Insight Editions · No. 270
How Change Really Works
Seven Science-Based Principles for Transforming Your Organization
Julia Dhar, Kristy R. Ellmer & Philip Jameson
Three BCG leaders explain why most transformations miss their goals, naming the gap between the leaders who design change and the employees who live it, and set out seven principles for closing it.
A study guide to How Change Really Works by Julia Dhar, Kristy R. Ellmer & Philip Jameson. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book on One Page
Three BCG partners argue that roughly 70-75% of organizational change fails for behavioral reasons, not strategic or financial ones: leaders design change for themselves and ignore how employees will behave, feel and think. Treat employees as the customers of change and design the change around predictable human behavior, and success becomes repeatable rather than lucky. Part One gives seven principles; Part Two turns them into 26 tactics across five phases.
- The diagnosis. Change distance separates designers from those affected: in the authors' Change Game, 68% of executives feel positive about an unspecified change against 45% of employees. Leaders fall for the false consensus effect, invest in the what of change and skimp on the how, and misreadings compound (the mathematics of misalignment). Like Paul Fitts's WWII cockpits, the context, not the people, usually fails.
- The reframe. Employees are the customers of change. Leaders who market obsessively to buyers should segment, pilot and sell change internally with the same care, reversing the burden of adaptation. The model is Claude Hopkins, who made advertising measurable by behavior changed.
- Principles 1-3: getting the foundation right. Executives must reach true agreement (not false alignment) on the Why, What and How through a five-step process; employees need agency (decision-making for some, influence for many, representation for all) because of the IKEA effect; and take up must be earned by removing all seven COM-B barriers in a measured loop.
- Principles 4-7: sustaining it. Measure emotions, confidence and capacity every two weeks instead of trusting instinct; run change through ritualized weekly meetings that cut decision fatigue; carry it with one change story (threat, fitness or destiny) plus symbols; and manufacture momentum with four techniques, predicting the six-month dip.
- Part Two: the operating manual. After two shifts (flip the pyramid, redesign the cockpit), five phases carry 26 tactics: Deciding (1-6 months, signed true agreement on Why, What and How), Planning (1-2 months: Transformation Office, four-level hierarchy, rituals, story, incentives, emotion tracking), Starting (4-6 months: kickoffs, 100 days of bottom-up planning, stage-gates, early wins), Persisting (6 months-2 years of the messy middle, where most value is delivered and the Autopilot and Sandbag traps lurk) and Ending (1-2 months: a formal decision to end, then close out, celebrate, reflect).
- The stance. Structure beats improvisation (a 5.9-point TSR edge for formal programs across 1,801 programs in the authors' data), so rituals are never canceled and transformations are never paused; persuasion comes first and enforcement only last. But the structure is built around people: stories, celebrations, fresh starts and deliberate endings, because people remember the peak and the end, and the authors expect those human fundamentals to outlast the tools of the AI era.
Chapter map
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| Pref | Why We Wrote This Book | Change fails for behavioral reasons; Hopkins shows a scientific way |
| Intro | The Distance between Us | Change distance; employees are the customers of change |
| 1 | True Agreement | Five steps to real agreement on Why, What, How |
| 2 | Agency | Decision-making, influence, representation; the IKEA effect |
| 3 | Take Up | Seven COM-B barriers and a five-step loop to earn behavior change |
| 4 | Emotions | Biweekly Sentiment Check on emotions, confidence, capacity |
| 5 | Rituals | Fixed weekly meetings and HIIDE triggers beat decision fatigue |
| 6 | Stories and Symbols | One story (threat, fitness, destiny) plus objects, actions, events |
| 7 | Momentum | Show belief, promote wins, new challenges, fresh starts |
| P2 | Putting Principles to Work | Flip the pyramid, change the cockpit; five phases |
| 8 | Deciding | Signed agreement, behavioral goals, leaders' own change |
| 9 | Planning | CTO, Transformation Office, hierarchy, six planning tactics |
| 10 | Starting | Kickoffs, 100 days of bottom-up plans, stage-gates, early wins |
| 11 | Persisting | Messy middle: Autopilot and Sandbag traps, eight tactics, never pause |
| 12 | Ending | Avoid the False Summit; decide the end; close out, celebrate, reflect |
| Aft | Change Is a Choice | Fundamentals outlast AI; 26-tactic checklist, ten sayings, glossary |
Why We Wrote This Book
Dhar, Ellmer and Jameson open with a blunt diagnosis: the root cause of most change failures is behavioral, not strategic, financial or operational. Organizations stumble because leaders pay too little attention to how executives and employees will behave, feel and think during the process, and those reactions are predictable, preventable and solvable. The preface sets out the problem through a composite company, introduces the authors and their method, and borrows a model from an early-twentieth-century copywriter.
TechCo: the familiar failure
The preface begins with TechCo, a disguised composite. For several years running the business had underperformed and lost market share. Customers had signaled that a new business model was needed and competitors had already adopted it, yet neither executives nor employees had rallied behind it: in public people agreed with the direction, in private they doubted it was practical. With the board and investors pressing and a new competitor gaining ground, the CEO decided something had to move quickly.
After weeks of closed-door discussion with her executive team, she launched an organization-wide transformation called "North Star." Its goals were deliberately bold: cut costs, double revenue, digitize the business, disrupt the industry with new products and reshape the culture. Global town halls told employees to expect an exciting new era.
- Early signs. A few quick cost reductions landed, leaders spoke up for cross-functional teams and digital overhauls, and staff who had spent years doing more with less were pleased to hear the words "culture" and "simplicity." Update meetings multiplied and initiatives were documented.
- Confusion underneath. Managers worked through jargon-heavy decks ("synergies," "simplification," "innovation at scale") with no idea of the next step. Priorities were reshuffled weekly, decisions taken in one meeting were reopened in the next or in private side conversations, nothing was ever deprioritized, and initiatives contradicted one another. One director asked whether the focus was customer experience, cost reduction, or both.
- Fatigue. Constant reporting, often duplicated for several audiences, and working methods that looked like more of the same left some teams feeling they were working harder than before without making progress, unappreciated, and with pay that did not improve.
- Resistance. Many people read digitization as a rejection of everything they had built. Middle managers, shut out of the big decisions, began to drag their feet; some complied under pressure, others shrugged that they had seen this before.
- Year two. Morale fell, major milestones slipped without discussion, and executives spent more time huddled together explaining poor results than with their teams fixing them. Promises of a turnaround next quarter went unbelieved on the front line.
- Outcome. The program was quietly shelved; the CEO stopped mentioning North Star and settled for small improvements with a handful of leaders. TechCo stayed stuck.
The uncomfortable part is that the CEO had done what most people would call best practice. She announced goals, held a companywide kickoff, set up a project management office (PMO) with quarterly initiative reviews, told her direct reports the change mattered, and even gathered leadership team feedback every six months. Many of her actions were sensible. Her bewildered question, roughly "what more did they want from me?", is the question the book sets out to answer.
Not a strategy problem
The authors say they have met dozens of leaders like TechCo's CEO and thousands of their employees, and the TechCo story hundreds of times. Months after momentum is lost, these leaders tend to say the same thing: they expected change to be hard but not this hard, and since companies have to change constantly, there ought to be a guide.
The authors agree a guide is needed, though not the one leaders expect. Struggling organizations rarely lack a good strategy or business opportunities. They fail because they do not attend to how people are likely to behave, feel and think as the change unfolds.
Behavioral research shows that people neither resist nor embrace change irrationally. They adopt a new behavior when a predictable set of circumstances makes it feel attainable and attractive, and they resist in predictable, knowable ways. Ignore motivations, emotions and assumptions and change becomes almost impossible; understand them and odds improve; design around them and odds improve further.
Behavioral science, as the authors define it, is the rigorous, systematic and experimental study of human decisions, emotions and actions, drawing on economics, psychology, neuroscience and sociology. The difficulty is access. Because so many disciplines work on human change, the useful research runs to hundreds of books and thousands of papers published over decades, and no leader can absorb and integrate it while doing a day job. Academic findings also rarely come with a translation into business practice.
The authors and their mission
- Julia Dhar. Based at the BCG Institute and cofounder of BCG's Behavioral Science Lab; more than a decade working with CEOs, teams and frontline staff and researching the conditions under which change succeeds.
- Kristy Ellmer. Decades of transformation experience; has served as Chief Transformation Officer in many organizations on large, multiyear transformations, working with hundreds of executives worldwide; cofounded the Behavioral Science Lab with Dhar and colleagues.
- Philip Jameson. A decade advising companies through transformative change, interested both in large economic forces and in the small, invisible acts that make teams cohere or fall apart.
Their shared mission is to give people the best chance of reaching their goals, using the best available evidence. Working across every industry and more than fifty countries, they found the same dilemmas everywhere: higher stakes have not produced more success, and more resources have not reliably helped.
They describe two feelings. Frustration at how regularly change fails, and optimism because the solutions already exist: in almost every failure they examined, applying proven behavioral principles would have raised the chance of success. What blocked leaders was that the advice is scattered and untranslated, which left their odds needlessly low. The waste of money, time and human potential is what pushed them to write a coherent, practical account of the science combined with their own practice.
An unlikely hero: Claude C. Hopkins
Their model is Claude C. Hopkins, a meticulous, methodical copywriter from Michigan. In summer 1907 Milwaukee's Schlitz Beer sat in fifth place in America's beer wars. Hopkins had just joined Chicago's Lord & Thomas at a salary of $185,000 a year (over $6 million in 2025 money), and the agency's owner, Albert Lasker, asked him to shift the habits of millions of drinkers toward Schlitz and away from half a dozen perfectly good rivals.
Every brewer, Schlitz included, advertised purity, and the claim made no impression; Hopkins later compared its effect to water on a duck. Beer buyers are creatures of habit who buy what they always have or what is nearest, so changing their behavior meant changing how Schlitz spoke to them.
- Method. Instead of starting with a slogan or artwork, Hopkins asked for a tour of the brewery.
- Discovery. Schlitz drilled artesian wells thousands of feet deep for pure water, ran beer through elaborate pulp filters, cooled it in plate-glass rooms to keep out contamination and sterilized every bottle four times. None of this appeared in its ads.
- The exchange. The brewmaster said every brewer did the same. Hopkins answered that no one else had ever told the story.
- Execution. His ads described the purity process, not just the result, inviting drinkers to picture the care taken on their behalf.
- Result. Within months sales soared (some reports claimed 600%) and Schlitz moved from fifth into a dead heat with Anheuser-Busch's Budweiser.
The authors explain why it worked: people are wired to want evidence that producers respect them enough to take care, to know why something is happening, and to see behind the scenes. Hopkins changed how consumers chose beer by giving them a clear, credible reason to change a habit.
The authors themselves hedge the 600% figure with "some reports claimed." It traces back to Hopkins's own self-promoting memoir and later retellings, and no audited sales series is offered. The story works as a parable about telling the untold process story; treat the number as folklore rather than data.
Hopkins's real gift, in the authors' reading, was systematic understanding of motivation. He saw advertising as an applied science of changing behavior: every ad was an experiment adding to knowledge of what works and why. He pioneered what we now call A/B testing, splitting campaigns into controlled trials and tracking results, on the view that almost any question could be settled cheaply by a test campaign.
He codified his precepts in Scientific Advertising (1923) so others could apply them repeatedly. His complaint about earlier advertising, that each practitioner was a law unto himself and ignored what others had learned (like building a locomotive without checking prior designs), fits many change programs. His central claims:
- Advertising is salesmanship. It exists to give people honest reasons to adopt new habits, not to entertain or impress.
- Measure by behavior. An ad that does not measurably change behavior is worthless.
- Psychology is permanent. Human nature has barely changed since Julius Caesar, so principles of psychology learned once never need unlearning.
From Madison Avenue to Main Street
The authors want to do for organizational change what Hopkins did for selling. They define change and transformation broadly: any deliberate effort to shift how people get something done together, from reinventing an entire enterprise to introducing a new process in one factory. Anyone who needs people to start, stop or shift something is the audience.
Their own "test campaign" included interviews with hundreds of executives and employees in public and private companies worldwide, shadowing board meetings, sitting at the back of town halls, trialing techniques from one setting in another to see whether they transferred, and forensic examination of change efforts that worked and those that did not.
Seven predictable failures
Across that work one pattern recurred: failed change fails for some or all of the same seven reasons. Each maps to one of the book's seven principles.
| When change fails, leaders... | Principle that answers it |
|---|---|
| Don't agree on what must change, or what will be different | 1 True agreement, not false alignment |
| Don't give people meaningful agency over the change | 2 Agency, not just involvement |
| Assume take up of new behavior is automatic | 3 Take up is earned |
| Read employees' emotions by instinct | 4 Feedback, not instinct |
| Overload people with a reactive, inconsistent process | 5 Rituals, not reactions |
| Overfocus on financial targets | 6 Stories and symbols, not just dollars |
| Launch big, then lose momentum | 7 Momentum throughout |
These mistakes are common but not random: they are predictable, preventable and, when made, solvable, provided leaders apply a common set of principles consistently.
The problems are as many and as important as the problems in building a skyscraper. And many of them lie in the foundations.
Why it matters
The authors close on what each party is owed. Organizations deserve a better return on change investment; executives deserve a guide, grounded in research and their own data, for anticipating obstacles; employees deserve a change program built around their needs and emotions and a better experience of living through it. Change can be more scientific and succeed far more often. The book therefore starts with the foundation: the relationship between those who design change and those affected by it.
The Distance between Us (and Them)
The people who design change and the people who live through it experience the same program in completely different ways. The authors call this gap change distance, and argue that the customers of organizational change are the employees, so leaders must design change for them the way they design products for buyers. Ignore the gap and you join the roughly 70-75% of programs that miss their goals; study the 25% that succeed, and redesign the "cockpit" people work in, and the odds shift.
The Change Game
The authors' research instrument is the Change Game, a series of questions they have put to thousands of people in boardrooms, warehouses, hospitals and software labs, in English, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic, to executives, first-time managers and frontline staff. The first question sets the frame: a change is coming to your working life, but you do not yet know its type, size or impact. How do you feel?
The largest run involved 6,000 people in large companies across 15 countries, and three questions produced the headline gaps.
- How do you feel? 68% of executives felt positive vs 45% of employees; among employees 32% were neutral and 23% negative, against only 12% of executives negative.
- Will it achieve its objectives? Based on past experience, 72% of executives expected success vs 49% of employees.
- Who matters most to success? From shareholders, board, executives, managers and employees, each group mostly picked itself: 38% of executives named "executive leaders," double the 19% of employees who did.
The pattern held question after question. Asked to pick an emotion, executives more often chose "happy," "enthusiastic," "energized" and "inspired." They also more often thought of the upside: a better working life, a chance to shape the change, a career boost. The authors resist the easy conclusion that people simply dislike change; the results are more nuanced than that. What they show is that the people who instigate change are, on average, the most positive about it. Same company, same change, very different experiences.
Change distance
The authors name this invisible divide change distance and compare it to a crackling phone line. Leaders speak into the microphone confident they are being heard; employees catch fragments that are delayed, staticky or scrambled, often while distracted by what is happening around them. Each side assumes the line is clearer than it is, and even when they suspect interference they underestimate how much meaning is lost. The authors consider this distortion one of the most under-recognized variables in whether change succeeds. Your people don't see change the way you see change is the first of the ten "words to live by" collected in the book's appendix.
Why executives love change
The authors offer three explanations for executive enthusiasm:
- They have benefited before. Many rose through the ranks because changes at the top opened new opportunities, leaving lingering positive associations.
- It is part of who they are. Volunteering to lead and implement change programs is often how they built careers, so a pro-change stance has become part of their professional identity.
- They are paid for it. Executive compensation packages often reward successful change, while the rest of the organization has few incentives or cannot see how its effort will reach its paychecks.
The false consensus effect
Enthusiasm produces a classic bias, the false consensus effect identified by Stanford psychologist Lee Ross: leaders assume their excitement, urgency and motivation are shared by everyone, when employees more often feel anxious, overwhelmed or frustrated. Having watched the plan emerge from its first conversations and spent many meetings and off-sites on it, executives forget that others have not had the same time to absorb it and work out their own reactions. That leads to risky shortcuts the authors have seen repeatedly:
- Late telling. Executives do not deliberately hide a change, but they tell affected employees late in planning because they assume goodwill, or wait until the plan is "finished" so as not to distract people.
- Thin retraining. After years of complaints about a bad process, a new one is designed, but little is invested in retraining because leaders overestimate employees' knowledge and motivation and underestimate what it takes to change habits.
- Wrong pitch. A national road show tours manufacturing sites explaining that the change helps the bottom line, while saying little about what employees care about: safety, product quality, working hours, innovation culture.
All three reflect too much cognitive effort on the what of change (the design of the future company) and too little on the how (the actions that bring that design to life).
The authors call this compounding the mathematics of misalignment. Each small misstep widens the starting distance, and small gaps between leaders' assumptions and employees' realities snowball into resistance, disengagement and failure. Every misread emotion, unspoken fear or overlooked objection makes this change harder, and the next one too.
Employees are the customers of change
The paradox is that the same leaders are often superb at closing the distance to external customers. They study buying behavior, define segments, innovate for specific markets and generations, pilot, iterate and message-test, and invest in customer journeys, in the spirit of Steve Jobs's advice to begin with the customer experience and work back to the technology. Turned inward, that care and curiosity often disappears.
Asked who the customer of organizational change is, many leaders instinctively say themselves, as if employees deliver change to them. The authors call that upside-down. In a change program change is the product, leaders and their teams make it, and employees are the customers. This is meant literally, not as a nicety about employees mattering: you are producing something new, asking people for their attention, persuading them of its benefits, expecting them to use it, and hoping they will recommend it to others.
The most successful change leaders do not push through resistance. They reverse the burden of adaptation: instead of asking people to work harder at change, the leaders work harder at making change feel natural.
Most change programs fail
Why invest so much effort in understanding employees? Because most change programs fail. The authors define failure precisely: not that nothing was achieved, but that the objectives set at the outset were not achieved or sustained, for reasons that can be identified and explained.
Harwood Manufacturing, a pajama factory in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, had been a testing ground for organizational-change pioneer Kurt Lewin since 1939, hosting nearly a decade of the first organizational development experiments. After Lewin's death, personnel head Lester Coch (a Lewin student) and morale psychologist John French studied what happened when the largely female sewing and assembly staff had their tasks adjusted, as frequently happened to meet orders or new machinery. A group given no input saw productivity fall 35%, and 17% quit within weeks. Two groups that helped design the new procedures rebounded within days, ended 14% above previous output, and lost no one, tracked over six weeks and published in detail. Coch and French noted in Human Relations that most Harwood grievances had always come from change situations. Change itself was not the problem; how people experienced it was.
Harwood began an inquiry that has run for decades and across disciplines. From the 1950s, psychologists, sociologists and management theorists found again and again that change efforts, especially autocratic ones, often failed, and that even enthusiastic starts gave way to confusion, frustration and retreat.
1970s The field of organizational development (participatory planning, facilitation, cultural alignment) concludes that change breaks down under social pressure: people resist openly or change only passively when they lack clarity, trust in leadership or real involvement. Stanford's Jerry Porras reviews team-building, sensitivity training, survey feedback and managerial-grid programs and finds only about half show significant improvement.
1980s-90s The age of reengineering. MIT engineer Michael Hammer, who helped define the term, admits within a few years that by his "unscientific estimate" 50-70% of reengineering efforts miss their intended results.
1995 Harvard's John Kotter, "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail," built on a decade of study, lists eight errors, including too little urgency, too weak a guiding coalition and no vision. In A Sense of Urgency he later says that in over 70% of cases needing substantial change, efforts were not fully launched, abandoned midway, or delivered late, over budget and with great frustration.
2000 Harvard's Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria contrast Theory E (economics: downsizing, shareholder value, incentives) with Theory O (organizational development: culture, commitment, trust), argue that integrating both works best, and open with the line that about 70% of change initiatives fail.
2013 A Towers Watson global survey puts large-scale change failure at 75%; studies in health care, IT, education and public administration report 70-80%.
2022 The authors' own research on 2,000 transformations over 20 years finds no substantial improvement since Porras: more than 70% fail to beat their industry peer average at one year and five years after a downturn.
The authors stress how stubborn this is: in the same decades humanity digitized the economy, mapped the human genome and built self-driving cars, yet has not become meaningfully better at helping groups of people do things differently, consistently and sustainably. Failure is routine, not exceptional, and it is not for lack of spending: estimates put investment in change in the trillions of dollars.
The 70% figure is mostly inherited citation. Hammer called his own estimate "unscientific," and a 2011 review by Mark Hughes in the Journal of Change Management found no valid empirical evidence behind the Beer and Nohria number. "Failure" is also defined differently across studies. BCG's 2,000-transformation dataset is a firmer base, but it measures shareholder returns versus peers, not whether behaviors changed, so it is a proxy for the authors' own definition of failure.
