Change Management
Change management is the discipline of moving people from the current way of working to a new one deliberately - diagnosing the need, building the case, handling resistance, and reinforcing the new state until it's actually how things are done, not just how they were announced.
Diagnosis sits at the left of the sequence, reinforcement at the right, with resistance handled somewhere in the middle.
Reach for this when…
- A new system or structure was announced and adoption stalled within weeks.
- You can feel resistance in the room but nobody's naming it or addressing it.
- A previous change reverted the moment attention moved elsewhere.
How to run it
- Diagnose the real need for change and who it affects.
- Build the case and communicate it honestly, including what's lost, not just what's gained.
- Identify likely sources of resistance and address them before they surface as sabotage.
- Implement in stages, with checkpoints, not as a single big-bang announcement.
- Reinforce the new state until it survives without your attention on it.
A worked example
Situation. Marek Kowalski's mid-size bank, Bank Karpacki in Krakow, Poland, rolled out a new loan-approval system, trained everyone in a single day, and within a month half the branches were quietly back on the old paper workaround.
Applied. Marek restarted the rollout in stages: piloted in two branches, named the loss branch managers actually felt - control over exceptions - and negotiated it directly rather than dismissing it, then rolled out branch by branch with a manager check-in at 30 and 90 days.
Result. Adoption held past the 90-day mark in the pilot branches, and the staged rollout to the rest of the network kept the same pattern instead of reverting.
The catch
Change management done as a single kickoff meeting is theatre - the reinforcement step is the one organisations skip most often, declaring victory at go-live and then wondering why the old habit crept back within a quarter. It also assumes leadership has the standing and consistency to reinforce the change, which a fractured or distracted leadership team can't do.
If nobody checks in at 90 days, assume the change reverted. Silence is not adoption.
Origin: Draws on Kurt Lewin's unfreeze-change-refreeze model and John Kotter's eight-step process, blended rather than either one reproduced exactly.