Change Management is Broken, and More Speed Won't Fix It
Written by Harriet Bodö, Executive Coach & Mentor
Harriet Bodö has spent years on both sides of the relationship, as a client and today as an executive coach and mentor, across programs in leadership, business development, and change management. That vantage point shaped Coach Me & More, where she is also a certified board member, advisory board member, and keynote speaker.
We work in something close to real time now, weekly check-ins instead of quarterly ones, plans that shift before they're even finished. So here's the honest question: is the way you're leading change today actually keeping pace with how your organization works, or has reality already moved past the plan? For most leaders, the answer is no. But the fix isn't running faster. It's protecting the time to do fewer things, more clearly, more often, with the same why running through all of it.
The plan is outdated before it's approved
Change management, as most of us learned it, was built for a slower world. A watertight, months-long plan, signed off in a boardroom, rolled out top-down. That model made sense when the environment held still long enough for the plan to survive contact with it. It doesn't anymore. AI, real-time markets, constant reprioritization, the pace has changed, and the old model hasn't caught up. This is the first in a series of reflections I'll be writing for Brainz on leadership through constant change, and it starts with the number that should make every leadership team uncomfortable.
The failure rate nobody fixes by trying harder
It's widely cited, and worth taking seriously even with the caveats, that as many as 70% of change initiatives fail. Kotter's original research into why transformation efforts fail found the same pattern three decades ago, and it hasn't gone away: the reasons are rarely technical. They're human. Organizations invest heavily in new structures, processes and systems, then wonder why people aren't on board.
Traditional change management treats people as a variable to be managed around. Transformative leadership treats them as the point, and that distinction is the whole difference between a change that sticks and one that quietly reverses itself six months later. The fundamentals of leading people haven't changed. The pace around them has. Which means a comprehensive plan that's outdated before it's even approved is worse than no plan at all, it gives you the comfort of having “done change management” without the substance of having led anyone through it.
What people are actually reacting to
A recent survey by Novus, a leading Swedish research institute, asked people what irritates them most about their managers. The top answers weren't about strategy or competence. They were conflict avoidance and poor communication, managers who dodge difficult conversations and stay vague, and in doing so, create exactly the uncertainty and disengagement they were trying to avoid. Eight out of ten respondents said they speak negatively about their employer as a result. Eight out of ten.
The uncomfortable conclusion from the leadership consultants behind that study is simple: the ability to communicate clearly and handle conflict takes courage, and courage is built in the everyday, not in a workshop once a year. We talk about time being money, but rarely about how much time gets lost to the fallout of avoided conversations, the quiet complaining, the second-guessing, the energy that goes into working around a problem instead of through it. It rarely improves quality, efficiency or anyone's development. The leader avoiding the conversation loses time too: to worry, to discomfort, to postponing what needs to happen regardless. It really is easier, in the end, to just have the conversation. Psychological safety is what makes that possible in the first place, without it, people manage the impression of alignment instead of raising what's actually wrong.
Knowledge doesn't travel uphill
Here's something worth reflecting on: knowledge moves fastest between peers, not up and down a hierarchy. We take in what resembles our own reality more easily than what comes from somewhere unfamiliar, which is exactly why middle managers matter so much in any change effort. If they aren't given time and room to learn with each other, horizontally, the knowledge stays wherever it already lives. It doesn't spread.
This is where AI is a genuine opportunity, not just a faster engine. Make it a colleague you can ask the question nobody else wants to ask out loud. Lower the threshold for admitting a mistake before it compounds. Build the forum for the “dumb questions” that were never actually dumb, the leaders who stay truly present are the ones who make that forum feel safe, tools or no tools. The tools aren't the answer. How you use them together, horizontally, between peers, is.
Three things that actually move a change forward
As a leader, answer the question no one asks out loud before you announce anything. It's not “what does this mean for the organization?” It's “what does this mean for me?”, the question every person on your team is quietly asking. If you can't answer that clearly on their behalf, they'll fill the gap with fear, and answering it once isn't enough; repeat the same why, in the same words, as often as the plan itself has to change. If you don't believe the why yourself, that's worth admitting, and handing the leading of the change to someone who does. You have to believe it to lead it.
Involve people before you've decided, not after. Not as a formality, genuinely and present. The moment involvement becomes a communication tactic, people feel it. Real involvement also surfaces the perspectives you don't have; together, you see further than you would alone, and that's a head start, not a delay.
Measure pace, not just milestones. A shorter plan, revisited weekly, beats a comprehensive one that's already out of date. This also gives you, as the leader, a softer start, you don't need every answer or know exactly how each step gets done to begin. The leaders who move fastest usually slowed down first.
What doesn't change
Google famously let people spend 20% of their working week on projects of their own choosing. AdWords and Gmail came out of that time, not out of a more efficient calendar, but out of space. That's the distinction underneath everything here. Transformative leadership isn't about giving people more tasks. It's about giving them trust and room, and trusting what they build with it.
I keep returning to a line from Colin Powell: “Leadership is all about people. It is not about organizations. It is not about plans. It is not about strategies. It is all about people, motivating people to get the job done. You have to be people-centered.” Pair it with Einstein's observation that we cannot solve the problems we created with the thinking that created them, and you have a fairly complete picture of where most organizations stand right now. We can't think our way out of a faster world with slower thinking. But we can't outrun it either, and hoping speed alone will solve it is its own kind of avoidance.
What actually moves change forward isn't more velocity. It's time together, to understand, to ask why, to share what isn't working, and to adjust. Again and again. It's not the lack of tools, plans or good intentions that slows most organizations down. It's the lack of time together to use any of them well.
If you're rethinking how you lead through constant change, as a leadership team, a board, or one leader carrying more of it than you should have to alone, that's exactly the work I do: building the clarity, trust and psychological safety that let strategy actually hold up under pace, instead of quietly failing on schedule.
Read more from Harriet Bodö
Harriet Bodö, Executive Coach & Mentor
Harriet Bodö became an executive coach and mentor after experiencing, as Head of Department, what a real difference that support makes for leaders who often carry decisions alone. In 2018, she turned that conviction into Coach Me & More, a Finland-based coaching and leadership development practice working with leaders, leadership teams and boards across the Nordic region. She holds a Master's degree in Economics from Hanken and is an ICF-certified executive coach, with 700 hours of coaching experience and more than 200 leaders coached and mentored. She is a certified board member (HHJ), holds board and advisory board assignments, and is a keynote speaker on leadership, transformation, and psychological safety.