The cost of failure
Failure wastes human potential as well as money. Long-term studies of large programs find greater exhaustion, lower engagement and, past a threshold of wasted effort, a higher likelihood of quitting. BCG colleagues Deborah Lovich, Rosie Sargeant and Jacob Smith (2024) put a number on the threshold: people tolerate only so much toil (work they do not enjoy), and beyond four hours a week they start thinking about leaving.
Every failed program also leaves scar tissue that reduces the organization's appetite and capacity for the next change, a dangerous apathy when constant reinvention is required. The most common aftermath is plain disappointment. One employee described moving over four years from disbelief to anger and frustration and finally to sadness at what had been lost for nothing.
Chess, not roulette
The flip side: if about 75% fail, about 25% succeed, so some organizations are doing something systematically right, and it is knowable and repeatable. Hammer himself warned against treating low success odds as high risk. Roulette is high risk because the outcome is pure chance once the bet is placed; chess is not, because the better player can expect to win and losses come from ability and strategy. Change belongs with chess.
When the cockpit fights back
What do the 25% do differently? The authors answer with a second hero, psychologist Paul Fitts. In 1942, just after the US entered World War II, the air force recruited Fitts from his University of Michigan PhD because he specialized in human behavior under stress and insisted on observing it in real settings. He climbed into fighter cockpits at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, with no helmet or parachute, just a notebook and pencil; he could not fly. Each aircraft was worth roughly $2 million at current prices.
The puzzle: veteran pilots with thousands of flawless hours were making catastrophic errors at critical moments, crashing into trees, ending up in riverbeds and landing with the wheels up. Planes were improving while pilots seemed to get worse. Fitts logged every hesitation and misplaced reach and saw the pattern others had missed: pilots were consistently confusing similar-looking controls, and key instruments were placed against intuition. Under combat stress those flaws became deadly. The plane was failing the pilots. His report concluded that many accidents came directly from how equipment was designed and placed, and could be eliminated by designing for human requirements.
- Touch-coding. Controls were given distinct shapes and textures so pilots could tell them apart by feel.
- Logical grouping. Instruments were arranged by purpose and urgency.
- Natural reach. Key switches moved to where a pilot's hand naturally goes.
- Outcome. Pilot errors and fatal crashes fell sharply, transforming aviation safety.
Former BCG colleague Yves Morieux sums up Fitts's spirit: context drives behavior, which drives performance. Most transformations fail because the cockpit is wrong, not the strategy. The issue is how, not what.
In organizations the faulty cockpit looks familiar. Employees often know what needs doing but feel the system fights them: deadlines set by executives without grasping the effort involved, structures that slow decisions and collaboration, contradictory metrics and incentives across teams, and meetings that review the past instead of preparing upcoming work or helping people reach the next level.
The lesson extends to every wave of new tools, from analytics and digitization to AI: as technology advances, humans stay at the center of the change. Harvard psychologist Stanley Smith Stevens, in Machines Cannot Fight Alone almost eighty years ago, observed that the human operator seemed the weak link but much of the fault lay in equipment poorly matched to human capabilities. The authors' conclusion: successful change does not force behaviors on people; it builds environments that, through design, incentives and nudges, naturally produce the desired behaviors. That requires leaders to go where the work happens and find what stops people behaving as expected.
How to read this book
Part One sets out seven principles, one for each common leader mistake, to maximize the chance that employees take part and start doing things differently.
- Get true agreement, not false alignment. Executives often fail to truly agree on why things must change, what will change and how; successful leaders have a process for bringing peers to true agreement before the organization is asked to move.
- Increase agency, not just involvement. People are more open to change they helped design; leaders build high-agency mindsets through three experiences: making decisions, influencing someone else's decisions, and being represented by trusted peers.
- Expect take up to be earned, not automatic. Organizations are full of barriers; leaders stay curious about where people lack the capability, opportunity or motivation to change, then use resources to lower those barriers until none remain. They inspire, encourage and enable.
- Understand emotions through feedback, not instinct. Companies measure how customers feel rather than guessing; leaders should continuously measure emotions, confidence and capacity, act on worrying results and encourage behaviors they want more of.
- Use a process with rituals, not reactions. The more decisions people face, the worse they make them; change creates decision fatigue, so leaders design ritualized meetings for every team, including structured celebration, reflection and debate, to give back cognitive capacity.
- Share stories and symbols, not just dollars. Leaders learn employees' goals and desires and use them to tell a compelling, emotional change story, reinforced by symbolic objects, actions and events.
- Create momentum throughout, not just at the start. Early wins matter but do not sustain momentum alone; leaders continuously predict when momentum will sag and adjust, encouraging strong teams and resetting struggling ones.
Part Two turns the principles into practice across the five phases of a typical transformation: Deciding, Planning, Starting, Persisting with and Ending Change. Each chapter covers the key activities and essential tactics of a phase: how effective leaders select initiative owners, sequence wins, structure rituals against decision fatigue and measure emotion to prevent burnout, through the launch, the "messy middle" and the close. It also shows how a small gap (an open loop, an early misalignment, inattention to real emotions) can knock an entire effort off course, and how such missteps are prevented or recovered from.
The scope is wide: a "capital T" Transformation that shifts a company's whole trajectory, a new system in one business unit, or a team changing how it enters new markets; at the start, stuck in the middle, or reviving a stalled effort. Every principle and tactic aims to close the distance between what leaders intend and what employees experience. The authors frame the book as practical, not inspirational: readers already know change matters, and the question is how it really works and how, with more science and intention, to make it work better for everyone.
Get True Agreement, Not False Alignment
Executive teams routinely launch change before they actually agree on why they are changing, what is changing, and how. Worse, they behave as if they agree. The authors call this false alignment, diagnose its three consequences and three causes, and prescribe true agreement: a detailed, explicit compact reached through a deliberate five-step process, with four fallback options when disagreement will not yield. If you left the room aligned in principle, but not truly agreed, you are misaligned in practice.
Pandora's forty-six priorities
In 2000 Danish jeweler Pandora launched the product that made it: the charm bracelet, a silver rope-like base onto which charms of gold, silver, Murano glass and semiprecious stones could be clipped and removed. It spread from Denmark to the US and Canada and then worldwide. By 2009 Pandora called itself one of the world's three largest jewelry brands, and in 2010 it listed in Copenhagen at 27 billion kroner ($5 billion), Denmark's largest IPO in sixteen years.
The 2010s were harder. In August 2011 Pandora lost 65% of its market value in a single day and its CEO departed; three more CEOs came and went over the next seven years. In February 2019, during yet another CEO search, it announced Programme NOW, about a dozen interconnected workstreams:
- Costs. A $400 million cost-reduction program, every dollar to be reinvested in the business.
- Talent. A global reorganization of people.
- Brand and stores. A brand relaunch and 360-degree store revamp for a more welcoming experience.
- Pricing discipline. Fewer of the excessive promotions that were eroding brand equity.
- Digital. An overhaul of digital marketing, personalization and loyalty.
- Go-to-market. Loose product groups replaced by six consumer-facing collections.
BCG colleague Javier Seara framed it as bold action to restore shareholder trust and reawaken consumers' passion, not a set of incremental fixes. When Alexander Lacik took over as CEO in April 2019 he judged the plan broadly right on paper but saw a missing ingredient: focus and consistency in the work. The program listed about a dozen priorities; Lacik counted forty-six priorities for the management team alone, before even looking further down. There was no anchoring point. His question was how to build real agreement on what Programme NOW meant.
False alignment
Every program needs clear answers to three seemingly obvious questions:
- Why are we changing?
- What are we changing, and what are we not changing?
- How will the changes occur?
Executive teams often launch before they truly agree on the specific answers, and then act more agreed than they are. The authors see this so often they named it false alignment. Alignment suggests objects facing the same way; when leaders say "we are aligned," they usually mean only "we are not in each other's way." Change demands far more: leaders must intensely collaborate, compromise and communicate as one. Settling for alignment fails in the end, hence "false." Leaders who build detailed, explicit compacts, which the authors call true agreement, make faster progress on shared priorities and can hold each other accountable.
A North American energy distributor asked the authors to help prepare it for a potential sale; the CEO said everyone agreed on the changes needed before the "For Sale" sign went up.
- Question 1. How clear are you on the specific ways the new company will differ? 10 of 13 executives said "very clear" or "clear."
- Question 2. How aligned is this team on those differences? 8 of 13 said "aligned."
- The test. Each wrote down the differences independently. One expected a larger, more complex system with similar operations; another saw mainly standing alone without a large parent; a third listed new assets, markets, cost structure, people and leaders.
- The risk. Had each returned to their department and steered by their own reading, every group would have drifted from the CEO's intent, some by a few degrees and some by a lot, confusing employees and frustrating leaders.
- Outcome. The executives were shocked and agreed on the spot to spend much more time discussing the true purpose of the program. The authors report similar results with other teams.
Technology executive Hany Fam told them he had learned the "falsehood of consensus": it has many passive forms, such as someone nodding along and declaring themselves on board when they are not.
The consequences of false alignment
When executives do not share an agreement on what, why and how, execution teams struggle; the authors compare it to asking car workers to build a vehicle without telling them its make or model. Three afflictions are common.
- Paralysis: lots of talk, no action. Stuck between leaders' competing priorities, teams take no meaningful action on any version. They arrive at meetings with a blank sheet asking what the priorities are, list possible focus areas, propose strategic reviews scheduled over months and devise complicated prioritization frameworks to reconcile visions. Nobody is pleased, nothing moves, observers say the team "seems stuck," and the team itself complains that no one is steering the ship.
- Hyperactivity: lots of action, no progress. Teams chase every executive's vision at once and prove commitment with a huge number of initiatives, many designed to placate a sponsor ("we can't drop that one, it's for Joan"). The initiatives are shallow and speculative, fail ordinary rigor tests and are under-resourced because funding is spread too thin.
- Tunnel vision: lots of progress on the wrong thing. Lacking the full picture, teams execute a narrow interpretation. If executives want better customer experience and lower costs but never agreed targets and trade-offs, a team may treat the program as cost reduction and succeed so well that cuts start to damage customer experience.
A rarer but equally damaging outcome is the Abilene paradox, coined by Jerry B. Harvey after a family outing. He and three relatives each said they wanted to drive 53 miles to Abilene, Texas; back home after an exhausting afternoon, each admitted they had gone only to keep the others happy. Harvey recalled a 106-mile round trip across hot desert to eat poor food at a cafeteria, which none of them had wanted. Poorly communicating executives can likewise converge on a version of a transformation nobody actually wants. Consumer-industry executive Elaine Boltz summed up false alignment: it gets murky very fast.
The causes of false alignment
False alignment typically has one of three causes.
1. Executives don't realize they disagree
This sounds implausible for high performers, but it is common. It is the false consensus effect from the Introduction (Lee Ross and Stanford colleagues): we overestimate how widely others share our beliefs. Harvard decision scientist Julia Minson illustrates it with ice cream: someone who loves vanilla will persistently overestimate how many others love it too.
The usual culprit is a conversation that is not specific enough. Two manufacturing executives both want better margins; one means charging customers more, the other lowering unit costs. Until they go deeper than "margin improvement" they will not find the disagreement or a balance between approaches, and the bias can hide it for months.
A broad goal ("Double revenues!") or a single number ("Save $500 million!") cannot tell you whether you agree. Executives need a specific, shared breakdown of the goal across levers and business areas, the consequences and trade-offs, and an approximate timeline for capturing the value. Without that detail, agreement cannot be tested.
2. Executives pretend to agree to avoid conflict
The more pernicious cause is pretending to agree rather than having needed disagreements. At one large company with strained executive relationships, the CEO polled every executive for explicit verbal agreement before each decision. On a pair of proposals one said he agreed with the first but not the second, another said "aligned," a third "partly aligned," and the COO concluded that everyone was "conceptually aligned." The meeting ended; real disagreement went unspoken.
At another transformation, meetings routinely ended with "we are aligned," yet nobody could say what had been agreed or what came next. The authors banned the word "alignment": each use cost a $5 fine, and the fines paid for a team celebration when a specific goal was reached.
The underlying reason is that humans overestimate how unpleasant disagreement will be. Minson and Harvard colleagues split several hundred participants into two groups. Conservatives were shown, or asked to imagine, a short speech by a leading Democratic senator; liberals, a Republican. One group only imagined watching; the other actually watched. The imaginers expected the experience to be significantly worse than it was and overestimated how much they would disagree. Minson named this affective forecasting error: expecting holders of opposing views to disagree with us more dramatically than they do.
On the Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast, Minson separated two things we tend to merge:
Disagreement. I think we should do one thing, you think another; we discuss it and hear each other. We may reach consensus or part still disagreeing, but nobody feels strongly about it.
Conflict. Disagreement plus a negative attribution about its source: you disagree not because you know or saw different things but because you are not smart enough, biased, or self-interested. We move to conflict by blaming the other person.
Successful change leaders acknowledge their own affective forecasting error. Admitting the human tendency to catastrophize disagreement frees them to have the productive arguments that, through the process below, end in true agreement.
3. Executives know they disagree but plan to resolve it later
The telltale lines:
- Deadline pressure. "No time to debate; without starting now we'll have nothing for Investor Day."
- Something beats nothing. "We have to do something, even if imperfect."
- Details later. "We can sort out details later; the team can make progress meanwhile."
- Clarity later. "Things will be clearer once the program is running."
Here executives know about their differences and are willing to air them, but real or imagined time pressure pushes them to start anyway, hoping for a later chance to settle the big issues. The authors grant this is not unreasonable in general: someone getting fit should just start exercising rather than plan workouts for months, and the book itself later recommends planning initiatives while delivering early wins.
A transformative change is the wrong place for "just start," because of the mathematics of misalignment. Without agreed purpose and scope, small misalignments compound, plans written on vague or contradictory premises multiply confusion, and untangling it is slow for executives and demoralizing for employees who feel their effort was wasted. Worse, teams that defer agreement rarely come back to it: they get busy executing and with other business, and disagreement lingers or widens. Deferred agreement is a debt leaders expect to repay in weeks that takes months or years, if it is repaid at all.
The authors advise taking the time up front; there is usually more time than leaders think, even under pressure. Agreed programs usually find chances to accelerate later, while unagreed ones hit delays that cost far more than the debate would have. The principle is to go slow to go fast, the title idea of former US Marine Damian Pitts, who argues that slowing down lets leaders see clearly, communicate better and decide more cleanly.
Reaching true agreement: the five-step process
The most successful executive teams counter the false consensus effect, open the awkward conversations and invest the time to resolve them through five steps.
- Set clear parameters. Name the precise question; "should we do the transformation?" is too vague (what is "do"? what is "the transformation"?). Explain the process: which conversations, over what period, what supporting information will be available when, and who takes part. State honestly how the decision will be made: only when every executive explicitly agrees, or by the CEO, and if the latter, whether those who cannot agree will be asked to resign honorably.
- Provoke an early exchange. Make the case: say exactly what you propose and why, in structured written arguments, detailed enough that colleagues have something to disagree with (few object to savings in "the operating budget"; many object to savings in their budget, or to how it is done). Invite dissent, remind people they owe the company their views, and ask questions that call for differences.
- Have a quality debate. Give executives time to learn and ask for clarification, best in one-on-ones rather than group meetings, informal and at their own pace, so each grasps the proposal and what will be expected of them personally. Accept that it will feel time-consuming and inefficient. Be honest about the level of agreement: say "we are not yet agreed" rather than euphemisms like "we're speaking the same language." Throughout: Listen. Negotiate. Compromise.
- Come to a formal verdict. Hold a formal final-decision meeting and ask for each individual's agreement, not the group's, which lowers the odds of passive resistance, especially from high performers who think they can get away with it. Decide according to the decision rights set at the start. If all truly agree, document the decision in simple terms and mark it with a physical ritual of unity. Acknowledge remaining concerns and plan to return to them, and respect those who agreed despite discomfort.
- Send a unified message. Leave with an agreed account of what was decided. In the afterglow this is easy to forget, while teams are already texting executives for updates. Do not let each team get its own version or rely on leaders to cascade it; everyone who asks should hear the same message.
Inviting dissent and recording positions
Imperial College London behavioral scientists Celia Moore and Kate Coombs suggest asking "What could go wrong with this approach?" instead of "What do you think?" The small shift signals that the leader wants disagreement, and people are inclined to give leaders what they want. At this stage unanimous support is as likely a bad sign as a good one. Former Admiral Bill Lescher, who led the US Navy's "Get Real Get Better" transformation, told the authors he seeks well-informed decisions by accountable leaders rather than consensus: he does not expect every stakeholder to love each decision, but does expect them to be pleased with a process in which every voice was clearly heard.
Ask leaders to record their initial position as early as possible: what they clearly agree with, clearly disagree with, and feel unsure about. Getting this in writing rather than aloud reduces groupthink and shows where common ground already exists, so discussion can concentrate on real differences.
- What. We agreed to execute the program on page 12 of the briefing document.
- Why now. We must act to meet the threat from new competitors; arrangements start immediately and go to the board in August.
- Who leads. Timo becomes Chief Transformation Officer (CTO): he sets the transformation approach and structure, orchestrates change across the company and role-models the new behaviors. Others share delivery and oversight, but Timo is accountable for overall success.
- Money. The budget is $[x] and the EBIT target is $[y] per year.
- Still open. Workstream Leaders and Initiative Owners are not yet chosen.
- Next. The team meets again in July for the next implementation decisions.
When all else fails: facing true disagreement
Sometimes, after clear parameters, an early exchange and a real debate, some executives still will not agree. The authors give four options, in order of preference.
Disagree again
The first, best and cheapest option is persistence. True agreement on a large program can take months of intensive deliberation. Executives often declare "Sam will never agree," then find Sam wanted one minor concession on timing. Do not give up early.
Leaders can sometimes persuade by spending political capital and asking for trust. Political scientist Robert Putnam described diplomacy as a two-level game: leaders must strike a deal abroad and also sell it to their constituency at home; executives face the same double task. A leader with a large stock of credibility can win agreement even from doubters, but only if two conditions hold: others believe the leader has superior information, and believe the leader is honest and straightforward. Psychologist Edwin P. Hollander called this stock idiosyncrasy credit: accumulated influence, regard and goodwill that lets some people deviate from group norms in ways others could not, an account they can draw down. The reserves are finite, and the request for trust often arises in the act of disagreeing again.
Subtract and defer
If more debate is exhausted, there is no shame in removing the contested parts or postponing them while formally starting on what is agreed, keeping the discussion going on the rest. A smaller agreed change beats a larger contested one; small and late successes both beat failure, and a successful scaled-back program often converts skeptics to what they opposed. Occasionally the disagreement is so deep that the wise move is to defer the whole program: the status quo carries risk, but more time and information can produce a more durable agreement.
Offer an attractive exit
If you cannot or should not subtract and defer, offer executives in the minority an honorable way out; stepping down from a team whose decisions you cannot support involves no loss of face. Make the exit attractive, fast and drama-free, for example early retirement or an extended transition plan. Sometimes the CEO must walk people out, which can carry symbolic value (developed in Chapter Six).
Proceed with a plan
The last and worst option is to launch with a plan to win over dissenters in the following weeks and months, because it carries the highest risk of continued uncertainty. Sometimes outside forces leave no choice: a board and shareholders may set an immovable sale date requiring an immediate cost program. Then every day without true agreement means risk incurred and opportunities missed, and settling the disagreement becomes the top priority alongside execution.
| Option | What it involves | Rank |
|---|---|---|
| Disagree again | Persist; hidden concessions; spend idiosyncrasy credit if others trust your information and honesty | First, best, cheapest |
| Subtract and defer | Drop or postpone contested parts; start what is agreed; rarely, defer it all | Good |
| Attractive exit | Honorable, fast, drama-free departure for dissenters; sometimes a symbolic walk-out | Acceptable |
| Proceed with a plan | Launch under immovable pressure; resolving disagreement is top priority | Worst, highest risk |
Putting it together: how Pandora reached true agreement
Lacik judged that Programme NOW had mostly the right elements and that what it needed was focus and consistency in execution, starting with the executives. He worked on three agreements.
- Priorities. Lacik told his team to concentrate on Programme NOW's priority areas and stop work not contributing to them. He ran what he called an "open boxing match": everyone could argue about every priority, but nobody would leave until the list was cut. From 46 the list fell back to about a dozen, which he grouped into three major themes, each executive making clear commitments.
- One metric. The team agreed to judge success solely by like-for-like revenue growth: revenue from end-customer demand (not sell-in to intermediary retailers), counting only stores open at least twelve months plus Pandora Online. That ruled out flattering results via inventory movements or new store openings and committed the team to improving real customer relationships. Lacik said it became the only language any of them would speak.
- One brand idea. The team agreed that the human need Pandora served was commemoration: good grades, a milestone birthday, a first job. The response was jewelry with meaning, from which the company's purpose flowed. A new brand launched in August 2019 with the purpose "We give a voice to people's loves."
- Outcome. In May 2021 Pandora told shareholders that its key objectives (stabilizing the topline, raising brand relevance and access, cutting cost) were achieved, and Lacik declared the turnaround behind it. The company moved to a new phase, Project Phoenix, with fresh revenue-growth and margin targets.
