on how we approach people and change is a good thing.

Why this matters now

Here's why this isn't an academic question.

The pace of change has, well, changed. Restructures used to land every few years; now they overlap. People are inside one change before the last one has bedded in. AI is reshaping roles while leaders are still recovering from getting their teams back into the office. Cost programs run alongside transformation programs run alongside cultural change programs. Each one, in isolation, would be a major undertaking. Together, they just compound the change conditions.

The people are being asked to absorb all of it are the same people who absorbed a pandemic, three rounds of restructuring, and a re-org they're still recovering from. Add on to that the current geopolitics that is wreaking havoc on our everyday lives in ways we simply don’t feel ready for. The resulting cost of living challenges we now face is becoming scary for many of us. The polite nods. The Teams cameras off. The vacant looks in meetings. The questions that don't get asked anymore because nobody believes the answers will change anything. The rising presenteeism and knock on effect to productivity. Everything feels harder.

And yet we are responding to all of this with the same change playbook we were using in 2010. Framework. Comms plan. Change impact. Town hall. Training. Readiness. Done.

It is not working. If it ever really was. Change projects struggle to land the way we want them to. The 70% stat on failing change is alive and well for a reason. And the cost of pretending they are landing, to the people inside the change, and to the leaders trying to lead it, is getting harder to ignore.

How we got here

The change profession grew up inside project management. That history shapes everything about how we still practice it. Change became a workstream. It got a RAID log (Risks, Assumption, Issues, and Dependencies) and a stage gate. It reported to a program director whose success was measured in dates, dollars and deliverables. It was delivered by contractors who wrap up after hyper care and move on to their next project. The people impacted became recipients or end users as a category to be moved through stages of awareness, desire, knowledge and ability, like packages along a conveyor belt.

In that world, a framework is a useful thing. It gives a busy program a shared language. It gives an exec sponsor something to point at. It gives the change lead a structure to plan against when the project's already three months underway and someone's just realised nobody's thought about the humans who do the work.

And to be fair to the field, the frameworks aren't wrong. ADKAR isn't wrong. CLARC isn't wrong. Kotter isn't wrong. Lewin isn’t wrong. They're genuinely useful as guides and checklists, as shared language, as a way to make sure you haven't missed something obvious.

The mistake isn't in the frameworks. It's in what we've quietly come to expect from them.

We've come to expect that naming the work is most of the work. That if we put the framework on the wall, run the workshop, send the comms, host the town hall, the change will, in some essential way, have happened. Or at least we'll have done our bit. We’ve ticked the boxes. The framework is our alibi. The artefact is our action.

The reframe

Here's the part I've been chewing on for years.

A few months ago, I built a CLARC poster for an executive team on a large and complex digital transformation program. Properly built — not just a slide pulled from a template. I put Superman on it, a nod to Clark Kent, a way to make the model land with people who'd seen a thousand change models before. Under each letter I wrote the behaviour the leader needed to demonstrate: build awareness, deliver key messages, answer the questions your team is actually asking. I gave them the questions to ponder and use with their teams. What does this change mean for me? What's in it for me? Why now? It was clear. It was specific. It looked great. It sat so well right next to the ADKAR one with Wonder Woman on it.

The executives loved the poster. Some even put it on their wall.

And then almost none of them did the things on it.

This is the moment I want to sit with, because it's the whole problem in miniature. The poster wasn't bad. The model wasn't wrong. The briefing wasn’t pointless. The executives weren't stupid or lazy. It wasn’t that they didn’t care. They were busy people doing busy jobs in an organisation that was asking a lot of them. For a moment, the poster made them feel like they were in on the change. Like advocates. Like they'd done the thing. Until it became just wallpaper.

And here's the part that took me a long time to see.

We were doing to them exactly what they were doing to their people.

Every change leader has heard the line from executives: but I sent the email, so they should know what to do. We roll our eyes. We talk about it in the corridor. We know that sending the email or doing a 2-minute update in the weekly stand up is not the same as leading the change. We know that artefact is not action.

Then we make a beautifully designed framework poster, give it to an executive, and quietly expect that the framework, by virtue of existing, on their wall, with a superhero on it, will translate itself into behaviour.

It won’t. Because frameworks don't do anything. People do things. And shifting how people behave, including how executives lead change with their teams, is not once-and-done. It is consistent, persistent, hand-fed work. The same work, in fact, that the framework was trying to describe.

Which means the change profession has been quietly applying the wrong logic to its own audience. We treat the people being changed as humans who need time, repetition, conversation and care. We treat the people leading the change as delivery mechanisms for the framework. Hand them the model, run the briefing, expect the behaviour. Send the email. We think they know. No, we assume they understand what they need to do.

The reframe I keep coming back to is this: there is no inside and outside of the change. Everyone in the system is a person. The executive who puts the poster on the wall is in the middle of the change too. The change lead is in the middle of the change too. The program director designing the program is in the middle of the change too. The work isn't deploying a framework to people who aren't in it yet. The work is helping a roomful of humans, all of whom are inside the change, shift how they behave — over time, with support, badly at first, eventually well.

That's not a workstream. That's not a stage gate. That's a different kind of work entirely.

What this looks like in practice

In practice, this means a lot of things I'll spend time in follow up blogs unpacking. But here's the shape of it.

It means treating the executive sponsor not as a switch to be flipped at kick-off but as a leader who themselves needs coaching, support, and repeated conversation to actually lead the change. It means designing for the second, third, tenth conversation, not just the launch. It means measuring change not by what was delivered but by what is now different about how people work. It means accepting that the most important work is often the slowest and least visible — the ten-minute corridor conversation, the question asked again two weeks later, the small bit of permission given that lets someone try the new thing badly without consequence.

And it means being honest about what frameworks are for. They are a map. They are not the journey. They are useful for orientation and useless as a substitute for the walk.

The door

I've been participating in and practicing change for over twenty years. My whole life really. With a multitude of personal and professional change experiences supported by the practical application of change frameworks. I've made the posters. I've taken the win when they went on the wall. I'm not standing outside this critique. I'm standing inside it, looking at the wall, with my own work on it.

But I've come to believe that the gap between what the change profession promises and what it actually delivers, for people, for organisations, for the leaders trying to do the right thing is widening, not narrowing. And that something has to give.

Over the rest of the year, I will be taking that gap apart, piece by piece. What change actually is, when it's not communication. Who should be leading it, when it isn't a project manager. What politics has to do with it, and why we keep pretending it doesn't. What credibility means for a profession that's still young, has come a long way, and is meeting a moment that demands more of it than the early playbooks can give.

These are my second thoughts on change. Not because I've changed my mind once and for all. Because I think the field is ready for a long, honest look at the work we've been doing — and the work we could be doing instead.

I'd like you to come with me.