An organisation can announce a transformation and still conduct its business much as before. Employees attend the briefing, learn the terminology and return to routines that remain easier, safer or more rewarding than the proposed alternative. The launch succeeds as an event. The work barely changes.
That gap is the starting point for a more useful discussion of change management strategies. Leaders need to understand how a new practice becomes credible among colleagues, when people are ready to adopt it and what happens when public agreement conceals private resistance.
Greg Satell, co-founder of transformation advisory ChangeOS and author of Cascades, proposes three approaches to organisational change: build a small local majority, prepare for a moment that enables action and create a constructive dilemma that makes obstruction visible. Drawing on social movements and research into how behaviour spreads, he examines how change gains support through relationships, timing and shared commitments.
These ideas offer a productive challenge to familiar management habits. They also require care. Evidence from an online experiment or political movement cannot automatically establish what will work in a company with different incentives and obligations.
Question The Failure Narrative Before Replacing The Playbook
The assertion that most transformations fail is frequently used to justify a new approach. Its apparent precision can conceal uncertainty about what counts as transformation, when success is assessed and whose judgement determines the result.
In a 2011 paper, researcher Mark Hughes examined five published instances of the widely repeated 70% failure claim. He concluded that the figure lacked valid, reliable empirical support. His finding challenges that statistic; it does not suggest that organisational change is easy or usually successful.
Nor is the choice simply between broadcasting urgency and building local support. Kotter’s current framework includes a guiding coalition, removing barriers and reinforcing new behaviours, alongside urgency. Some of the proposed alternatives overlap with those principles.
Leaders should therefore evaluate mechanisms and outcomes rather than pledge allegiance to a model. A framework can organise the work. It cannot establish that the work has succeeded.
1. Build Support Where People Actually Work
A company-wide announcement reaches many people at once. It does not necessarily give any of them a trusted colleague who can demonstrate the new practice under ordinary working conditions.
Damon Centola’s 2010 study, published in Science, examined behaviour spreading through artificially structured online health communities. Adoption was more likely when participants received reinforcement from several neighbours, and behaviour spread farther and faster through clustered networks than through comparable random networks.
The experiment concerned health-related participation, not a corporate restructuring. Its practical implication for managers is nevertheless worth testing: repeated support from connected peers may help people adopt an unfamiliar practice.
Consider a hypothetical customer service team trying a new process for handing over unresolved cases. A small group can use it together, identify missing information and show colleagues whether it reduces repeat work. The evidence is close to the job. People can question those producing it.
A local majority, in this context, means sufficient support within a defined group to make the trial workable. It is not a universal numerical threshold. Selecting only enthusiasts can also produce misleading results if they have unusually favourable conditions.
Bring in people who understand the difficult cases, including thoughtful sceptics. Their objections may reveal a genuine weakness. Expand only after the practice works beyond its most enthusiastic supporters.
2. Prepare Before The Opening Appears
Timing influences whether a proposal receives attention. A contract renewal, customer complaint, new competitor or technology upgrade can make an unresolved problem harder to ignore.
Satell argues that changemakers should organise before such a trigger arrives. Preparation allows them to respond with something more substantial than a hurried promise.
For a business, preparation means identifying the decision that could create an opening and assembling the resources needed to act. A team considering a new scheduling system might document current delays, test an alternative and estimate training requirements before its existing contract expires.
Waiting must have limits. Safety failures, regulatory duties and immediate harm demand action. A leader should not postpone necessary work in the hope that a crisis will make it easier to sell.
Bryan Weiner’s 2009 theory of organisational readiness distinguishes shared commitment to change from confidence in the collective ability to implement it. His conceptual account also considers task demands, resources and circumstances. It is a theory, not proof of a single best intervention, but it provides a useful discipline: willingness and capacity need separate attention.
Employees may support a proposal while lacking the time, training or authority to carry it out. More urgent messaging will not supply those resources. A trigger creates attention; preparation determines whether that attention can produce action.
3. Make Commitments Visible And Testable
Resistance does not always appear as open disagreement. It can take the form of postponed decisions, withheld information or promises that repeatedly fail to become action.
Satell’s third strategy is to create a constructive situation in which an opponent must either honour a shared commitment or visibly obstruct it. The workplace application needs particular restraint. Managers should avoid arranging encounters designed to embarrass someone or manufacture grounds for dismissal.
A sounder approach makes the agreement observable. If a department has committed to sharing customer information, specify what will be shared, who is responsible and when the receiving team needs it. Hold a review that examines delivery and gives the responsible person an opportunity to explain obstacles.
This can expose several different problems. The manager may be protecting authority. The data may be incomplete. Privacy restrictions may have been overlooked. Treating all three as sabotage would undermine the change effort.
The aim is to remove ambiguity around an agreed action. Document the commitment, provide reasonable support and assess what happens. Accountability becomes more credible when the process is fair enough to distinguish inability, legitimate objection and deliberate obstruction.
Measure Change Management Strategies Through Everyday Behaviour
A transformation deserves assessment after the consultants have left and the launch enthusiasm has faded. Attendance, favourable survey responses and completed training can show participation. They cannot, by themselves, demonstrate a changed operating practice.
Choose measures connected to the actual problem: fewer repeat errors, faster resolution, more reliable handovers or continued use without managerial prompting. Establish a baseline and examine whether gains persist. Where feasible, compare similar teams and account for differences in staffing, workload and resources.
The uncomfortable test is whether people still use the new approach on a busy day, when shortcuts are tempting and nobody is watching closely. Leaders who study that moment learn more than those who count applause at the announcement. Change becomes durable when the organisation makes the better practice possible, useful and worth repeating.
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