Lacik credits the turnaround to foundational executive agreement on why the program existed, what its priorities were and how success would be measured. His formula: get clear on why you are there, turn it into actionable strategies, set simple goals and incentives, and the desired behaviors follow.
The Pandora account rests largely on Lacik's own retrospective and a BCG colleague's framing, so the authors' firm was close to the work. The turnaround also benefited from strong post-2020 consumer demand for affordable luxury. The case shows the mechanism plausibly, but it is not a controlled test of true agreement, and the chapter's other evidence (the energy company, the "$5 fine" team) is anecdotal and unnamed.
- The trap. Teams launch before truly agreeing on why, what and how, and act more agreed than they are: false alignment.
- Three consequences. Paralysis, hyperactivity, tunnel vision (plus the rarer Abilene paradox).
- Three causes. Not realizing you disagree; pretending to agree to avoid conflict; planning to resolve it later.
- Five steps. Set clear parameters, provoke an early exchange, have a quality debate, come to a formal verdict, send a unified message.
- Four fallbacks. Disagree again (best), subtract and defer, offer an attractive exit, proceed with a plan (worst).
Increase Agency, Not Just Involvement
No plan can prescribe everything employees must do differently, so transformations depend on a high-agency mindset: a bias for action plus the belief that one's actions matter. Surveys, focus groups and town halls rarely create it, and ignored input can backfire. If your people build it, they'll believe in it: agency comes from decision-making for some, influence for many, and representation for everyone else, as Ericsson showed in rebuilding the sales system its 40,000 users had learned to work around.
Ericsson's forty thousand skeptics
Bluetooth takes its name from a tenth-century Viking king who united Denmark and Norway; the wireless technology was invented in the mid-1990s by engineers at Ericsson, the Swedish telecoms infrastructure giant. By the early 2020s its leaders knew innovation alone would not secure the future: they had to win and sustain mobile-infrastructure contracts with operators in dozens of countries against strong rivals, while adapting to market and regulatory change. In 5G, which connects Internet of Things devices and opens new uses and revenue for operators, Ericsson had become a leading developer of Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) hardware and services.
Its weakness was sales and operations: fragmented, customized processes, silos, and systems, some more than two decades old, for preparing and negotiating bids, processing orders, and linking sales, delivery and finance. Ericsson announced an enterprise-wide, business-led digital transformation to speed up bids, order processing, delivery of products and software, and payment collection, making it more transparent and efficient for customers.
- The shift. SVP and Global COO Moti Gyamlani, who took over in mid-2022, judged that the "vertical lighthouse" approach (each function optimizing its own part) could not deliver a step-change. He moved to an end-to-end, horizontal view: redesign whole customer journeys rather than fix pain points, and reimagine workflows from scratch rather than automate them, for customer outcomes as well as internal efficiency.
- The structure. A new Global Operations function united IT, AI and Data, Sales Operations and Digital Transformation, because, Gyamlani argued, a fragmented organization cannot transform; breaking old boundaries gave a common digital foundation for standardization and scale.
- The scope. Simplify and standardize what Ericsson sold and how it delivered, redesign processes as digital and AI-native, and build one integrated digital business platform for the Americas, Northeast and Southeast Asia, India and Europe.
- The leader. Igor Maurell, former head of Ericsson's Thailand business, became head of global digital transformation, a unit with a self-described startup mentality and a mission to "rewire Ericsson to fit future business."
Maurell predicted that the hard part was not the technology but resistance: he had to understand the state of mind of more than 40,000 affected people. His plan was to make employees feel the new platform was theirs, that they had helped build it. The resource he wanted to create was agency.
High-agency mindsets
Social-cognitive psychologist Albert Bandura tied agency to intention: a shopper who is tripped into a display of dishes is not the agent of the breakage, and to be an agent is to influence one's own functioning and circumstances deliberately. The authors use a simpler working definition: agency is the capacity to make choices and act on them. A high-agency mindset combines a bias for action with the belief that one's actions will have an impact.
You need it because you cannot prescribe everything. Even a preagreed, detailed, high-quality plan misses eventualities; most employees will never hear directly from executives; few tools have complete manuals, few processes are fully specified, and no structure maps every reassigned task. Gaps, exceptions, judgment calls and unexpected opportunities arise hundreds or thousands of times in a large transformation. People must then act in the spirit of the goals without checking in, and at pace and scale you would not want them to check in, rather than freezing, kicking the problem back up, or reverting to old ways. Grocery executive Megan Shaffer puts it as employees needing to own their behaviors and their role in the change.
During a restructure at a soda manufacturer, a marketing manager notices that nobody has been assigned analysis of past campaign ROI. After consulting the relevant Workstream Leader, the manager decides the team is best placed to do it, runs the analysis and shares it with leaders who can use it. One product team learns that radio spots executives say they love have negative ROI; the marketing leader cancels next year's campaign and moves the money to influencer marketing. That is a high-agency mindset at work, and you need it in every business line and function.
Ineffective involvement
The finished-product handoff
Designing change without consulting employees and then handing it over for implementation invites backlash. Neuroscience shows that social pain (rejection, exclusion) activates the same regions as physical pain, including the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which monitors the environment for threats, interprets pain signals and triggers attention and adaptation. A scheduler at an engineering firm described a new digital reporting tool announced by a direct manager only after the decision was final: no regular staff were consulted, most disliked it, and it felt handed down from on high.
Telecoms executive Kye Prigg calls the opposite error the "hero mentality": loading everything onto a few trusted people because they will get it done. It is unsustainable; without the wider working level (project managers, individual contributors, thousands of people) lasting change cannot be delivered top-down.
Box-ticking involvement
Many leaders try to build ownership through involvement: employee surveys, focus groups, workshops, town halls. The theory is reasonable and the activities can help (Part Two recommends several), but employees often experience them as box-ticking: they feel overlooked, opinions ignored, voices unheard.
When a department at an auditing company was split in two, executives emailed and discussed the change months ahead, explained the reasons in writing and in person, held Q&A sessions and walked junior staff through the transition so no one would be shocked. By most standards this was thoughtful. The tax compliance officer who described it nevertheless felt "sad and helpless" and resigned to it. Communication and preparation did not produce agency.
Asking for involvement and then ignoring it can be worse than not asking, because employees read it as performative. Harvard Business School's Michael Norton explained the mechanism: the more effort you ask of people, the more say they feel they have earned and the angrier they are when ignored; effort also makes them think their ideas are good, so an executive's dismissal lands hard. Labor that is undervalued is worse than never having been involved at all.
The IKEA effect
To feel ownership, employees need more than emails, focus groups and town halls: they need the experience of contributing meaningfully to the design of changes that affect their work and the outcomes expected. Behavioral science has studied the links between effort, ownership, agency and perceived value for decades. In 1980 Richard Thaler, later a Nobel laureate, identified the endowment effect: we value something more once we own it.
- Setup. About fourteen years before speaking with the authors, Norton and colleagues paid US university students $5 each and split them into builders, who assembled a plain black IKEA box for CDs, and nonbuilders, who inspected an identical pre-assembled one.
- Test. Each participant bid for their own box.
- Expectation. Builders might bid less: they had already contributed labor, and their boxes were noticeably worse than the factory-assembled ones.
- Result. Builders bid 63% more than nonbuilders for a visibly inferior product.
- Norton's summary. Putting effort into something makes you value it. We own self-made things twice over: as possessions, and because we invested part of ourselves in them, like a treasured homemade sculpture or a chipped pottery-class mug.
The IKEA effect has been found for self-built LEGO, self-folded origami and self-prepared food, and marketers used it before it had a name: General Mills reportedly removed dried egg from Betty Crocker cake mix so home bakers had to crack in a fresh one, doing more work and valuing the cake more.
The Betty Crocker egg story is marketing folklore: food historians attribute the switch to fresh eggs largely to better taste and texture, and the psychological explanation is unproven, although the authors present it as correct. The IKEA effect itself (Norton, Mochon and Ariely, 2012) is well replicated, but its size in workplaces is not established, and the box study measured bids by students, not commitment to organizational change.
Applied to change: employees who contribute to a transformation's design value it more, bring more agency to execution, and improve its odds. Laura Kohler, for 24 years CHRO of Kohler Company, balanced a 152-year-old heritage against moving 40,000 employees in dozens of countries to change; she found that people who help create a future they will be responsible for are more invested in its success. Telecoms executive Ana White says using the collective intelligence of employees produces much better buy-in.
The effect also explains why token involvement fails. Imagine a third group in Norton's study invited to give mostly ignored advice to box builders: the authors doubt it would have bid as much.
Asking for ideas creates agency only when people see their fingerprints on the outcome. Otherwise involvement reads as performance and deepens resistance.
Experiences that create a high-agency workforce
Increasing agency feels exciting and risky, since not everyone seems capable or trustworthy enough for consequential decisions. Many executives say their real problem is too few high-agency people (those who solve problems unasked, volunteer for challenges and head off risks) and no budget to hire more. The authors' answer is that agency is almost alchemical: low-agency mindsets can be converted into high-agency ones through the right experiences.
Rescue. Tell a department its work is outdated and send a data science team to save it. People turn defensive and predict: if things improve, someone else gets the credit; if not, I get the blame.
Stretch. Give the department a small team, probably not quite enough, ask it to build analytics and prediction into its work, show the efficiency gains or savings, and track them together. Now credit and blame both sit with the department.
The experiences must also be practical: not everything can be debated, and not every employee can shape every design decision. Hence a tiered approach.
Experiences of decision-making (some employees)
This is the most powerful tool. Employees highly exposed to the changes should get to make decisions about them. Not carte blanche: leaders set boundaries and are explicit about what is negotiable and nonnegotiable, but within them grant a high degree of delegated authority to shape and execute initiatives in the way that best serves the objectives. The simplest mechanism is appointing people as Workstream Leaders, who manage a portfolio of initiatives, usually full-time, and Initiative Owners, who execute individual initiatives full- or part-time (two further roles come in Part Two). Successful transformations delegate a lot of decision power to these roles; a large, well-designed program often has more than one hundred Initiative Owners.
Experiences of influence (many employees)
People are strongly affected by seeing their fingerprints on a design even when they are not the final decision-maker. Influence needs two actions:
- Generate the input. Ask for ideas and feedback through focus groups, workshops and town halls.
- Show its effect. Demonstrate how the advice shaped decisions, for instance by having employees rather than leaders present feedback summaries at town halls, or by launching new initiatives led by the people who proposed them.
Leaders find the first step easy; the second step is what turns ineffective involvement into effective contribution. Influence scales further than decision-making, to hundreds or thousands of employees.
Experiences of representation (all remaining employees)
In very large organizations not everyone can decide or influence. The third option is representation: employees see that someone who shares their interests has been given the chance to decide or influence. If a large sales department is restructured and a highly experienced senior sales representative becomes Initiative Owner, staff who know, trust and respect that person feel more comfort and control. This is not quite the IKEA effect, since they are not building the box, but it helps. It makes the selection of Workstream Leaders and Initiative Owners critical: they need deep credibility and trusted relationships across strategic parts of the organization. Banking executive Paolo Kartadjoemena found that initiatives owned by business heads won stronger buy-in from their teams.
The cost, and the volunteers
Building all three is large and time-consuming. Logistics executive Jacqui McGillivray notes how hard it is to bring change agents in when things move quickly. But leaders have an ally: many employees want roles in designing change because they care about their workplace's long-term health. Insurance executive Katerina Guerraz received over 250 emails at the start of a transformation from employees wanting to help the turnaround and listing their skills; she put many on short-term assignments, some just one-hour calls, and still draws on that database of volunteers.
Putting it together: how Ericsson increased agency
Around the world Ericsson's employees had made the old sales system work through workarounds and tweaks for particular customers. Well meant, these had produced slower lead times, operational inefficiencies and barriers to digitalization, and represented a big investment of time, energy and ingenuity, so people resisted when Maurell announced the clunky system would be replaced. He understood: people protect their legacy, and if you simply tell affected staff how things will be, they will find every reason why it does not meet their needs.
His logic was that anyone involved from the beginning becomes a change agent, and, in words close to the IKEA-effect research, that people value what took effort to achieve.
- Decision-making. Cross-functional regional teams (Sales, Operations, Finance, Delivery) were given co-ownership of developing and implementing the new processes and ways of working; selected employees were assigned full-time from day 1, with their jobs temporarily backfilled.
- Influence. Maurell's team gathered 30-40 representative employees, chosen for recognized expertise, standing among colleagues and regional affiliation, and sought their advice in a series of workshops. These were treated as the start of a long relationship, not a one-off: when people invest time and effort in you, you must deliver.
- Literal buy-in. Business units and market areas that would benefit were made co-owners and charged a small, symbolic fee for development, and later for maintenance. Maurell reasoned that free tools give no incentive to adopt them, comparing it to an expensive gym membership that makes you go. He called it a "business-led, co-ownership model."
- Outcome. Teams in Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, the US and Europe reported 30-50% faster bid preparation, order processing and delivery of products and software licenses; some order processing fell from 19 days to 1-2 days.
Employees bought into the platform metaphorically, through decision-making and influence, and literally, through the fee. That is the difference between agency and mere involvement.
The Ericsson figures come from the company's leaders as relayed to BCG, without a baseline or comparison group, and the program was still being rolled out. The fee mechanism is the most original idea here, but its separate effect on adoption cannot be isolated from the co-design work.
- Definition. Agency is the capacity to make choices and act on them.
- Why. You need high-agency mindsets because you cannot prescribe everything people must do differently.
- The trap. Asking for ideas without visibly acting on them does not build agency; ineffective involvement can backfire badly.
- The mechanism. Genuine contribution to the design and expected outcomes builds ownership: the IKEA effect.
- The tiers. Decision-making for some, influence for many, representation for all the rest.
Expect Take Up to Be Earned, Not Automatic
Take up means people actually doing what the change asks of them, and it was low in every failed transformation the authors have seen. Leaders blame culture or character; the authors blame the leaders' failure to remove barriers. Don't ask what's broken in them; ask what's blocking them. Seven conditions, grouped under capability, opportunity and motivation, must all hold before behavior shifts, and a five-step loop earns them, as Etsy's blameless postmortems showed.
Etsy's outage problem
Etsy, the New York e-commerce marketplace founded in 2005, connects some 8 million makers of handmade and vintage goods with around 96 million buyers across about 100 million listings. Its mission, "Keep commerce human," evokes a preindustrial world of artisans, but its success against Amazon and eBay depends on staying at the front of the technology race, and its platform has repeatedly strained to keep up with demand.
The first big test came in 2010, when gross merchandise sales rose from $180.6 million to $314.3 million, a 74% jump, and the infrastructure urgently needed upgrading. Every outage hurt Etsy and also the solo entrepreneurs and small businesses that relied on it; John Allspaw, then VP of Technical Operations, said bluntly that outages were awful for shoppers, sellers and staff alike. There was no easy fix, because code deployment, the very act of upgrading, raised the risk of more outages. The question was how to make the system stable and resilient while still changing it.
Allspaw, newly recruited from Flickr, could have built a zero-tolerance culture: single out engineers who caused errors, make examples of them, fire or retrain them. A student of behavioral science, he judged that a culture of fear would backfire. He rejected what Dutch safety scientist Sidney Dekker calls the "Bad Apple Theory", the traditional view that removing careless individuals removes human error. Firing the person responsible for a slip guaranteed nothing about reliability; getting engineers to admit errors, explain how they happened and help design fixes was far better.
That raised the behavioral puzzle the chapter is about. Take up is getting people to do what we want them to do, and just as you cannot force a customer to buy, you cannot force an employee to buy into a change, especially admitting errors when they might be fired for it. Without take up, the platform's long-term sustainability was in doubt.
Take up: what it is, and why it's lower than you hope
Three familiar scenes from struggling transformations share one cause, low take up:
- The forgotten tool. Months after launch, few people use a new digital tool; in the elevator someone says it never caught on and is probably still on their computer.
- The shelved process. After a thorough review by many steering committees, a marketing team's redesigned processes gather dust, described as a "future-state ambition" not ready for use, while the same team complains its current work is inconsistent, duplicative and slow.
- The phantom reorganization. After a painful reorganization people still seek informal approval from old managers, still ask former direct reports for work, and contractors backfill roles that were supposedly cut.
Field of Dreams promised that if you build it, they will come. Take up is a concept that assumes the film was wrong: people routinely fail to take up opportunities offered and benefits they are entitled to. Transformations depend on it. Revenue managers using an AI pricing tool exactly as intended is take up; customer service reps using the new script instead of improvising is take up; vice presidents holding new head count after a cost program rather than hiring contractors is take up.
Whose problem it is
Low take up frustrates executives: the steering committee agreed the new processes were more secure and consistent, big sums were invested, so something must be wrong with the culture, and the next business case is met with "why bother, they won't use it." The authors take a different view. Executives are responsible for results, not just design, so poor take up is as much their problem as poor design. They cite Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin: leaders own everything in their world and have no one else to blame. Outright resistance does happen, but the default should be to treat a failure to change as a take up problem until another diagnosis is proven.
Low take up rarely reflects character flaws, low ambition or poor grasp of the big picture; it reflects the leader's failure to win people over. Lee Ross (also behind the false consensus effect) named the bias at work: the fundamental attribution error, overrating personal disposition and underrating the situation. Chip and Dan Heath put it as attributing behavior to who people are rather than where they are. Employees are customers of the change, and you would not blame customers for not buying.
Humans struggle even with changes that help them
The best explanation for low take up is usually that employees are human. Medical researchers found that one in four men who had a stroke or coronary heart disease event made no lifestyle improvement afterwards: they kept smoking, avoiding exercise and eating badly. In the US, 20% of eligible low-income workers do not claim the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), effectively free money, even though many get IRS reminders. Rationally, take up of something that saves your life or pays you should be 100%. If people resist changes that are unambiguously good for them, it is no surprise they do not automatically adopt a transformation's initiatives, which may be less clearly good for them.
Earn it, like a product manager
Successful change leaders do what good product managers do: they earn take up rather than expect it. Netflix invites you to choose a plan with the promise you can cancel at any time, which forces it to keep earning your business. It offers endless entertainment for one low price, easy use on all your devices and ad-free viewing (even its ad tier promises fewer ads than you might think). It earns take up by anticipating every obstacle that might stop a well-intentioned person completing the transaction, and removing it. Employees notice when leaders do the same: one told the authors that training before rollout, extra staff so no one was short-handed and a warm, approachable manager made the change work.
The science of take up: COM-B
In 2011 Susan Michie of University College London led a team that built COM-B, whose central theory is that capability, opportunity and motivation interact to generate behavior:
- Capability. The individual's psychological and physical capacity for the activity, including the necessary knowledge and skills. Question: "Can I do it?"
- Opportunity. Every factor outside the individual that makes the behavior possible or prompts it. Question: "Is my environment letting me do it?"
- Motivation. All the brain processes that energize and direct behavior, not only goals and conscious decisions. Question: "Am I inclined to do it?"
Seven conditions for take up
COM-B is well grounded but broad, and leaders ask how to use it tomorrow. The authors split it into seven conditions for take up. When any one is absent it becomes a barrier to take up, and in their experience employees do not change until all seven are met.
| Condition for take up | Barrier to take up | |
|---|---|---|
| Capability | 1 Knowledge they need | Knowledge gaps |
| 2 Skills they need | Skills gaps | |
| Opportunity | 3 Enough time | Time constraints |
| 4 Enough resources (money, people, attention, tools) | Resource constraints | |
| 5 Permission they need | Permission gaps | |
| Motivation | 6 Something to gain | Little to gain |
| 7 Little to lose | Something to lose |
- Knowledge gap. Maria, a salesperson at a steel manufacturer, is expected to use a new process for reporting leads, negotiations and contracts, but has received only a three-page high-level summary and a 30-minute briefing call. She keeps doing it the old way.
- Resource constraint. Andrew, an airline marketing director, must build and deploy a personalization tool deciding which customers get which emails and when, but central teams can offer no developers for six months. He carries on as before, and when resources finally arrive he is jaded and implements slowly.
- Something to lose. Raj, a supply chain manager at a confectionery maker, is asked to use a new tool optimizing distribution of finished goods. He has made those calls himself for twelve years and will not hand them to a machine. He sticks with the old way.
For one employee to change, all seven barriers must be overcome; for an organization to change, most affected employees must do so. Framed that way, poor take up is hardly surprising.
Five steps for earning take up
Earning take up needs knowledge of the barriers plus a process for applying it. The first two steps happen once; the last three run continuously until the take up goal is met or abandoned.
- Define whose behavior needs to change. Every initiative depends on specific people doing something differently. Write a list of their names and positions. If you cannot say precisely who must behave differently, the initiative is unlikely to succeed.
- Specify the change in behavior you expect. For each person, state exactly what they should do differently, usually starting from what they do now. For a new behavior (such as using a new digital tool), say what it is and when or how often it must occur; for an old behavior that must stop (such as circulating low-value data around a department), specify that too. The clearer the expectation, the better the odds.
- Identify barriers to new behaviors. Work through all seven barriers, write down those that may apply and rate their severity, ideally informed by surveys, interviews or both. Do it with empathy: the aim is an accurate picture of the real obstacles, which means spending time in employees' shoes.
- Act to minimize barriers. For each barrier list concrete actions, then estimate each one's likely effectiveness and cost, financial and nonfinancial. Implement those with an acceptable return on investment and discard the rest. If expectations change (for instance because high take up would cost too much), update the business case and share it with those who need to know.
- Measure take up and collect feedback. Decide how to measure and start as soon as possible: for a new tool, a one-minute weekly pulse survey on ease of use and workflow fit, or a data analyst counting weekly log-ins. Also set up a process to solicit, receive and review feedback on how people experience the tool, process or structure; without it you cannot interpret low take up early. Establish the loop from day 1.
Run the loop on a short cycle
Take up planning is iterative: repeat steps 3, 4 and 5 until you hit the target or lower it enough that more action is unnecessary. Urgent cases such as organization-wide critical software upgrades warrant a daily review; others a weekly or monthly cycle. The authors warn against cycles longer than a month, which are too slow to respond to evolving barriers. Research suggests the median person needs 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic, so aim to fit at least two take up cycles into that window while people are trying the behavior out.
The habit number comes from Phillippa Lally's 2010 study of 96 volunteers, where automaticity took anywhere from 18 to 254 days and many participants never plateaued. The median is a useful planning heuristic, not a law; complex workplace behaviors may take far longer.
Old behaviors are not always bad
Behaviors that need changing are often good ones in a different environment. A company fighting for share in a fast-growing, winner-take-all market benefits from bold, entrepreneurial behavior; when growth slows and positions settle, the same entrepreneurialism can produce poor processes, poor communication and unacceptably risky decisions. The question is not whether a behavior is good or bad but whether it helps execute the strategy the business needs under current conditions.
Putting it together: how Etsy created take up
Allspaw concluded that his engineers needed to take up one key behavior: total frankness about their thoughts, actions and observations after an outage, so Etsy could learn as much as possible from each incident and prevent recurrences. He knew they would be disinclined, for fear of blame: in the authors' terms they had something to lose, one of the two motivation barriers (the other being little to gain). An engineer expecting reprimand has no reason to give the details needed to understand how a failure worked, and without the root cause the failure all but certainly repeats, with the same engineer or another.
His remedy was the blameless postmortem, which shifts attention from "who" to "how." It assumes people do what made sense to them at the time; if nobody comes to work to do a bad job, the useful question becomes why someone did what they did.
- Just culture. Postmortems sat inside a broader "just culture" that institutionalized accountability alongside support for anyone who had ever taken down a website and felt huge guilt and embarrassment.
- Internal PSA. The process usually starts when the engineer who erred self-initiates an internal public service announcement, an email telling colleagues what happened, which Allspaw likened to putting up a "wet paint" or "slippery floor" sign.
- Formal process. The PSA triggers a rigorous postmortem following a formal method Allspaw later documented in his debriefing facilitator guide.
- Symbol. To signal collaboration rather than accusation, Allspaw gave an annual three-armed knitted sweater to the engineer with the most surprising error.
- Result. In a widely read blog post Allspaw observed that engineers who feel safe giving details become willing to be held accountable and eager to help others avoid the error; they are the leading experts in their own mistake and belong at the center of remediation.
- Accountability kept. To critics who said engineers were being let off the hook, he replied that they were very much on the hook for making Etsy safer and more resilient.
With a sturdier platform Etsy grew through the 2010s, reporting $12.6 billion in annual gross merchandise sales by 2024 after nearly a decade of global expansion. The authors concede that not all of this is due to blameless postmortems, though they helped everyone pull in the same direction. The lesson stands: you cannot expect take up; you have to earn it.
- Definition. Take up is people doing what you have asked them to do; transformations need it across initiatives.
- The bias. Blaming low take up on personality, character or commitment is the fundamental attribution error; leaders must earn take up.
- Seven barriers. Knowledge gaps, skills gaps, time constraints, resource constraints, permission gaps, little to gain, something to lose.
- Five steps. Define whose behavior must change; specify the expected behavior; identify barriers; act to minimize them; measure take up and collect feedback, looping steps 3-5 at least monthly.
Understand Emotions through Feedback, Not Instinct
Change is a visceral, emotional experience, and those emotions decide whether people have the energy to change. Leaders believe they can sense the mood of thousands, but two biases, rosy retrospection and social projection, wreck their judgment. You don't know how your people feel until you've asked them: measure emotions, confidence and capacity every two weeks, across everyone affected, and act visibly on the results so the loop closes.
Brunello Cucinelli listens
Brunello Cucinelli runs the fashion house bearing his name from Solomeo, a hamlet in the Umbrian countryside, working from a painstakingly restored medieval tower. The factory, walled mainly in glass and facing gardens, embodies his theory that happier people are more creative and productive. The business has 3,500+ employees, 400+ artisan workshops employing 8,000 people across Italy, 135+ directly operated boutiques and 27 franchised stores. Cucinelli calls the model "humanistic capitalism," with emotions at the center of working life.
As the still-unnamed coronavirus took hold in Italy, factories fell silent and stores emptied. Cucinelli spoke from his office to several thousand employees, artisans and suppliers on a single global call and promised no layoffs, no pay cuts and no supplier discounts: everyone would earn the same salary for two years, because the company had enough assets and they would go forward together. He addressed their fear and uncertainty directly, saying there was no shame in being afraid or worried, and treated negative emotion as a chance to pay attention and deepen a partnership. He later said that in those two years the company designed the best collections in its history.
Cucinelli's rule for reading others is not to guess or assume but to practice Plutarch's "attentive hearing"; he likes to say he solved half his problems just by listening. His Chief of Humanistic Technology, Francesco Bottigliero, describes the system in four parts:
- Sensing inner states through micro-interactions: a brief exchange or direct question creating a continuous, informal stream of insight.
- Guardrails for managing the emotional temperature.
- Sharing challenging emotions openly.
- Gestures of solidarity.
Bottigliero calls emotional sensing a discipline of attention. Alongside structured feedback systems, these daily touchpoints let leaders spot shifts in energy or morale early and respond with empathy; when a situation needs an immediate reaction, the company first takes care of the colleagues involved. The practices give a global firm the caring feel of a tiny village. The chapter asks how other companies can learn what employees feel.
Change is an emotional experience
Transformation can be profoundly visceral. One employee described starting to cry the moment a restructure was announced, feeling weak, angry, hurt and upset, suspecting things were being withheld, finding little empathy, and carrying on only because they needed the job. Telecoms executive Kye Prigg recalled joining a program that had struggled for a year: team members were literally crying in the office because they had lost hope, customers were furious, and the team had no goals and ineffective leadership.
The Change Game puts numbers on the change distance in feeling. Asked to name two emotions about an unspecified change, 58% of executives chose only positive words (happy, enthusiastic, energized, inspired, curious), against 9% of employees; the other 91% of employees named at least one negative emotion (apathetic, sad, overwhelmed, anxious, frustrated). The gap is real and physiological: change creates uncertainty, which activates the limbic system, the brain's threat center, a hardwired response. It is not confined to people whose jobs are restructured; those whose role descriptions stay the same are often unsettled by new tools, processes and behaviors that change their daily work.
The feelings around change may not be the leader's fault, but they are the leader's problem, because emotion drives success and failure. Industrials executive Christopher Scalia likens job or economic insecurity during a transformation to an anvil tied to a rope that you drag around the ocean while trying to change.
Harvard Business School's Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer place emotions among the three elements of employees' inner work life, with perceptions and motivation. Their interplay forms an unseen system, running all day in every employee and reacting to every event, that can fuel or kill performance. Neuroscience supports this: emotion and cognition are tightly intertwined, and brain areas for rational thought and decision-making connect directly to those for feeling.
The stakes are higher during a transformation because success is largely in employees' hands: they create the change by using new tools, following new processes and policies and working in new structures. Resentful, frustrated or anxious people struggle to find the energy to contribute. Consumer goods executive Heather Ray argues that understanding emotion is less about avoiding negativity than about cultivating the energy and commitment change requires.
Why you can't trust your gut
Many leaders accept they must be in tune with employees but go about it wrongly. They believe they have an instinctive read on hundreds or tens of thousands of people: they see themselves as "people" people, empathetic, knowing the organization well (especially if they rose through it), and connected by communication lines that would surface unusual experiences. Sooner or later they find their read was less sharp than they thought, not because they are bad leaders but because they are human and subject to two biases.
Rosy retrospection
Rosy retrospection is remembering past events as more positive than they were at the time; it is a cousin of fading affect bias, the tendency to forget negative experiences faster than positive ones.
A team led by Terence Mitchell of the University of Washington used repeated surveys before, during and after a three-week bicycle trip in California. During the trip 61% of cyclists felt disappointment (one, expecting sunshine, complained bitterly about rain). Back home, only 11% remembered being disappointed; beforehand, only 5% had expected to be. People recalled the trip as more enjoyable than they experienced it, and anticipated it rosily too. The team confirmed the effect with a trip to Europe and a Thanksgiving vacation, supporting Stanford organizational psychologist Robert Sutton's earlier question of whether Disneyland is really a happy place or just remembered as one.
The application: leaders are tempted to infer how employees feel from their own past experiences of transformation, perhaps as junior staff. Rosy retrospection makes those memories easier, more positive and more invigorating than reality, stripped of the stress, anxiety and confusion. The transformations in your past were harder than you remember, so recollection is an unreliable guide to what people feel now.
Social projection
Social projection is imagining that others feel what you feel.
Leaf Van Boven (University of Colorado Boulder) and George Loewenstein (Carnegie Mellon) recruited 47 people at a university gym about to do vigorous cardio and randomly assigned them to fill in a questionnaire before or after exercising. It told of three hikers on a short six-mile August hike in Colorado who sheltered from a dry-lightning storm, lost the trail and, having packed light, faced night with no food or water. Asked whether the hikers would suffer more from thirst or hunger, 88% of the post-workout group (thirstier and warmer) said thirst, against 57% of the pre-workout group. People imagining another's experience use their own current state as a guide without realizing it.
The finding replicated: people outdoors in winter overestimated how much others were bothered by cold, and people eating salty snacks without water overrated others' thirst. A team led by cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Giorgia Silani at the University of Vienna showed we also project our own pleasantness and unpleasantness onto others, and named it emotional egocentricity bias.
For leaders this means an excited leader assumes others are excited, a disappointed one assumes disappointment; it resembles the false consensus effect and widens the executive-employee chasm. Together the two biases make it very hard to intuit employees' emotions. That is how everyone is wired, but leaders are responsible for accepting their cognitive limits, and the alternative to gut instinct is data.
| Bias | What it does | Key evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Rosy retrospection | Past events remembered as better than they were (cousin of fading affect bias) | Mitchell bike trip: 61% disappointed during, 11% recalled it, 5% expected it |
| Social projection | Assuming others feel what you feel now | Van Boven and Loewenstein: 88% vs 57% chose thirst; replicated for cold and salty snacks |
| Emotional egocentricity | Projecting your own pleasant or unpleasant feelings | Silani, University of Vienna |
Stop intuiting, start measuring
A transformation needs regular, formal measurement of how employees experience it. This differs from annual or biannual employee surveys, which track medium- and long-term trends; it must capture the emotional ups and downs of a fast-moving program. It also differs from, and adds to, the take up surveys of Chapter 3. Three features are essential.
High frequency
In most transformations collect sentiment every two weeks: often enough to see the effect of big events (more positivity after wins are announced), with enough time between rounds to act (for example, opening conversations with the most negative areas). Some high-intensity situations justify weekly measurement; no transformation should go more than a month without hearing from employees and acting on the results.
High coverage
Get data from everyone who is or will be affected. Sampling a subset is tempting for efficiency, but the goal is not a statistical average: it is the full range of experiences and exactly where they occur, and giving every employee an experience of influence (Chapter 2). The best tool is usually a pulse survey that:
- Takes about a minute to complete.
- Has very few free-text questions, all marked optional, because they put people off.
- Uses clear, simple, jargon-free language.
- Opens with one click.
- Guarantees anonymity.
A focus on emotions, confidence and capacity
Resist asking how effectively people are working, how many training sessions they attended or how fast they are adopting tools. Measure narrowly what governs their ability to take on change: self-reported emotions, confidence and capacity.
Emotions. Which emotion did you feel most this week? Choose one: five positive (happy, excited, inspired, enthusiastic, proud) and five negative (anxious, frustrated, afraid, tired, overwhelmed). Confidence (strongly agree to strongly disagree). I believe I can succeed at almost any endeavor I set my mind to. I can always solve difficult problems if I try hard enough. I am not comfortable dealing with unforeseen circumstances. When facing difficult tasks, I am certain I will accomplish them. I struggle to remain calm when facing difficulties. Capacity (same scale). I have the time and motivation to take on extra initiatives. I do not feel my organization provides sufficient learning resources. I understand how to use the organizational resources available to me effectively. I can juggle my roles at work and at home. I believe people who matter noticed my work this week.
Why name emotions
Leaders often make sweeping, unsupported claims about thousands of people: "people are tired," "people are stressed," "people are cautiously optimistic." Well meant, these are dangerous, because ungrounded claims become rationales for regretted decisions, such as sending fewer communications when more is usually better, or glossing over hard choices when the better course is to acknowledge them and show a clear path. Asking each employee to pick one emotion from a short list gives a precise picture by business area and enables targeted action: if 44% of Sales feel anxious against a 16% company average, hold a dedicated town hall for Sales with more information on planned changes there.
Why measure confidence
Confidence is belief in one's own abilities, and a decades-long literature ties it to performance, including during complex change. Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura originated it with self-efficacy, belief in one's capability to organize and execute the actions needed for a given goal. Reviewing more than a hundred studies, Alexander Stajkovic (UC Irvine) and Fred Luthans (University of Nebraska) found self-efficacy positively and strongly related to work performance. Two of the Sentiment Check prompts are versions of classic self-efficacy items psychologists still use.
Why measure capacity
Capacity is mental bandwidth for complex tasks. Even people with positive emotions and high confidence struggle to change when bandwidth is short. In 1956 Harvard psychologist George A. Miller proposed that the brain handles only a limited amount of information at once: the spans of absolute judgment and immediate memory severely limit what we can receive, process and remember. His insight underpins cognitive load theory, visible whenever employees try to adopt several new behaviors and processes at once. The authors insist on keeping "and at home" in the juggling prompt: leaders are not responsible for employees' personal lives, but they are responsible for knowing how cumulative obligations across work and home affect mindset and behavior, because the combined load drives performance and satisfaction during change.
Close the loop
The precise questions matter less than what you do with the answers. Ask every two weeks and people rightly expect a structured, diligent response they can feel in their work.
After every data collection the authors have senior leaders engage with the results: they find the teams and departments with the most negative emotions, lowest confidence and lowest capacity and immediately push attention and resources there. The aim is a closed feedback loop between employees and executives.
For an AI or core-banking rollout, pair the biweekly pulse with take up data (log-ins, process adherence) by team. Where low capacity coincides with low usage, the barrier is probably time, not attitude, so cut competing work before adding training. Publish the action taken within one cycle, or response rates fall.
Putting it together: Brunello Cucinelli's project to listen
Cucinelli told investors that 2024 had been an "enchanting" year. Building on the pandemic practices, he institutionalized attention to emotion as a "project for the soul." Its aims:
- Attend to inner well-being. Colleagues watch closely for one another's emotional states.
- Normalize talk of obstacles, professional and personal.
- Prevent silent suffering through communal vigilance.
- Ground creativity and joy in emotional health.
Everyone is urged to notice small signs, such as a colleague looking more tired or worried, and to respond gently. Cucinelli's reason is that people struggling inside are rarely brave enough to raise a hand because they feel ashamed, whereas someone whose spirit is well becomes more creative and joyful toward themselves and others.
Cucinelli's no-layoff pledge was affordable for a high-margin luxury brand with ample assets, and the case offers no measured outcomes linking listening to results; the "best collections" claim is the founder's own. Notably, the case leans on informal sensing more than the formal measurement the chapter recommends, so it illustrates the attitude rather than the method; most firms will need the survey machinery precisely because they lack a founder who knows every workshop. The Sentiment Check items are also adapted rather than a validated scale, so trends matter more than absolute scores.
- Emotional by nature. Change is an emotional experience; employees' feelings may not be your fault but are your problem, because they shape success.
- Distrust instinct. Rosy retrospection and social projection distort leaders' reading of thousands of people.
- Measure three things. Emotions, confidence (belief in one's abilities) and capacity (mental bandwidth), every two weeks, across everyone affected.
- Close the loop. Act on the data in specific, personal ways that employees can see.
Use a Process with Rituals, Not Reactions
Transformations demand far more meetings, conversations and decisions than leaders expect, and the sheer number of small choices drains the judgment needed for big ones. The authors' answer is ritualized weekly meetings: fixed members, time, place and agenda, never canceled or rescheduled, defended rather than forgotten, and made attractive through five HIIDE triggers. To make better decisions, don't take more time: make fewer decisions.
Heineken's supply chain shock
In the early 1970s Heineken promoted its beer with the famous line that it refreshed the parts other beers could not reach, and chairman Freddy Heineken, the founder's grandson, said he sold warmth, not beer. Nearly fifty years later, as COVID-19 locked the world down, the owner of Amstel and Birra Moretti needed to refresh one of its own parts: its European supply chain. Raw materials such as aluminum for cans, plus shipping and trucking, soared in cost. In 2020 Heineken reported a €204 million net loss, down from a €2.2 billion profit in 2019, and in February 2021 it announced 8,000 job cuts, roughly one in ten of its global workforce.
In Europe, its most important region, leaders set out to build a "future-proofed and sustainable supply chain" ready for the next crisis. In 2020 Thibaut Boidin, a former French armed forces officer, became Chief Transformation Officer (CTO) for Heineken Europe with four goals:
- Simplify the complexity of products and packaging.
- Leverage the network of 25 operating companies better.
- Harmonize ways of working across the continent.
- Cut the carbon footprint.
His first step was a regional Transformation Management Office (TMO), which he called absolutely essential: an engine driving the transformation while the rest of the organization ran the day-to-day business. Many companies set up TMOs. What set Heineken apart, and contributed most to its success, was what Boidin built next: a set of weekly rituals that bound contributors together for more than two years.
Get ready to get close with your colleagues
Transformation is a collective effort that requires people to engage constantly, and it demands more time, conversations and effort from more people than almost anyone anticipates. Serial transformation executive Allan MacDonald, on his third program, says all have been very hard, this one perhaps the hardest, because every company and team is unique and the foundation must be rebuilt each time.
The authors spell out who must talk and about what:
- Executives should talk every week about the hardest trade-offs, especially resourcing and timing.
- Workstream Sponsors (usually executives), Workstream Leaders and Initiative Owners should hold substantive weekly debates on design and execution: confirming and committing to targets, rigor-testing business cases, finding risks, overlaps and gaps in plans, and solving interdependencies between initiatives.
- These conversations must be fact-based, frequent, fast and focused.
| Role | Time on the transformation |
|---|---|
| Executives, early stages | 50-70% "changing the business," the rest "running the business" |
| Executives, later stages | 30-40%, still substantial |
| Workstream Leader | Commonly full-time |
| Initiative Owner | 30-70% of a senior employee's capacity |
Executives often wonder how they could possibly give 70% of their time, and many want agile, lean, minimal processes, mostly out of a protective wish not to clog calendars. What those calculations leave out is the invisible cost of deferred decisions: ambiguous outcomes that must be relitigated, time spent reconfirming earlier understandings, and frustration at explaining changes several times. Harder to count, but real, is the sense of momentum that comes from time together well spent.
Without enough time and planning, change does not get done, in personal change such as diet and exercise and even more in organizations. The authors have never seen a large, successful, sustained transformation that did not consume a huge share of senior leaders' time in meetings. Consumer goods executive Steve Bennett points out you cannot roll out a new structure with changed ownership through an email and some PowerPoint; it takes continual communication, monitoring, check-ins and adjustment.
If senior leaders cannot meet these time commitments, the authors advise reconsidering whether this is really the right moment for the company to transform.
The science of decision fatigue
Transformation is an investment of leaders' time, energy, attention and cognitive capacity, all easily depleted. One common trap is spending those resources planning to talk rather than talking.
Senior leaders on one initiative agree, out of respect for each other's time, to meet only as needed, and work alone. Eventually they decide to meet: days of calendar back-and-forth settle a day, time and place; they decide which colleagues to invite as a courtesy; the day before, one writes and sends a preread, and each recipient decides whether to read it. Two hours before, the most senior person cancels for a conflict; the rest phone each other and decide to reschedule. A week later they meet, find they had different expectations about the purpose, and improvise the agenda and who leads. Only then do they begin. That is a huge number of decisions just to hold one discussion, and some leaders live this reactive story across perhaps a dozen initiatives.
Decision fatigue is the exhaustion felt as choices pile up, which raises the odds of poor or impulsive decisions or avoiding decisions altogether; more formally, the cognitive exhaustion and deteriorating decision quality after repeated acts of choice. It shows up in everyday life, for instance in making more impulsive replies and silly mistakes as an email session wears on: the brain has limited capacity for self-regulation, and deciding depletes it.
Where the idea comes from
Social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister laid the foundation with ego depletion: self-control draws on a limited resource, so using it impairs later, unrelated tasks. He and colleagues extended it to routine decisions, and John Tierney popularized the result in the New York Times article "Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue?" and their joint book Willpower. They argue it touches everything from CEOs' careers to sentences handed down by weary judges, and explains why sensible people snap at colleagues and family, splurge on clothes, buy junk food and accept the car dealer's rustproofing offer.
The evidence the authors cite
- Suits. In 2010 Jonathan Levav of Columbia and colleagues had MBA students order customized suits. One group faced attributes from most to fewest options, starting with suit fabric (100 options); the other started with lining fabric (5 options). Each attribute had a random "recommended" default. Those who began with the complex choices accepted more defaults later and were less satisfied, as if they had spent their mental energy early even knowing more decisions were coming.
- Cars. The same researchers found car buyers shown complex choices first were more likely to accept defaults, spent more money and felt less satisfied, so the order of choices sways even high-stakes purchases.
- Mall arithmetic. Kathleen Vohs (University of Minnesota) with Baumeister and others counted how many choices mall shoppers had made that day and then set them simple arithmetic problems. Those who had made more decisions did worse, even controlling for time spent shopping and other factors: choosing itself depletes the energy needed for cognitive performance.
- Trivial choices count. The most pernicious feature is that many small, even trivial decisions cause fatigue. Leaders under pressure can spend so much effort on meeting structure or whether to send a preread that little energy remains for the important decisions. As one researcher put it, however smart or hardworking we are, our ability to decide well eventually runs out.
Urgency fog
Decision fatigue has a companion the authors call urgency fog (psychologists would call it a specific kind of resource depletion): faced with many decisions under time pressure, people become overwhelmed and defer decisions. Where leaders institute and protect good rituals, the authors see needless deferrals, big and small, fall. The implication: one of the greatest services a change leader can offer colleagues is to make the thousands of important decisions in a transformation easy and satisfying to make.
Ego depletion has fared badly in replication: a 2016 registered replication across 23 labs found an effect near zero, and the famous hungry-judges parole study behind the "weary judges" line has been challenged for confounds. The practical advice survives without the theory: fixed rituals cut coordination overhead and deferral, whatever the mechanism.
Transformation rituals
The obvious way to reduce decision fatigue is to make fewer decisions, and an effective way to do that is to replace active decisions with automatic rituals you simply follow.
What counts as a ritual
Some scientists define ritual narrowly. In 2017 Nicholas Hobson and colleagues required both physical features (rigid, repetitive action sequences) and psychological features (the user must see a purpose or meaning). Their examples: the kneeling and bowing of prayer, which signals commitment and gives solace; a team putting kit on left to right, never right to left, to perform at its best; wedding rites that seal a bond. The authors use a broader definition: a ritual is a repeated behavior that serves a meaningful purpose. It need not be physical and its purpose need not be deep: a Friday-afternoon phone debrief with a trusted colleague, the most senior person buying pizza for the monthly all-hands, blocking an afternoon each quarter to read the results.
Rituals cut cognitive load. In his first community Q&A in 2014, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he wore only gray T-shirts, citing decision-fatigue research, so he could make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to serve his community. In a transformation, meeting rituals do the same for leaders: being prescriptive about exactly when and how people meet gives back capacity for decisions about the business rather than about whether and when to meet.
- Which meetings. At least one executive meeting, plus one per workstream with its Workstream Sponsor, Workstream Leader and all Initiative Owners; in big programs these often exceed a dozen people.
- Fixed in advance. Members, place, time and duration are predefined and pre-announced well ahead, with a standing agenda led by the same person every week.
- Standard agenda. Open with a positive moment (recognizing the week's wins); review outstanding actions ("Did we do all the things we said we would do?"); look ahead ("What is coming next? What decisions do we need to make to be ready?"). This cuts preparation effort, gives an early confidence boost and the satisfaction of ticking off tasks.
- Absolute consistency. Once defined, it happens exactly the same way every time: never canceled or rescheduled, always on its day, time and room. It is not an ordinary project meeting to be delayed, split or repurposed but an "immovable center of gravity."
Consistency lets attendees protect the time and arrive with maximum capacity for decisions that matter, knowing their investment will be respected. The secondary benefits:
- Speed. A full panel of senior decision-makers meeting weekly, fully attended, with no room to procrastinate, makes remarkably rapid progress.
- Connection. Weekly rituals, especially in person, expose leaders to each other more, which almost always increases liking and trust. Teams with high familiarity and synchronized schedules decide faster and solve problems better, and lower-stakes contact teaches each other's passions, biases and triggers; negotiation research finds such familiarity improves reading of counterparts' views and priorities and reduces misinterpretation.
- Transparency and accountability. Workstream meetings give a view into every part of the program and hold Workstream Leaders, Initiative Owners and Project Owners to account. Telecoms executive Kye Prigg says they let him see "from left to right" what is and is not working, distill it for other leaders and the board, and, above all, drive accountability as people show weekly what progress they have made and where they need help.
- Memory. Organizations forget standards they committed to. Rituals that document and reinforce them, such as standard templates for initiative charters, business cases and implementation plans, reduce corporate amnesia.
Not "set and forget" but "set and defend"
Rituals are not set and forget but set and defend. Early in a transformation they are entropic: they disintegrate unless actively held together, and when they erode, the work of reducing cognitive load is wasted. So meetings must be desirable as well as easy to attend, especially for senior colleagues most tempted to repurpose the time. The meeting leader should act as a ritual designer using five psychological triggers.
- Help. People learn by experience that bringing their hardest problems makes them easier, not harder, to solve: roadblocks removed, intentions clarified, decisions made, advice from leaders and peers. A culture of bad meetings is an opportunity: role-model good meetings here and enjoy the spillover elsewhere.
- Information. Attendees get information they cannot get elsewhere; the biggest discussions happen and important news is shared first here. Wrestle with hard questions instead of generic, performative updates; ask people to bring hard decisions still to make, not easy ones already made; aim for everyone to leave having learned something that affects them. Between meetings, when time allows, say: "Let's defer this to this week's meeting, so everyone can hear it."
- Influence. The weekly meeting is the main place to shape decisions, so anyone who wants a say must attend. Show visibly that contributions change outcomes, and refuse to postpone decisions because someone is absent: anyone who cannot attend must send a proxy fully empowered to decide for them.
- Duty. Missing a meeting should feel like breaking a commitment to colleagues. The easiest lever is to personally call no-shows and ask why; tough, but it works. Some leadership teams post attendance scorecards publicly or share them at executive meetings. One team marked attendance with smiley faces, adapting research on electricity customers in which a smiley beside usage data improved later behavior. One CTO who occasionally sent a proxy got calls from disappointed junior team members.
- Enjoyment. Meetings will not match ice cream or a great party, but should evoke milder versions of those feelings. Start every ritual with a positive moment. Consumer goods executive Heather Ray opened with "What are you most proud of in the last two weeks?" and "Who do you want to give a shout-out to?" Alternatives are a personal story of change (why someone is on the team; see Part Two) or lighthearted traditions such as one person's weekend sports report. Hobson notes our most important rituals can look arbitrary and trivial once their meaning is stripped away.
What to do when the unexpected occurs
Leaders object that their organizations need agility: they lose big clients, sites are hit by major weather, currency swings upend budgets, activist investors demand full executive attention. Should transformation meetings pause? The authors' answer is an emphatic no: a well-run transformation shows absolute consistency whatever the circumstances.
The tempting response. Pause the transformation meetings and handle the crisis ad hoc, which costs the rhythm, the decisions and the momentum the rituals exist to protect.
The authors' response. Keep the meeting, change the agenda. Each Workstream Sponsor and Leader swaps the usual agenda for an open discussion of how the crisis affects their initiatives' costs and benefits and how plans and resources can be adapted to support colleagues directly affected. Solve urgent problems through your rituals, not around them.
The model is the injured professional athlete with a career-long gym ritual: they still go every day but recalibrate the workout, twenty minutes on a treadmill or just stretching, doing something, however small, to keep the commitment.
Putting it together: how Heineken harnessed rituals
Facing a generational challenge to its European supply chains during a pandemic, Boidin had set up the TMO. His next step, he later reflected, mattered as much: weekly meeting rituals for executives and every workstream, which lasted more than two years and which he called "the drumbeat."
- Design. Predefined meetings for precisely chosen groups, with standing agendas, on every day of the week, bringing together workstream leaders, representatives of the operating companies and the regional TMO. Attendance was mandatory. On Tuesdays each workstream reviewed progress, tackled roadblocks and made real-time decisions; on Thursday evenings executives took the largest workstream issues and resolved them quickly. In total, more than twenty ritualized meetings a week, plus monthly sessions for longer-range strategic decisions.
- Benefit 1, consistent priorities. Large companies suffer from constantly shifting priorities; the weekly rituals kept focus on what mattered. Executives sometimes found it boring, but Boidin reminded them they had absorbed the priorities through planning far longer than anyone else.
- Benefit 2, speed. Everyone, executives included, had to move fast and show progress frequently, and executives felt a healthy obligation to clear roadblocks. A problem raised on Thursday was often solved by Friday; the organization moved to a faster cycle of discussion and decision.
- Outcome after one year. The number of unique bottles and of secondary packaging formats (such as six-pack cardboard) was halved; a single sales and operations planning function, on one planning tool, served all of Europe; and production-related carbon emissions fell significantly.
Boidin urged other leaders not to be put off by the apparent time burden. Transformations are complex and multidimensional, and you cannot bet that the right people will talk at the right times and align properly without a structure for it. Strong rituals seem complex at first but simplify everything: clear priorities, clear decisions, speed.
Boidin's verdict: there are always reasons to stop or slow the drumbeat, but keeping the discipline makes success far more likely. Predictability and consistency were his constant focus.
The Heineken results come from Boidin's own account, and the halving of packaging formats and the single planning function reflect the TMO, the cost program and the 8,000 job cuts as much as the meeting cadence. The case shows rituals can coexist with fast results; it cannot show they caused them. More than twenty mandatory weekly meetings is also a heavy load that a smaller firm would need to scale down.
- Constant engagement. Major change requires people to meet constantly to decide jointly, share information and build rapport.
- Decision fatigue. Many conversations on complex issues bring cognitive exhaustion and worse decisions after repeated choices.
- The remedy. Replace routine decisions (when and how to meet) with automatic rituals: repeated behaviors serving a meaningful purpose.
- Weekly meeting rituals. Predefined times, places and agendas, executed consistently, never canceled or rescheduled.
- Design for desire. Make attendance easy and satisfying through help, information, influence, duty and enjoyment (HIIDE).
Share Stories and Symbols, Not Just Dollars
Most cases for change are lists of financial targets wrapped in jargon and sent by email, so employees decide the change is really about shareholder returns and promptly forget it. The authors' remedy has two halves: your people will remember the story, not the business case, so choose one change story (threat, fitness or destiny) and hold to it, then show as well as tell through symbolic objects, actions and events. Delta's two-decade VELVET tradition frames the chapter as proof that both tools compound.
Delta's VELVET: hardship turned into heritage
The chapter opens in a hotel ballroom in Atlanta. Delta's Chief People Officer Allison Ausband, who started at the airline more than forty years earlier as a flight attendant, faces hundreds of employees: cabin crew, baggage handlers, ticket agents, aircraft engineers. She begins with photos from the company's centennial, and the room laughs at how far each work group has travelled: reservations kept on chalkboards and index cards, pilot timesheets dropped into a wooden box, canvas sheets used as emergency slides, machinists in ties in the sheet-metal shop.
Ausband was one of several leaders who had come to listen as much as to speak, to learn how to look after the people in the room and their nearly 100,000 colleagues. Asked to describe his job in five words, CEO Ed Bastian answered: "Taking care of our people." The executive team was about to tell and show what that meant.
- The welcome. A crew of enthusiastic "Velveteers" met every arriving employee with waving signs and T-shirts printed "Delta Proud" across the back; people had flown in from every corner of the network.
- The format. VELVET, short for the Velvet Rope Tour, is a two-day immersion linking frontline teams directly to leadership, strategy and one another.
- Day one. Small breakout sessions with divisional leaders, where employees asked questions, challenged ideas and shared what they saw in the field; in the evening the ballroom became a party with prizes, good food, drinks, music and dancing, a demonstration that Delta knows hospitality.
- Day two. Bastian, Ausband and other executives covered strategic priorities (network strategy, customer personalization, loyalty) and every part of the employee experience: pay and profit-sharing, scheduling and flexibility, career development and advancement.
- Scale. That year several VELVET events in multiple cities reached more than 7,000 of 100,000+ employees; it was the nineteenth year of the tradition.
The obvious puzzle is why the leaders of one of the most operationally complex, fiercely competitive businesses spend so much effort on an annual celebration. The answer lies in its origin. When Delta filed for bankruptcy protection in 2005, leaders had to reconnect nearly 50,000 employees to a company fighting for survival. The first VELVET sessions were small, in-person listening events where executives explained the way forward face to face and heard concerns directly.
Ausband attended the very first one. In her account, the purpose was to show staff how much they mattered and to explain plainly what was happening in the business, an exercise in accountability and transparency. The camaraderie that returned, she says, helped Delta beat off a hostile takeover in 2007: "Our people saved Delta." Those sessions gave the airline its cultural reset, left employees believing the company would rise only if everyone rose together, and cemented the "people first" philosophy behind the "Delta Difference."
The authors' reading is that Delta turned hardship into heritage through stories and symbols. Stories tell a group who it is and what it hopes for; symbols provide memorable touchstones and gather people around shared objects, actions and events. Firms that use both, they argue, speed up and amplify their transformations.
Making your case for change
Most transformation leaders know the idea of a case for change: an account of why things are changing, what changes to expect and how they will be made. They also accept that communicating it, before and during execution, is their job. A good case does three things.
- Capture attention. It makes the change feel relevant and urgent, so employees focus on it despite their day-to-day priorities.
- Facilitate recall. It makes the key messages easy to remember, so people can pass them on to one another and absorb them over time.
- Activate motivation and behavior. It moves people to change how they act in ways that serve the transformation's shared goals.
In practice cases for change often fail with employees, and the authors trace most failures to two mistakes.
Mistake 1: financial targets with vague justifications
Financial targets are fine in themselves. The trouble is that they are usually justified with abstract, euphemistic business phrases such as "best practice," "future-proofing" and "full potential," which mean little without concrete explanation. The authors reproduce the kind of draft they see constantly in all-staff emails and town halls; its substance runs as follows.
- The target. Raise gross margin from 38% to 44% over eighteen months.
- The lever. Mostly through a $200 million cost reduction.
- The justification. Future-proofing in a fast-moving market, being agile and resilient, keeping up with industry best practice and continuously improving customer service, followed by a closing line about tackling an exciting challenge "in partnership with you."
Such a story tells employees nothing about the real motive, so they fill the gap with the only explanation left: bigger shareholder returns. An employee at a financial institution that restructured a department said they got little detail and concluded the firm had put profits ahead of employees. Someone at an IT provider said the promised new direction turned out to be entirely about profits and nothing about staff. Get the story right and the conclusions change: one frontline worker, surprised by a move, still felt positive and hopeful, calling happier staff and a better product a win-win.
Mistake 2: telling instead of showing and telling
Leaders naturally treat the case for change as something to tell, through emails and presentations. Those channels are essential, the messages are often crafted with care, and leaders know repetition is needed before anything sticks. But in polishing the words they miss the memorable metaphor, picture or symbol that would connect people to the change's goals.
Either mistake produces the same result: too little attention on the change, poor recall of its purpose and nature, and a low chance that people will behave in the ways that make it last. A health-care data analyst described weekly or biweekly transition meetings and approachable managers, yet nobody could say what they were transitioning to.
Each mistake has its own remedy: storytelling fixes the narrow financial focus, and consistent use of symbols fixes telling without showing. The authors insist neither is a mere marketing device; both are anchors that keep reminding the organization why, what and how things are changing.
The science of stories
Storytelling is an ancient habit. Anthropologists have concluded that language evolved largely for exchanging social information, in effect gossip about who is rising and who is falling. Social psychologists and neuroscientists add that we process the world through stories. NYU Stern psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the brain a "story processor, not a logic processor." Because stories set humans apart from other animals, some scientists have proposed renaming the species Homo narrans, Homo narrator or Homo narrativus.
The authors claim three properties for stories. They are uniquely captivating (their suggested test: say "Let me tell you a story" in a business meeting and watch attention sharpen), uniquely memorable (which is why teachers rely on them) and uniquely moving.
- Mandler and Johnson, 1977. Psychologist Jean M. Mandler and linguist Nancy S. Johnson of UC San Diego showed that people hold an intuitive grammar of narrative, a sense of how a story ought to unfold; when that structure is broken, listeners fill in the missing details from their own imagination so the story makes sense.
- Zabrucky and Moore, 1999. Karen Zabrucky (Georgia State) and DeWayne Moore (Clemson) gave 40 adults eight passages each: four narrative short stories and four expository short essays, every one exactly eleven sentences long with a similar number of ideas. Some passages contained planted inconsistencies (plot holes, contradictory facts). They measured reading speed, recall and detection of inconsistencies. Story readers won on every measure: they read faster, caught more inconsistencies and recalled more detail. The researchers concluded that narrative makes lighter demands on self-regulation than exposition; in plain terms, stories make your message easier to take in.
- 2021 meta-analysis. Pooling 75+ unique samples and more than 33,000 participants in memory and comprehension experiments, researchers found stories were understood more easily and recalled better than essays.
In periods of uncertainty leaders assume people want plain facts. The research says the opposite: narrative structure lowers the effort of comprehension and raises recall, so the facts you care about travel further when they ride inside a story.
Change stories: threat, fitness and destiny
It is tempting to think that during upheaval people just want the facts. But a case for change that is to capture attention, aid recall and trigger behavior needs a suitable narrative. Telecoms executive Ana White told the authors that teams usually run in "GSD" mode (get stuff done, move on, prioritize), yet pausing to evoke emotion through a story makes the message "stickier", more likely to be remembered and acted on. Banking executive Ira Robbins made the same point from the top: the more senior you become, the more you believe that telling someone to do something makes it happen; usually the reverse is true, and less direct influence through stories builds connection and resonance.
Many people have tried to classify narratives.
- Fiction. Christopher Booker found seven basic plots: overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy and rebirth. He counts more than 1,000 versions of the rags-to-riches Cinderella tale alone.
- Economics. Robert Shiller identified nine economic narratives, among them "labor-saving machines replace many jobs," "real estate booms and busts" and "the wage-price spiral and evil labor unions." Such narratives, he argues, can change real economic decisions: whether to hire or wait, take a risk or stay cautious, launch a venture or buy a volatile asset.
- Transformation. The authors see three archetypes: threat, fitness and destiny stories.
| Story | Core message | Where the problem lies | Exemplar |
|---|---|---|---|
| Threat | "If we don't change, we'll suffer... or die" | External danger: rival, technology, regulation, consumer shift, macro shock | Ford, 2006 |
| Fitness | "Changing will make us stronger" | Internal: too slow, complex, costly, fragmented or variable | LEGO, 2003-05 |
| Destiny | "By changing, we can realize our potential" | No crisis: the firm is strong and wants to become what it was meant to be | John Deere, 2021 |
Threat stories
A threat story names an external force endangering the company (a rival, a new technology, regulation, changing consumer tastes, a macroeconomic shock) and argues that change is needed to prevent or limit the damage.
Ford in 2006 faced pressure from inside and out: a record $6 billion quarterly loss, fears of bankruptcy, the Detroit trio's shared problems of overcapacity, high labor costs and uncompetitive products, plus rising fuel prices, shifting tastes and tougher Japanese competition. On October 13, 2006, just two weeks into the job, new CEO Alan Mulally emailed the whole company. He praised Ford people as natural winners with justified pride in more than a century of value, acknowledged many current areas of excellence, then turned: pockets of success are no longer enough in this competitive environment; Ford needs success across the entire enterprise, and while competitors might try to "divide and conquer," he would not let Ford do that to itself.
The authors spell out the subtext. You are not the problem; ferocious new competitors are coming for the business; we must fight back; we have shown we can win, and this time we can only win together. That is the essence of a threat story. Mulally closed by saying everyone loves a comeback story and inviting staff to write the best one ever. Within less than three years Ford was profitable again, without a government bailout, while other US automakers were still recovering from the financial crisis.
Fitness stories
In a fitness story the enemy is internal: you are your own problem. You describe unhealthy practices that make the firm too slow, too complex, too costly, too fragmented or too variable, and argue that change will make it stronger and healthier.
LEGO in 2003 was one of the world's best-loved toy brands yet carried mounting debt, collapsing profits and strategic overreach: 94% of its products were unprofitable, it had lost sight of its core, and complacency masked how bad things were. Nothing external caused it. David Robertson, in Brick by Brick, judged that the company lost focus and discipline while chasing every conceivable adjacency.
- Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen's admission. In a candid Financial Times interview in February 2004, the then-CEO said the problem was internal: not enough focus on core products and too much growth from licensed products.
- Jørgen Vig Knudstorp's reset. The new CEO, appointed later that year, made the same storytelling choice. He told Robertson the aim was to "break the back of the culture" through a painful year of self-criticism: admitting LEGO was not the world-class brand it told itself it was, and that claims about child development rang hollow when sales were weak.
- The program. LEGO cut unprofitable lines, reduced complexity and rebuilt around its core of bricks, creativity and disciplined innovation; it had to stop believing its own hype and earn its place again.
- The result. By end-2005 LEGO swung from a $292 million loss to a $117 million pretax profit, and it nearly doubled its market share between 2004 and 2020, one of the best-known turnarounds in modern business.
Destiny stories
Usually it works best to present change as a response to a specific challenge, external (threat) or internal (fitness). But a company in a clear position of strength can sometimes do better with a destiny story: describe what makes the firm special and argue that change will give the market more or better access to those qualities, helping it become what it was always meant to be.
John Deere, founded in 1837, had long led in agricultural machinery with a beloved brand and fierce loyalty. Yet leaders found they could no longer differentiate on size and speed alone; the future demanded smarter, connected, more productive machines for modern farming and construction, and the company had to explain its shift from shaping iron to building software. To energize staff for one of the biggest shifts in its history, it launched the Smart Industrial strategy and in 2021 commissioned a mini-movie that framed the catalyst not as threat or dysfunction but as realizing the potential of inherent strengths.
The voiceover's arc: "sweat and smarts" built the company; it is in a position of strength thanks to its people, whatever their role; together they move earth and move the earth forward with machines of "hard iron and hard data"; to keep leading they will build tools and technology, support customers across the whole life cycle and create production systems that yield more worth with less waste; and nobody, from Illinois to India, is better equipped for the leap. A year on, Deere told investors that the redesign's lower structural costs had pushed profit margins to 17%.
- Ford (threat). Record $6 billion quarterly loss; Mulally's October 13, 2006 email: you are winners, pockets of success are not enough, we will not divide ourselves. Profitable again within three years.
- LEGO (fitness). 94% of products unprofitable; Kristiansen's 2004 FT admission and Knudstorp's year of self-criticism. From a $292 million loss to a $117 million pretax profit by end-2005; market share nearly doubled by 2020.
- John Deere (destiny). A 1837 icon moving from iron to software; the 2021 Smart Industrial film of "hard iron and hard data." Margins reached 17% a year later.
Ford did avoid the TARP bailout, but it had mortgaged nearly all its assets for a $23.6 billion financing package in 2006 and took a $5.9 billion federal Department of Energy loan in 2009, so "without a bailout" understates the help it got. Deere's margins also rode a commodity and equipment boom. In all three cases the story is one contributor among many, and the causal weight the chapter gives it is assumed rather than demonstrated.
Stay focused: no hybrid stories
The obvious objection: most companies have external threats, internal weaknesses and special strengths at once, so why not combine them? The authors' answer is mostly no. Long formats such as a speech or all-staff email leave room to touch on several features, but listeners condense every story in memory. The essential discipline is a twenty-word summary of why, what and how the company will change, repeated in every communication, and such a summary will rarely hold elements of all three types. Pick one change story and stick to it.
The science of symbols
The second mistake was relying on words alone, so the authors urge leaders to speak the language of symbolism as well. By "symbol" they mean far more than visual icons: any nonverbal communication, any moment when you show rather than tell. They adopt the scheme of Hong Kong Polytechnic University organizational sociologists Yu Wang, David Diwei Lv and Christina W. Y. Wong, which sorts symbols into objects, actions and events. To show a relative far away that they matter, you might send flowers (object), ask their advice on something personal (action) or visit over the holidays (event).
- Dual coding theory. Canadian psychologist Allan Paivio, writing in the 1980s, proposed two processing systems: a verbal one for what we read and hear, and a nonverbal "imagery" system (named for its role in analyzing scenes and generating mental images) that handles visual objects, environmental sounds, the feel of objects, and memories of taste and smell. A words-only message engages one of the mind's two systems.
- The multimedia effect. Educational psychologist Richard Mayer and colleagues built lessons on how pumps work, how brakes operate and how lightning storms form, teaching some students with words only and others with words and pictures. The results gave clear, consistent support for a multimedia effect: people learn more deeply from words plus pictures than from words alone.
In business few used symbols better than Steve Jobs. In 2008 he drew the new MacBook Air out of an ordinary manila envelope to prove its thinness. Viewers forget the specifications but never the image of a computer emerging from office stationery. Mayer put it to the authors simply: quoting dimensions is one thing, showing it fits in an envelope has an impact.
Chefs know the power of engaging all five senses at once. In a converted shipbuilding warehouse in Copenhagen, Rasmus Munk, named the 2025 World's Best Chef, runs the two-Michelin-star Alchemist, which has had more than a million people on its waitlist since opening in 2019. Each of the thirty-five "impressions" in a meal is a staged symbolic event meant to change how diners think about the food system: fish wrapped in edible "plastic" evokes ocean waste; an empty plate stands for global hunger and nudges diners from empathy to action. His innovation lab Spora turns rapeseed waste into animal feed, brewers' spent grain into vegan cocoa-free chocolate, and insects into high-protein dishes.
The lesson the authors draw is that change symbols should be both challenging and charming: pushing people beyond their comfort zone while energizing and exciting them. Munk accepts the paradox; if guests enjoy absolutely everything, his team has not done its job, yet the transformation runs on deliciousness.
Change has to be desirable.
Using symbols in your transformation
The supply of possible symbols is almost unlimited. The authors offer three examples that stuck with them, one per category.
- Symbolic objects: the "Conte Curve" at Databricks. Objects are things people experience or own, physical or not, as long as employees can access them. Silicon Valley's fast-growing Databricks built a giant chart in 2023 tracking progress toward profitability by 2026, nicknamed after CFO Dave Conte. By end-2024, per the Wall Street Journal, it had more than doubled revenue to $2.6 billion while halving its negative operating margin.
- Symbolic actions: stand-up comedy at Spanx. Actions are things people do, which may mean a practical step, a decision, or both. Sara Blakely, founding the shapewear firm Spanx, wanted a culture where creativity thrives and people learn from failure, so she made stand-up comedy training part of onboarding: each new hire went onstage to tell a few funny stories to peers. The aim was not comedians but a signal that staff can be vulnerable, confident on their feet and able to laugh at mistakes; Blakely rejects the idea that you must act serious to be taken seriously.
- Symbolic events: hackathons at Microsoft. Events are gatherings for a purpose, in person, virtual or both. When Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, Microsoft held its first companywide hackathon during its "OneWeek" celebration: 12,000 employees from 83 countries produced more than 3,000 hacks. It showed, without a word of instruction, Nadella's top cultural priority: renewed collaboration and innovation.
The authors keep a running list of symbols they have seen and used in transformations; table 6-1 gives the highlights.
Symbolic objects (things people experience or own).
- Value thermometer. A display in a communal space showing the financial benefits the program has created.
- Public trackers. Visible performance charts in shared spaces.
- New spaces. New offices for teams formed by a restructure.
- Merchandise. Gifts carrying the program's name or slogan.
- New job titles. Names that reflect changed priorities, e.g. "Account Managers" becoming "Customer Relationship Managers."
- Awards. Special recognition for adopting specific new behaviors.
Symbolic actions (things people do or decide).
- Incentive scheme. Rewarding employees for the program's success; the symbolism of putting your money where your mouth is matters as much as the money.
- Killing projects. Eliminating low-priority work to free capacity for higher-priority change.
- CEO media statements. A public show of commitment at launch or on progress.
- Leader visits. Senior leaders joining working team meetings on high-priority topics.
- Public praise. Recognizing the behaviors the program most needs.
Symbolic events (gatherings for a purpose).
- Themed launch. In a special location away from the usual workplace.
- Multiday training. In new ways of working, held somewhere comfortable off-site.
- "Ask Me Anything" forums. Executives give unscripted answers to employees' questions about the program.
Putting it together: how Delta perfected stories and symbols
The VELVET name is itself a symbol. Early versions were called the Velvet Rope Tour because they took employees "behind the rope" to win their support and show them where the business was headed. The program mattered so much to Delta's emergence from bankruptcy in 2007 that the name stuck. Nearly twenty years on it is a cornerstone of Delta's leadership model and still a channel for direct dialogue between executives and the front line.
BCG aviation expert Jason Guggenheim, the authors' colleague, says Delta redefined aviation leadership: grounding strategy in care for people unlocked the operational reliability and customer loyalty that sustain superior financial results, so employees, customers and shareholders all win.
- 14% more revenue per seat mile than competitors.
- 84% on-time arrivals in 2024, leading North America for the seventh straight year.
- No. 15 on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For.
- 7,000+ employees reached by VELVET in one year, in its nineteenth year.
Ausband calls it a virtuous cycle: invest in your people, they pour that into customers, and shareholder returns follow, sustained by culture. The authors argue these outcomes are no accident but the product of a philosophy that puts employees first even when business is hardest. Bastian's version: being people-first is easy to say and hard to do; culture looks like the soft, nice stuff but is really "the hard stuff," the fabric of the company. Delta has kept that care visible across decades and distances through the stories told and the symbols shown at VELVET.
Draft the twenty-word why-what-how before anything else and test it on someone outside the program. Then choose one object, one action and one event that make the same point without words; if the only symbol you can name is a slide deck, the case is still all telling.
In sum
- Stories work best. In a transformation they are the most effective way to capture attention, aid recall and activate motivation and behavior.
- Two common mistakes. A narrow focus on financial targets with vague justifications, and telling without showing.
- Choose one of three stories. Threat (change or suffer, perhaps die), fitness (change makes us stronger) or destiny (change lets us reach our full potential).
- Reinforce with symbols. Build a complementary set of symbolic objects (things people experience or own), actions (things people do) and events (gatherings for a purpose).
Create Momentum Throughout, Not Just at the Start
Transformations launch with a burst of energy and a run of early wins, then typically stall around six months in, when only the hard initiatives remain and employees drift back to the day job. Leaders often respond by "giving people a break," which nobody would accept as a customer retention strategy. Your people will make more progress when they see more progress, so leaders must manufacture momentum with four techniques (show belief, promote wins, set new challenges, engineer fresh starts) and predict where it will dip.
Aetna: from the Mercury astronauts to fifty thousand skeptics
In 1959 NASA presented its first seven astronauts, and Life put them on its cover in ordinary business suits, not silver space suits: these were ordinary men with families, homes and bills. The next week's cover showed their wives. Yet only four years later, after Alan Shepard (first American in space), John Glenn (first American to orbit Earth) and the others had flown the risky Project Mercury missions, did the astronauts get life insurance to protect their families. Aetna wrote those first policies, a landmark for space travel, insurance and the company.
- Origins. Founded in 1853 in Hartford, Connecticut, Aetna spun out of a fire insurer named after Sicily's Mount Etna, Europe's largest and most active volcano, and became a life insurance pioneer before specializing in health.
- Medicare first. In 1966, a year after the US created Medicare (federal health insurance for people over 65 and some younger disabled people), Aetna became the first insurer to pay a Medicare claim.
- CVS deal. By 2018 Aetna was worth about $70 billion and was bought by CVS Health. The logic: lower total cost of care, connect health experiences, and offer a simpler, integrated one-stop shop to the 100 million+ people the combined firm served each year.
After COVID, demand for care rebounded and Aetna grew Medicare Advantage enrollment. As the Financial Times put it, new customers brought a surge in claims just as the government tightened reimbursement rates.
- 95.2% medical benefit ratio (share of premium revenue spent on medical costs) by Q3 2024, against a more typical 85.7% a year earlier.
- 21% of Medicare Advantage members in plans rated four stars or higher in 2023, down from 87% in 2022.
- Up to $1 billion of operating income expected to be lost from the star-rating fall.
- About 50,000 employees to bring along.
Leaders concluded the changes needed were bigger and more profound than anything before, and set out to diagnose the deepest problems and fix them for good. The first move was the right leader. Katerina Guerraz, CVS Health's Chief Strategy Officer and a twenty-year Aetna veteran, became Aetna's Chief Operating Officer with a mandate to transform. She knew where the business was strong and where it had fallen short, and her strategy role gave her the wider enterprise view. A company born in fire insurance now had to stop firefighting; as she told the authors, people cannot always be made to feel they are in crisis.
The three-year plan, "Aetna Business Excellence," aimed to make Aetna the leading consumer-focused health solutions organization: excellent at the fundamentals (best-in-class member and provider experience, managing total cost of care, operational excellence) while building a culture that was bold, innovative, empathetic and empowering. Guerraz knew a workforce of fifty thousand would greet yet another mitigation plan with skepticism and fatigue, so trust, energy and belief had to be rebuilt. Her chosen resource was momentum.
Momentum during a transformation
Executives obsess about keeping customers. The authors want the same zeal applied to employees: the task is to win their attention and energy and then keep it for years.
Leaders usually start well with "quick wins," which the authors prefer to call early wins, since "quick" implies an effortlessness that rarely exists. These are usually about savings or cash.
- Supplier contracts. Renegotiating the largest supplier contracts for fast cost savings.
- Asset sales. Selling the company jet or other assets.
- Invoicing. Tightening invoicing rules to bring cash in faster.
- Sponsorships. Ending corporate sponsorships with poor returns.
Industrials executive Christopher Scalia says such wins get momentum started: if you only talk about the need for change and never turn it into things people can see and touch, initial momentum is hard to build.
Trouble usually comes around six months after launch: executive focus fades and employees turn to more urgent matters. Board member Sigal Zarmi, retired from Morgan Stanley and GE Capital, says every large multiyear program loses momentum because things change: a supportive leader is replaced by a skeptic, market conditions make the program look less relevant, technology moves and a different solution looks better, budgets tighten.
There is a structural reason too. Once the early wins are banked, what remains are the hard-to-do initiatives, which tend to be:
- Slower to progress. Inherently slow work such as construction and capital projects, deep research or complex analysis of ambiguous data.
- More interdependent. They need new collaboration across functions.
- More political. They create winners and losers, for example by moving resources from one team to another.
- More behavioral. They demand large-scale behavior change through slow persuasion (the take-up problem of Chapter 3).
As the early wins fade, interest and belief fall away. Those designing and executing change move more slowly; everyone else grows less receptive to new tools, processes, policies and structures. A corporate accountant at an energy supplier restructuring after a profit slump said the drawn-out process and inactivity made him complacent. BCG's Simon Weinstein observes that momentum spikes at the announcement but is quickly lost: without active reinforcement people go back to the day-to-day, and without a continuing reason there is little incentive to push or take risks.
How leaders get it wrong
Executives rarely fight for disengaging employees the way they fight for departing customers. The authors hear the same lines again and again.
- "Change fatigue." Our people are tired; there is too much change.
- "Peak season." We cannot keep distracting people with this now.
- "Non-compliance." People just are not doing what we asked.
- "Never understood." People never grasped the program in the first place.
The well-meant, empathetic response is to scale back and let people recover: give them a break from "change" and try again later in the year. The authors sympathize with the frustration but reject the decision, because it tolerates the loss of important customers far too easily. A retention strategy of leaving customers alone for several months would see those customers leave the company alone, permanently. The alternative is the deliberate creation and relentless maintenance of momentum.
The science of momentum
High school physics gives momentum = mass × velocity. Change leaders, too, are moving something big at pace. Public-sector leader Kok Yam Tan extends the analogy: velocity has limits, since people cannot move faster than they or their organization are ready for, so sustainable progress must come from building mass, drawing people in and letting them reinforce each other's stories.
Two behavioral concepts explain momentum, or what most people simply call progress: the endowed progress effect and the progress principle.
The endowed progress effect
In 2004 Joseph Nunes (USC Marshall) and Xavier Dreze (Wharton) asked whether a head start makes people more persistent toward a goal. They handed 300 loyalty cards to random customers of a local car wash; each paid wash earned a stamp and a full card earned a free wash.
- Group one. Cards needing 8 stamps for a free wash, none pre-applied.
- Group two. Cards needing 10 stamps, with 2 already applied. Both groups therefore needed exactly eight purchases.
- Result. Over five months, 34% of the head-start group redeemed, against 19% of the others.
Nunes and Dreze named it the endowed progress effect. Being 20% complete rather than 0% creates an illusion of progress, a sense that the task is under way and unfinished rather than not yet begun, and that illusion sustains momentum because people want to finish what they start. The effect has since been found in coffee shops, savings programs, video games, sales and charitable giving.
In a transformation the authors use it by creating early wins and making them visible. When employees see the program succeeding, they want to continue the momentum even if they had no part in the initial progress: a whole workforce can share the satisfaction of successes created by a handful of people and be inspired to add more. Logistics executive Jacqui McGillivray puts it simply: once people see they are winning together, they work together. The catch is that employees must hear about the progress they are endowed with, loudly and often.
The progress principle
In the early 2000s, Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School and Steven Kramer (met in Chapter 4) gathered 12,000 diary entries from 238 people in seven companies to map the anatomy of good and bad days. Comparing participants' best and worst days by mood, emotions and motivation, they found the most common trigger of a best day was any progress in the work, by the individual or the team, and the most common trigger of a worst day was a setback. They called this the progress principle.
The authors stress the wording: not large, significant or meaningful progress, but any progress, an observable step forward; even small everyday wins change how people feel and perform. Frequency matters too: small, frequent wins beat occasional big ones, and the more often people feel that sense of purpose, the more creatively productive they are over time.
This explains why people react so strongly to a perceived loss of momentum. Everyone is acutely sensitive to the presence or absence of progress; when a program seems to be slowing or setbacks multiply, people find it harder to make progress themselves. The authors liken it to a demand-side recession: consumers who perceive a slowdown save more and spend less, which deepens the slowdown and confirms their fears.
Neuroscience adds reward prediction errors. A reward bigger than predicted triggers dopamine release, which fuels motivation, sharpens focus and reinforces persistence; a smaller-than-predicted reward dampens it. Spreading good news, especially unexpected good news, is therefore a social act and probably a chemical one.
- Endowed progress. 300 car-wash cards; 8 stamps vs 10 with 2 pre-applied; 34% vs 19% redemption over five months (Nunes and Dreze, 2004).
- Progress principle. 12,000 diary entries, 238 people, 7 companies: any progress makes a best day, a setback a worst day (Amabile and Kramer).
- The two rules. "Create a head start" and "Keep the wins coming."
The authors condense the two lessons into "Create a head start" and "Keep the wins coming." Successful change leaders treat manufacturing momentum as seriously as delivering financial results, customer experience or engagement; they refuse to accept its loss and make more wherever and whenever it is needed. Knowing this is one thing; doing it is much harder.
Four techniques for creating momentum
As steward of momentum, a leader needs a toolkit of four techniques: showing belief, promoting wins, setting new challenges and engineering fresh starts. The first two work any day, for every team; the last two are targeted at overperforming and underperforming teams respectively.
Show belief
Ben Bernanke, chair of the US Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014, once said monetary policy is 98% talk and 2% action. Economic behavior responds to what central bankers do now and also to what they say they expect: when a credible official signals a future policy change, markets act as if it has already happened.
Organizations work the same way. A leader can create or destroy momentum just by how they talk about the future, and employees are especially sensitive to statements of belief. Psychologists find that when leaders express confidence, employees internalize it, which lifts their self-efficacy and then their performance; classic studies showed teacher expectations alone raised student achievement, and later workplace research found the same for managers' belief in their teams.
- Say it. The words "I believe we will succeed" are surprisingly powerful, and successful change leaders use them often, especially early.
- Recruit a chorus. Arrange for fellow executives, board members, influential senior employees and respected outside thought leaders to say the same.
- Give your reasons. Explain why you believe, for example: I believe this new product offering will succeed because of the progress I saw in the Polaris project last year; we already know how to launch offerings, and now we need to go bigger and faster.
Promote wins
Often one group is declaring a change impossible while that very change is happening elsewhere, sometimes nearby. In October 1903 astronomer Samuel Langley tested his Aerodrome and it failed to fly. Two days later the New York Times ran an editorial, "Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly," guessing that a machine that really flies might take mathematicians and mechanics one to ten million years to evolve. At that moment Orville Wright was noting in his diary that he and Wilbur had begun assembling the Wright Flyer; two months later it flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
The lesson: almost every company contains pockets of successful change, but news of progress travels badly. Wins must be seen to be believed and talked about to be known. Progress needs a publicist. The Wrights got coverage once they flew, but organizations cannot wait for the final result; they must document, syndicate and celebrate progress along the way while fighting cynicism. A team may be landing new clients, big savings or experimental deployments of new technology, yet other units will know nothing unless the news is deliberately broadcast, and then they get neither the endowed progress effect nor the good days of the progress principle.
So leaders must detect and spread good news through newsletters, videos, town halls and every other channel. Former executive Janice Semper described keeping a database of stories; whenever energy seemed to be waning, her team asked where the energy was and how to lift it, found the big wins and got them in front of people again.
What counts as a win
People ask what counts as a win and whether something is big enough. The progress principle answers: even very small wins matter. Wins need not be financial; cultural and leadership wins matter as much as strategic and financial ones and often have outsized impact.
| Win type | What it demonstrates | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Cultural | The company is doing things differently, before results show | Policy or process changes; stopping pointless meetings; scrapping legacy KPIs never met; removing needless sign-offs |
| Leadership | The leadership team operates differently | Faster decisions that clear logjams; executives moving desks to sit with teams; hiring a new-thinking executive or removing an old-thinking one |
| Financial | Progress measurable in dollars | Lower operating costs; revenue from new business lines |
| Strategic | The strategy is working | Customers won with a new product; a new system going live |
Cultural wins earn extra credit when they tackle an organization's longest-standing irritants. Where past transformations failed, the goal is for employees to tell each other that this time things feel different. At Aetna, Guerraz found some of the biggest early wins were not financial at all: they came from sitting down and listening to colleagues who said they had been trying to share and nobody listened. When staff saw leaders respond to feedback, even with fixes that would take months, it was a cultural shift; one employee cried with happiness when a claims-processing problem they had fought for years was finally fixed. Cultural and leadership wins may cost money, the authors note, but they pay off.
When recognizing wins, praise freely. In a 2017 survey of more than 7,000 people, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman found 37% admitted they avoid giving positive feedback. The authors do not see praise as a scarce resource. For the right kind, they recommend Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck's Mindset, which favors praising effort over ability; but the first step for most leaders is simply to give more.
Showing belief and promoting wins can energize or re-energize a program at any time: every day is a good day to show belief or talk about a recent win. The next two techniques are reserved for specific situations.
Set new challenges (for overperformers)
Some teams will consistently beat expectations. The risk is complacency or boredom, especially six to twelve months after launch. They drop their agreed rituals (no need to meet, everyone knows what to do) and stop attending to detail on the assumption that this initiative will work out like the others, which is exactly where things begin to go wrong. Raise the bar before complacency sets in, with challenges that keep them mentally fit and add value. Two common methods:
- Stretch targets. Replace the original goal with a higher one, for example a 20% savings target becomes 30%.
- Higher standards of execution. Keep the targets but demand more specificity and certainty in planning. Early on you might ask an initiative owner for major milestones in July, August and September; with an overperformer you start asking which tactics they will use at a communications event three Tuesdays away.
This keeps people engaged, creates fresh opportunities for small wins and preserves the feeling of progress. One caveat: it only works if you have first lavishly celebrated, praised, rewarded and thanked the team for meeting the original bar. Otherwise employees conclude you are arbitrarily moving the goalposts and see no point in hitting targets that will simply be replaced without thanks.
Engineer fresh starts (for underperformers)
Some teams will underperform. Causes may be internal (wrong personalities or skills, too little motivation or experience) or external (outside events that make initiatives far harder than expected). Either way, the leader cannot let sustained underperformance stand. Health-care executive Francisco Jiménez Sirvent warns that when people working extra hours see that a deadline missed by one month, then two, brings no consequence, they start asking why they should stress about deadlines at all.
The remedy is a fresh start: agree as a team to learn the lessons of the first attempt, formally reset with refreshed goals and execution plans, and begin again. Sometimes that means swapping out team members who are a poor fit; sometimes it does not.
Hengchen Dai, Katy Milkman and Jason Riis (University of Pennsylvania) showed that people are more likely to take up aspirational behaviors right after temporal landmarks: the start of a new week, month, year or semester, holidays and birthdays. Milkman told the authors that the more meaningful the date feels, the more powerful the fresh start. Dai (2018) found that an underperforming baseball player's batting average rises about 3% when his statistics are reset by a move between the American and National Leagues.
The practical rules follow directly.
- Pick a meaningful date. The first week of January, the first day of spring, the one-year anniversary of the program's launch, even the team leader's birthday.
- Debrief first. Hold structured team discussions about past challenges and learn from them.
- Then wipe the slate. Reset all tracking metrics, stop discussing which goals and milestones were hit or missed in the first attempt, and talk only about those ahead.
- Show belief (every team, every day). Credible statements of expectation move behavior, as Bernanke's "98% talk" shows; say "I believe we will succeed," recruit a chorus, and give the reason.
- Promote wins (every team, every day). Progress needs a publicist: detect and broadcast cultural, leadership, financial and strategic wins; praise more.
- Set new challenges (overperformers). Raise the bar at 6-12 months with stretch targets or higher standards of specificity, after lavish thanks.
- Engineer fresh starts (underperformers). Learn lessons, formally reset goals and plans, swap people if needed, choose a meaningful date and reset the metrics.
Predicting momentum loss
Start thinking about these techniques well before momentum flags. Some momentum stoppers are genuinely unforeseeable: a private equity firm launching a hostile takeover, a key executive resigning unexpectedly, a major geopolitical event that distracts the team. But most loss of momentum is predictable, so the best time to plan for it is early. During planning, experienced change leaders review initiative plans and ask two hard questions:
- "When will our early wins run out?"
- "When will the hard-to-execute initiatives be at their peak?"
From the answers they forecast where momentum will run high and low across the program and agree in advance how to manage those swings.
Outside a physics lab momentum is hard to pin down, but successful leaders know how much it matters. Telecoms executive Kye Prigg describes the arc: early on you inject energy, structure and the right people; some jump in, others doubt; small successes appear and must be celebrated; more people engage and more progress follows while governance, processes and systems improve bit by bit. Eventually you reach a "magical place" where people fix things, help each other and collaborate across lines without being asked, and the transformation takes on a life of its own.
Putting it together: how Aetna built momentum
- The 90-day plan. Guerraz opened with a ninety-day plan to energize staff and win support: she listed the problems transparently, named the measures to fix them and began delivering.
- People first. Minor tweaks would not do. Tough personnel decisions put in leaders who rejected the status quo and would drive fast, fundamental change.
- Stop losing. She stripped out low-value processes and cut manual work with AI and digital tools; to win, the team first had to stop losing.
- Endowed progress. While handling the practicalities she played up positive early developments and described Aetna's potential as the leading consumer-focused health-care solutions company, using people's urge to finish what they had started.
- Openness. She said plainly what she did not know and where she needed help, signalling that the transformation belonged to everyone. Employees felt trusted to shape the future rather than blamed for the past; after the first town hall she received 250+ emails with ideas, résumés and offers of help.
- The road map. After the reset, initiatives covered efficiency, the experience of individuals, employers and providers, and new capabilities: AI-driven case preparation and documentation to free clinicians, on-demand mental health services, simpler service models and tech-enabled clinical care models.
- A second wave of wins. Knowing the launch energy would fade, she hunted for wins in behavior and technology rather than finance: praising once-siloed teams that collaborated, individuals who flagged problems holding the company back, and teams that piloted AI that summarizes clinical case files, making nurses more efficient and freeing them to engage more members.
- Broadcasting. A twice-monthly "transformation email" from Guerraz; operating-committee executives swapping success stories; teams with emblematic wins telling their own stories at all-staff town halls.
- Status. With eighteen months still to run, CVS Health shares were up nearly 85% year to date in October 2025. One analyst judged that the core elements of the turnaround appeared to be working, and CEO David Joyner spoke of building momentum across the enterprise and of renewed vigor and optimism at Aetna after a hard 2024.
The company that once insured the first astronauts still has work to do, the authors concede, but its record so far shows why momentum must be created throughout, not just at the start.
The Aetna case is mid-flight: the authors report it before the program ends, and the share price reflects all of CVS (pharmacy, policy and rate changes), not the momentum techniques. The teacher-expectation research behind "show belief" (the Pygmalion effect) is also contested, with replications finding effects smaller than the early studies claimed.
Put a momentum forecast in the plan: mark the month the early wins run out and the month the hard initiatives peak, and schedule a fresh-start date and a wave of win stories for each trough before launch.
In sum
- Momentum matters. Transformations succeed more often when people feel momentum, and successful leaders invest heavily in creating that feeling.
- Two mechanisms. Seeing progress motivates people to go further (the endowed progress effect); at work, people are highly sensitive to their own sense of achievement (the progress principle).
- Four techniques. Show belief, promote wins, set new challenges for overperformers and engineer fresh starts for underperformers.
- Plan for the dips. Predict how progress will ebb and flow, and agree in advance how to sustain momentum throughout.
Putting the Principles to Work
Part Two turns the seven principles into a step-by-step operating manual for every executive running a transformation, Chief Transformation Officers included. It walks through five phases, from deciding to ending, each with its science, activities, tactics and time cost. Before any tactic, leaders must make two shifts: flip the pyramid so employees become the customers of change, and redesign the cockpit they work in.
Two essential shifts
Part One argued that changing how people behave, feel and think requires understanding how they behave, feel and think. Part Two is about applying the seven principles, and it starts with two changes in the leader.
- Flip the pyramid. Leaders usually behave as if they are the customers of change and employees are the suppliers delivering it to them, the pattern behind the change distance of the Introduction. They review working teams in steering committees and make the occasional big strategic call. Successful leaders reverse this: they treat employees as the customers of change and are relentless in getting them to buy the change offering (new tools, processes, policies and structures). They show up daily asking how to serve the people executing the change, act proactively, know the details, and keep looking for ways to make the work faster and easier.
- Change the cockpit. Recalling how Paul Fitts redesigned aircraft cockpits rather than blaming pilots (Introduction), leaders must change employees' working context. That means becoming a passionate designer of change infrastructure: rituals, communications, tools and incentives that create the conditions for the desired behavior, with the human at the center for the whole life of the program.
How to read Part Two
For each phase the chapters recall the key scientific concepts, explain the main activities to expect and describe the tactics used by successful change leaders. Phases differ in length and in the capacity they demand of most executives; a Chief Transformation Officer (CTO) must give far more, at least 80% of their time for the entire program.
| Phase | Main activities | Duration | Executive time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deciding (Ch 8) | Debate why, what and how; reach true agreement on a specific program and its goals | 1-6 months | 20-30%, spiking when big decisions fall |
| Planning (Ch 9) | Set up a Transformation Office; define approach, workstreams and goals; appoint leaders; prepare training, rituals, incentives, announcements | 1-2 months | 20-50% (50% for the biggest roles, 20% minimum for others) |
| Starting (Ch 10) | Launch with announcements and events; build bottom-up plans; prioritize and finalize the full plan; deliver early wins; begin full execution | 4-6 months | 50-70% |
| Persisting (Ch 11) | Execute harder initiatives through the "messy middle"; show sustained progress; measure and respond to emotions; keep rituals; manage context; refill the pipeline | 6 months-2 years | 30-40% |
| Ending (Ch 12) | Decide how to end and what comes next; consolidate knowledge; celebrate achievements | 1-2 months | 20-30% |
Scaling the advice
The advice applies to programs large and small, but for completeness the chapters assume a "capital T" Transformation: complex, multiyear, organization-wide, and changing the company's trajectory fundamentally. Smaller efforts translate the vocabulary.
- Single tool rollout. The program may have one workstream instead of several.
- AI transformation. The Transformation Office may be called an "AI Delivery Office."
- Digital transformation. Workstreams may be called "squads."
Whatever the scale, the guidance rests on the same principles.
"There's no way this will work here" is a natural reaction, but the authors find transformation problems recur across countries, industries and contexts because they are rooted in humans being human. Their advice: follow all the recommendations, which carry the best odds. Where a firm is 100 days from insolvency, heavily regulated or facing activist investors, follow or tweak what you can, name the risk you incur by skipping the rest, and revisit the omission when circumstances allow.
Even with no constraints, leaders will apply the tactics with nuance, fitting their organization's history, culture and mission; the seven principles keep those refinements grounded in the science. Some recommendations will seem too basic, and that is deliberate: experienced leaders routinely neglect basics when things are complex and time is short. The test the authors propose is to ask whether you have done this with 100% consistency across your career; for most the answer is no, and in a complex program consistent basics can decide success or failure. The real power appears when all the recommendations are applied together, consistently.
Read the table as a budget: at the peak, executives give half to 70% of their week to the program for months. Few leadership teams plan for that, and the authors offer little guidance on which business-as-usual work should stop to make room, beyond urging leaders to look for it.
Part Two is therefore written differently from Part One: lists, granular detail and tips from experienced leaders, meant to be read with a practitioner's mindset, annotated and consulted throughout the change. Serial entrepreneur Jesse Itzler supplies the motto: life's big accomplishments come from the little things you do daily.
Deciding to Change
Companies change all the time, but a transformation alters the company's trajectory, so it is not an incremental response to slow market drift; it is a deliberate choice about what the company does and how. The Deciding to Change phase runs from loose executive conversations to a formal, joint decision to embark, and lasts one to six months. Its output is true agreement on the Why, the What and the How, signed by every executive, plus leaders who have faced their own need to change.
How the phase is defined
Deciding to Change is the first of the five phases. It usually begins with unstructured conversations in the executive team, a free-flowing debate of new ideas and old problems. A strategic review or a formal, sometimes rapid, assessment then sizes the opportunity: what is possible and what it would be worth. The phase ends when the executive team formally, officially and jointly decides to embark.
- Duration. As little as one month or as long as six; there are no fixed rules.
- Fast track. Facing major industry disruption, the needed change is more obvious and agreement can come quickly.
- Slow track. From a position of strength, without strong external pressure, or when tackling industry-wide problems that need breakthrough innovation, executives need more convincing and the process lengthens.
Taking the time to reach true agreement avoids the heavy costs of misalignment.
- LSA Global, analyzing 410 organizations, found misaligned companies show about 37% slower revenue growth.
- They also report 42% lower profitability.
- And 94% lower employee engagement.
- The authors' conclusion: misalignment is serious business risk, not merely a strategic or cultural issue.
The start of the phase may be blurry, but the end must be unambiguous, marked by some form of ritual signalling the final decision (Chapter 1).
The human factor
- Change distance. Attitudes to change vary, and executives feel far more positive about it than employees.
- False consensus. People overestimate how much others agree with them.
- Self-interest. People weigh information and decide in ways that maximize personal benefit or protect their self-image.
- Affective forecasting error. People overestimate how unpleasant an experience will be (such as a hard conversation about competing self-interests) and so avoid it.
What should happen in the phase
The question to debate is blunt: "Should we embark on this particular transformation, or not?" Use the step-by-step process of Chapter 1: set clear parameters, provoke an early exchange, hold a quality debate, reach a formal decision, then send a unified message to the small group of people needed in the next phase. Agreement is needed on three elements: the Why, the What and the How.
The purpose of the change (the Why)
The executive team should form a shared view of the transformation's purpose, informed by a wide range of information and perspectives. The driver is usually one or more of the following, and it determines whether the overarching change story is threat, fitness or destiny (Chapter 6).
- A rival's threat. A competitor endangering the business.
- A new regulation. Rules that change the game.
- A new technology. An invention that reshapes the market.
- A new growth market. An emerging opportunity.
- An economic downturn or upturn. Macro conditions shifting.
- Continuing decline against peers. Performance sliding relative to competitors.
- Activist intervention. Pressure from the board, investors or shareholders.
- Unrealized potential. A conviction that the company has not reached its true potential.
The components of the change (the What)
The team needs a shared multiyear view of the most important goals and outcomes, usually expressed as four to eight quantifiable targets. These must include behavioral targets that drive the cultural shifts behind lasting change, not only financial and operational ones (table 8-1).
| Category | Example targets (fill in the blank) |
|---|---|
| Financial | Total shareholder return vs peers up %; EBIT margin to %; operating costs down $; capital costs down $ |
| Operational | Acquire __ new customers; on-time deliveries to %; BCG's long-term growth-potential score up % |
| Behavioral | Enterprise-wide adoption of a new tool to %; new product proposals from individual contributors up %; share of employees reporting high agency to __% |
Later, in the Planning phase, the top-level goals are broken into smaller targets that are clear and relevant to the people who must hit them. In a function-specific transformation (say, Operations), a single company-wide productivity percentage becomes a productivity goal for each station or site. That improves measurement, sharpens incentives for teams and individuals, and raises the odds of a sustainable result.
The science backs this. Reviewing thirty-five years of research, psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham found that short-term goals used alongside long-term goals significantly improve performance, especially on complex tasks. Splitting a big task into smaller ones helps people manage complexity: benchmarks become clearer, effort becomes more focused, and feedback arrives fast, allowing goals to be adjusted.
The manner of the change (the How)
The executive team must settle how it will lead and execute and what behavior it expects of every leader in the program. These agreements build the shared trust and commitment leaders will need; the authors often run multiday off-sites just for this work.
The first step is agreeing how to lead as a team, by creating three distinct assets (detailed in Tactic 4).
- Leadership Principles. Who we are as a leadership team: shared values and guiding beliefs defining its identity and purpose.
- Leadership Team Operating Principles. How we work together: practical agreements and processes for collaborating, communicating and deciding.
- Role-Model Behaviors. How we demonstrate what we expect from everyone: specific, observable actions that model the desired culture and standards.
Then the team decides how to organize resources for execution.
- Talent and capability. An early, open, clear-eyed view of the talent needed, the talent present and how to close gaps. Even the best-designed, highest-agency programs fail without the right people in the right roles. Treat gaps as neutral observations paired with practical problem-solving, not judgments, and expect an enterprise-wide program to need some new hires or outside help.
- The executive team is not exempt. Everyone will be asked to perform at the best of their careers, individually and as a team, and some executives will not be up to it. In the authors' research with about 70 former CEOs, C-suite executives and board chairs, a common regret was not removing underperformers and detractors fast enough, especially during change. Some had held on for fear of disrupting the organization mid-transformation; once they acted, colleagues often asked why they had waited so long.
- Investment. A unified view of how much to spend in money and resources on people, technology and change infrastructure such as a Transformation Office.
- A multiyear view of culture. Treat culture as a sustained strategic investment, not a short-term fix. Management professor Anthony Mento and colleagues found culture change far more likely to succeed when viewed as an investment over time rather than a quick fix or "change du jour."
- Communication. Three audiences need tailored messages.
- Employees. They will know an off-site took place and will wonder what was said, so leave no room for wild speculation: communicate immediately after major decisions, speak with a unified voice from agreed talking points tailored to each employee audience, address their likely questions and concerns directly, and show those concerns are built into execution.
- The board. Plan how to secure its support, and in some cases its sign-off to begin, since the work may need large financial investment.
- Shareholders and investors. Decide what to tell them, focusing on the timing of the change, the financial outcome to expect, and how risk will be managed throughout.
Four tactics for the Deciding phase
Tactic 1: Reflect on your emotions and anticipate your personal challenges
Change is emotional for leaders too, often personally hard and stressful even for veterans, because no two transformations are alike. The obvious reasons: stakes and pressure are high, odds of success are low, and there is a great deal to do. The heavier burden is realizing that you must change your own behavior. Almost every leader discovers they must show up differently.
- Disagree more. Challenge colleagues more often in faster, higher-risk decision-making.
- Know the details. Understand tools and processes deep in the operating model well enough to judge the company-wide effects of changing them.
- Mix more widely. Have more spontaneous interactions with employees across the company, not just in your own area.
- Role-model while learning. Model new behaviors for the whole organization while still building the habits yourself.
Leaders seldom change their companies unless they are willing to change themselves. That is hard: neuroscientists have identified brain structures central to habit, among them the basal ganglia, which help regulate movement, emotion and learning and also encode and express habits, and they do not alter easily. The good news is neuroplasticity: learning a skill, practicing a habit or picking up a language rewires the brain, strengthening connections and making new ones, throughout life. As the change takes shape, the authors recommend three steps.
- Reflect seriously. Use a structured process of reading, writing and consultation with trusted colleagues, mentors and advisers on how you feel about the change for yourself and the company. Play the Change Game from the Introduction to see your natural tendencies. Be honest about whether you are all-in, as you will need to be.
- Assess your capabilities. Anticipate the specific behaviors you will need and ask whether you can practice them; where you see a gap or foresee a personal challenge, work out how to build the capability fast.
- Commit to actions. List the actions you will take to overcome personal challenges and send the list to colleagues for accountability. You might write yourself a letter of personal change goals and display it in your office. Include a plan to measure and review your own progress.
The authors insist on writing, even for non-writers: putting goals on paper makes them tangible and engages memory encoding and external storage. Researchers report goals are 42% more likely to succeed when written down, and making commitments public raises the chance of keeping them.
For the personal change plan they borrow Charles Duhigg's habit loop.
- The cue. A trigger that tells the brain to switch to automatic mode and which habit to run. Start simply: put the desired action somewhere visible, on your desk or wall, so each sighting activates the intention.
- The routine. The physical, mental or emotional action itself; the more consistently repeated, the more automatic it becomes.
- The reward. A payoff that tells the brain the loop is worth remembering, physical (a midday snack) or emotional (recording the success in a diary).
Over time the action becomes reflexive and depends less on active motivation.
Tactic 2: Solicit employees' views
No leader changes a company alone: you need the executive team's agreement and the whole organization's energy, plus the best information, and frontline employees know things you do not. Asking them also gives them an early experience of influence, the first step toward the high-agency workforce of Chapter 2.
Ideally this is routine: whenever you walk the floor or visit a regional office, ask what changes people think are needed. In the Deciding phase, also commission a company-wide survey of current ways of working. This is not an engagement survey probing personal commitment ("do you see yourself here in one, three or five years?") but a "work and culture" survey about how work gets done and how it could become more effective, efficient and enjoyable. If the company is "allergic to surveys," use virtual focus groups to gather the same content. Questions from the authors' own survey:
- In what ways could the leaders do a better job?
- What challenges do you face in getting your work done?
- How willing are you to change?
- What do you need to be more successful in your role?
- What are the unspoken truths in the organization?
- Do you understand how your day-to-day work contributes to the organization's priorities for the next few years?
- Do you understand who gets to make decisions?
- Do you understand how decisions are made?
- Do you and your colleagues hold each other accountable?
- Do you feel a strong sense of belonging?
- Do you receive regular recognition and appreciation for your contributions?
- Do people on your team genuinely care about and support one another?
The aim is to learn quickly whether your own rapid assessment of what must change matches employees' assessment, the intelligence needed to bridge the change distance. If the views align, confidence rises and dissenting executives may shift. If they do not, you are not necessarily wrong, since opinions reflect perspective, but you learn what employees believe they need to succeed, essential input before launch.
The data also feeds a premortem before the formal decision. Premortems use "prospective hindsight": imagine the bad outcome has already happened and ask why. In a transformation, the team supposes the change has failed and lists the likely reasons, then preempts them. If the imagined cause is slow decision-making, agree now to a twice-weekly cadence for new decisions (rather than every week or two) and define precisely who decides what, and when.
Running effective surveys and focus groups
- Hear what is really going on. Employees often hold back because they see no upside or doubt anything will change. Launch with direct messaging from top executives; some of the highest response rates come when an executive opens the survey with a personal video explaining why they want to hear from staff and committing to act.
- Explain how feedback will be used. Executives fear employees feel oversurveyed; probing usually shows they are under-listened to, tired not of surveys but of the lack of action that follows. If past surveys led nowhere, say why this time is different.
- Guarantee anonymity. Remind people responses cannot be traced, for instance by using a third-party administrator. In focus groups the authors start by showing participants the behind-the-scenes analytics proving answers cannot be tied to anyone.
- Go deeper afterward. Run targeted focus groups, in person or virtual, to understand the results (or more focus groups if that was the original method). Many AI tools now parse such data in detail, and building your own interpretation system is increasingly easy.
A frontline employee described why this matters: fear of the unknown breeds anger, frustration or sadness, and the cure is communicating again and again from start to finish. Their company constantly asks for feedback through one-on-ones, team meetings and anonymous surveys; they are brutally honest, many suggestions have been implemented, and that keeps them motivated to make things better for everyone.
Tactic 3: Define specific behavioral changes for the whole organization
The financial imperative dominates most debates, and operational goals such as new customers or on-time delivery usually follow. Leaders must also set organizational behavioral goals. The authors' examples:
- Trust. Deepen trust between teams through greater empathy, openness and the presumption of positive intent.
- Debate. Improve its quality through direct communication, active listening and encouraging quieter voices.
- Accountability. Strengthen it by locking arms, committing to decisions and owning outcomes.
- Enterprise mindset. Emphasize what is right for the whole company rather than individual business areas.
- Constructive conflict. Address tensions in an open, timely and productive way.
- Learning. Increase curiosity, reflection, humility and adaptability in team interactions.
Select two or three high-priority behavioral goals, quantify them and put them on the short list of major transformation goals (for example, raising new product proposals from individual contributors by a set percentage). When the change starts (Chapter 10), launch initiatives explicitly designed to deliver these behaviors inside a dedicated Culture and Change workstream, held to the same standards, resourcing and support as any other initiative.
Of the three goal types, behavioral goals are the most neglected, often because leaders assume they cannot be stated or measured. The authors disagree: regular employee polling on observed behaviors tracks improvement over time just as financial indicators do, and performance reviews and 360-degree feedback help monitor progress.
Setting behavioral goals does two jobs.
- It makes the transformation real. It shows what must change and how, and above all how leaders will act differently too, which tells people this program differs from past ones: it is not only about numbers, and not only about employees changing.
- It speaks employees' language. Promising a "10% revenue uplift" rarely moves anyone; promising to "speed up decision-making" connects directly to how people work and improves their daily lives.
Aetna's Katerina Guerraz (Chapter 7) describes the effect of new norms: people had not felt safe raising real problems, so leaders created a space where bad news could reach the executive team without blame; now staff email her or stop her in the corridor to flag issues, and the culture has moved "from fear to problem-solving."
Tactic 4: Agree how the leadership team will lead
Strong leadership teams agree on why and what, and also on how they will work together. The three assets sound alike but do different jobs. They matter because the real benefits of change come from cross-functional efforts, the things no function can do alone, so executives will collaborate, debate and compromise far more than in business as usual and need shared commitments to do it.
| Asset | Defines | Example commitments |
|---|---|---|
| Leadership Principles | Who we are: shared values and beliefs | Fast, informed decision-making to keep momentum; one team, putting the shared enterprise ahead of the parts we each lead; a growth mindset that learns from successes and failures (after Carol Dweck) |
| Operating Norms | How we work together | A standard decision template recording owners and timelines for key decisions; weekly cross-functional meetings to agree priorities and resolve disagreements; structured after-action reviews when major initiatives finish |
| Role-Model Behaviors | How we show it: observable actions | Decide in the meeting rather than deferring needlessly; seek diverse input, then support decisions unreservedly; when pilots fail, ask "What did we learn?" and apply it |
Some leaders will struggle to adopt the new behaviors, and the hard decision may be to remove them. Telecoms executive Ana White says that sometimes you must simply move someone along who is not living the culture, especially a leader causing turmoil, and she has seen that make a huge difference.
The transformation leader should document the Why, the What and the How (Chapter 1's "formal verdict"), then ask every executive to review, commit and sign at the bottom, like a bank check. Give each a framed copy for their office as a constant reminder of their commitment to the goals and to the agreed Leadership Principles, Operating Norms and Role-Model Behaviors. Consider making the signed page the first slide of every executive meeting, or printing copies for conference rooms and desks.
When the whole team will not truly agree
Full agreement on every aspect is rare, especially this early. Strive for true agreement on the Why, the What and the How, since it is the foundation, but be ready to start without it. Then use one of Chapter 1's four options.
- Disagree again. Try once more, drawing on your political capital and accumulated trust.
- Subtract or defer. Remove the contested parts or postpone them, and formally begin what you do agree on.
- Offer an exit. Give those who truly disagree an attractive way out.
- Win them over. Proceed with a clear plan to bring dissenters round in the following weeks and months.
Leadership teams evolve during transformations in two ways: some executives are asked to leave because they do not fit a high-change environment, and others choose to leave, even after expressing true agreement at the start. Each departure is an opportunity to recommit to true agreement and refocus on the work ahead.
The LSA Global figures come from a consultancy's proprietary data, and the "42% more likely" claim for written goals traces to a small, unpublished study (usually credited to Gail Matthews at Dominican University). Both point the right way but are thinner evidence than the precise percentages suggest. Table 8-1 in the source also lists the EBIT margin target twice, a minor editing slip.
Takeaways
- The rationale. Change is a choice: to alter the trajectory of a company or business area fundamentally, through one change or many, you must decide to change.
- The time frame. Agreeing on the Why, the What and the How takes one to six months, depending on circumstances.
- The four tactics. Reflect on your emotions and anticipate personal challenges; solicit employees' views; define specific behavioral changes for the whole organization; agree how the leadership team will lead.
Planning for Change
Fresh from agreement, executives want to launch at once and see results. The authors insist on a one-to-two-month planning phase first: build the change infrastructure, write the story, design rituals, incentives and emotion tracking, and predict momentum. Sustained change at scale calls for slow, deliberate preparation: go slow to go fast.
Why plan before launching
Leaders who have just agreed to transform feel motivated and optimistic and find it hard to commit to a planning pause. But sustained change at scale is extremely hard, and focused planning has four benefits.
- Beat the planning fallacy. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky named the planning fallacy: people confidently believe their project will run to plan even though most similar projects run late. Psychologist Roger Buehler and colleagues later showed that people favor imagined best-case scenarios. Time to stress-test the plan counters both.
- Design the employee experience. Hundreds or thousands of employees will do the hard work, so time spent putting yourself in their shoes, refining what they will hear about the Why, What and How, and shaping how they will experience the first months, is time well spent.
- Move faster later. A detailed, documented plan lets you deliver compelling early wins quickly after launch, which proves the change's value; as Chapter 1 put it, sometimes you must go slow to go fast.
- Measure against a baseline. When execution gets busy, the plan written now becomes the fact base for judging whether you are on track on the elements that matter most.
How the phase is defined
In Planning for Change you review everything the transformation must accomplish, establish the change infrastructure (organizational structure, tools, processes), create the communications strategy (including stories and symbols) and conduct prelaunch preparations with change leaders. It ends when you are ready to launch, and should take one to two months. That can feel long under pressure, but robust, intentional design meaningfully raises the odds of success.
- Decision fatigue. People decide more easily when they have fewer decisions to make, for example by following fixed rituals instead of deciding each time when to meet.
- Information recall. People recall stories better than explanations, especially when supported by symbols (dual coding theory).
- Planning fallacy. People are overconfident about the short term and underestimate what consistent, disciplined effort achieves over the long term.
- Emotional blind spots. Intuition will not reveal how the organization feels, because we assume others feel as we do (emotional egocentricity bias, social projection) and remember past challenges as rosier than they were (rosy retrospection).
What should happen in the phase
Set up a steering committee
The steering committee, the whole executive team or a subset depending on its size, oversees the building of the transformation approach and plan. Its first task is appointing the transformation's leader, usually the Chief Transformation Officer (CTO), who will be the face of the change. The CTO should be a top performer, from inside or outside, who can formally sit on the executive team, and must combine:
- Persistence over long time horizons.
- CEO-level problem-solving capability.
- Coaching skills for both overperformers and underperformers.
- Balanced emotional intelligence.
- Strong financial acumen.
- A reputation as a "fair dealer."
The CTO sets the approach and structure, orchestrates change across the company and models the new behaviors. They are not responsible for delivering the work but are accountable for the outcome of the whole transformation.
The committee also appoints full-time staff in a central office that settles the specifics of the approach and oversees execution, usually the Transformation Office, though a focused program might name it differently (an AI Delivery Office for a new AI platform). It typically needs HR, Finance, Communications and transformation-management capability. Prefer people with credibility in their own area and influence across the organization; whom you choose signals how committed you are.
Typical PMO. Receives backward-looking, high-level reports from project teams and organizes them for senior leaders.
Activist Transformation Office. Forward-looking and engaged in each workstream's detail: sets clear rituals and high planning standards, reviews every initiative weekly, scans planned milestones months ahead for risk, works with sponsors, leaders and owners to manage or revise milestones that will slip, challenges business cases and plans, and keeps asking "What can be done today?" to accelerate value.
The authors call the good version an Activist Transformation Office: proactive, problem-solving, and using its outside perspective to help everyone on the change team reach their full potential.
Determine the hierarchy
Be clear and consistent about how big pieces of work break into smaller ones. Many companies keep the structure too high-level, which weakens executional certainty and limits experiences of agency. The authors recommend a three- or four-level hierarchy: workstreams, initiatives, projects (if required) and milestones.
Breaking the program into small pieces matters for three reasons.
- Executability. Each piece becomes concrete and manageable.
- Agency. Assigning initiatives and projects lets more people own part of the change.
- Momentum. It creates a feeling of progress early, long before the biggest financial impacts reach the bottom line, echoing Locke and Latham's finding on short-term goals within long-term ones (Chapter 8). Larger initiatives can be split again into projects.
Define and prepare the workstreams
Design workstreams around the behavior you want to drive. Two archetypes exist.
- Functional. Aligned with business areas such as Operations, Supply Chain, Technology, Finance.
- Strategic. Built around enterprise priorities that touch many areas, such as Personalization or Customer Excellence. Executives like these because they mirror strategic priorities, but they do not always deliver, since people must work outside their normal reporting lines.
The authors usually recommend both at once in a matrix: workstreams must cooperate on shared outcomes, especially enterprise priorities, while business-as-usual reporting lines support buy-in and accountability. They always add a Culture and Change workstream carrying the initiatives that deliver the agreed behavioral goals, equal in status to all others. Then prepare each workstream.
- Select Workstream Sponsors. The most senior leaders, C-suite or one layer down depending on size, used to owning a whole business area and deciding within it; they are responsible for the workstream's outcomes.
- Select Workstream Leaders. They oversee every initiative and project in the workstream, make sure owners have what they need, and are accountable for delivering the goals through it, so their influence on performance is large. The full steering committee approves them. They need credibility in their area and the workstream's subject, plus influence across the firm. Define their capacity up front: the authors strongly recommend 100% and advise never below 50%.
- Onboard the Workstream Leaders. Train them for what the next phase demands.
- Communicate goals and measures. Tailor each workstream's goals and measurement criteria for the people who must understand them, such as partners from HR and Finance.
- Agree interlocking goals. Break the enterprise goals from the Deciding phase into goals for each workstream and sometimes each initiative, designed so workstreams must cooperate: an Operations cost-reduction target should overlap with part of Procurement's, so neither can hit its number alone.
Define and prepare the major initiatives
Using the best information so far, including the Deciding-phase assessments, allocate known initiatives to the workstreams; more will come in the next phase.
- Choose owners for the biggest ones. Name Initiative Owners for the most important, strategic, high-profile initiatives now; owners of less impactful ones can be appointed in the Starting phase as workstreams begin meeting.
- Prepare templates. Create templates for initiative and project charters, business cases and implementation plans that every owner must complete (detailed in Chapter 10).
Develop infrastructure and governance
- Steering committee role. Define it and the rituals through which it decides.
- Meeting rituals. Design workstream and initiative meetings using the five HIIDE triggers from Chapter 5: help, information, influence, duty and enjoyment.
- Stage-gates. Set the stage-gate methodology for initiatives and projects, with rules for each gate.
- Baselines. Define the financial, operational and behavioral baselines against which every initiative and project will be measured.
- Training. Plan onboarding and training for all workstream, initiative and project team members (delivered in the Starting phase).
- Tracking. Set up the platform and reporting for tracking workstreams and initiatives.
- Rewards. Design the system of incentives, rewards and recognition.
Communicate and kick off
Planning includes planning how to tell the company. Draft and sign off company-wide announcements: presentations, statements for each audience (board, shareholders, employees, other stakeholders), press releases and multichannel distribution (website, social media). Plan a series of momentous kickoff events for senior leaders, each workstream's participants and all other employees; they should be painstakingly designed and extremely memorable, and preparing them takes real time. In parallel, build the momentum plan of Chapter 7.
Six tactics for the Planning phase
Tactic 1: Design your rituals
The real work of change happens in ritualized meetings, and four types are needed.
- Weekly steering committee for the executive team.
- Weekly Leader-Sponsor connect between each Workstream Leader and their Sponsor (almost always an executive).
- Weekly workstream meeting, the focal point of each workstream, with the Sponsor, CTO, Workstream Leader, all Initiative and Project Owners, the Transformation Office and other relevant people.
- Monthly town hall for all employees.
Every meeting needs a fixed agenda, the same steps each time, to create predictability and support the people doing the hard work.
| Agenda item (Table 9-1) | Owner | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Wins since last week | Workstream Leader | 5 min |
| Updates and actions since last week | Workstream Leader | 5 min |
| Deep dive: Initiative 4.2 (example) | Initiative Owner | 15 min |
| Deep dive: Initiative 4.7 (example) | Initiative Owner | 15 min |
| Late and upcoming milestones | Workstream Leader | 15 min |
| Recap of decisions and actions | Workstream Leader | 5 min |
- Open positively. A thank-you or recognition of wins.
- Check last time's actions. Confirm they were completed.
- Review status. Progress across the workstream, down to milestones in each initiative's implementation plan.
- Go deep where help is needed. Deeper conversation on specific challenges team members cannot resolve alone.
- Look ahead. Ask what is coming next, how to prepare, and which initiatives or projects could be accelerated by doing things differently.
- Recap. Review the decisions and actions taken.
- Use the peak-end rule. Spend the final moments making the most important information memorable: where to keep focus, which successes to reinforce, where more intensity is needed.
These meetings are not adjacent to the transformation; they are the transformation: where options are weighed, decisions made and colleagues held to commitments. A CTO may have twenty ritualized meetings a week; a Workstream Sponsor or other executive perhaps four or five. Do not postpone designing them until after launch. Employees expect a clear view of how the program will run, and that level of detail early signals this time is different. Energy executive Al Muthir Al Kharusi notes that people resist change, so they must be communicated with consistently and regularly to understand and absorb it. Besides, after kickoff you will be far too busy: dozens or hundreds of people will want your time, and your attention must go to early wins.
Tactic 2: Write the change story and teach every executive to tell it
Employees need an overarching change story about the why. The best stories capture attention, facilitate recall and activate motivation and behavior (Chapter 6).
- Pick the type. Decide whether it is a threat, fitness or destiny story.
- Make it memorable. Find a distinctive metaphor, visual or analogy and a catchy tagline or motto; reinforce it with symbolic objects, actions and events.
- Speak to intrinsic motivators. Do not dwell on the financial imperative; talk to employees as you would to customers, about autonomy (doing things our own way), mastery (growing confidence and competence) and purpose (work that is meaningful and has real impact).
BCG executive Sharon Marcil frames it as hands, head and heart. Old-style change management dealt with the hands: collating timelines, workbooks and templates to manage the process. Companies that achieve fundamental change also win the head and heart by engaging employees in four questions: why are we changing, what is in it for you, what will it do for you and your family, and what will it do for society. When all three work together, a company has truly nailed its transformation.
Two employees step into an elevator after the kickoff, and one asks the other why they think the company is doing all this. If you cannot say in one sentence what you want the second to answer, you have not found your story yet.
Then find media that connect emotionally (posters, images, videos) for use at launch (Chapter 10), and teach every executive to tell the story their own way.
- Fix the frame. Give executives a clear framework of accurate messages from which they may not deviate.
- Personalize. Encourage each to explain why the change matters to them and why they are personally committed, which makes the story authentic and more convincing.
- Rehearse. In executive meetings, have each leader practice their personal change story while others give honest, fair feedback that makes it more persuasive.
BCG alumnus Martin Danoesastro used this in a large banking transformation. Top leaders, who had to present to their own teams, got a fully agreed core story; they could make minor adjustments only within the narrative framework, so whoever told it, the message was at once corporate and personal. Delivery need not be formal: some of the most effective tellings happen in corridors and over lunch, where they feel sincere. Early on, weave the story into every conversation with peers and employees.
Tactic 3: Set up an incentives program with financial rewards
A financial rewards scheme shows employees you are serious and that they can personally benefit; the implied message is that the company cares enough to invest real cash to help them prioritize the change. The authors cite evidence that introducing an incentives program yields an average 22% performance improvement, more when rewards are long-term. Research also shows that satisfaction with rewards strengthens feelings of competence, autonomy and relatedness, universal needs that drive intrinsic motivation, affective commitment and job satisfaction across industries and cultures. Money also works as a symbol (Chapter 6).
- Replace or add on top. Replacing existing schemes reuses current funding and is cheaper; adding on top sends better cultural signals and feels like a fair exchange for Initiative Owners doing harder change work on top of their day jobs.
- Who is included. Usually executives, Workstream Leaders, and Initiative and Project Owners; company-wide incentives are rarer than the authors would like but recommended, because they show the whole company is involved rather than a small group running a "side project."
- Workstream Leaders. Rewarded mainly for completing the initiatives and projects in their workstream and achieving specific value, paid at the same time as Initiative Owners and as close to completion as possible (completion usually means stage-gate 4, Chapter 10), plus a portion tied to the overall program goals used for executives, to encourage cooperation. Payments mostly annual, with some immediate payments for large, high-value initiatives.
- Initiative and Project Owners. Rewarded for completing initiatives or hitting specific milestones, so tangible change brings a fast, material reward: faster change to the agreed quality bar means faster payment. Scale rewards to the value of the work so owners gravitate to the highest-value initiatives; more frequent payments keep the scheme in mind and temporarily boost motivation and reciprocity.
- All other employees (optional). Rewarded when the program hits specific milestones or sustains set performance levels aligned with the long-term goals; group schemes raise job satisfaction and emotional commitment. Cash lifts productivity and focus now, while employee share ownership is linked to longer retention and higher motivation.
- Executives (designed last). Rewarded for the program goals agreed in the Deciding phase (strategic, financial, operational and behavioral, with specific metrics), with identical incentives for every executive regardless of which workstream they sponsor, to build true cooperation. The largest studies find group incentives as good as or better than individual ones, with higher productivity and satisfaction. Usually paid annually.
- Spot rewards. Surprise rewards for Workstream Leaders, owners and any employee who contributes significantly or changes behavior. Recognizing top performers also lifts the future effort of those not recognized. Reward-points systems tied to third-party marketplaces work well, and simple thank-you messages can be as effective as money.
Announce the program in the relevant kickoff events and keep highlighting payments as they are made.
Tactic 4: Set up a mechanism for measuring employees' emotions
Some moments will inevitably trigger anxiety, stress and resistance, which hurt people's ability to take up change (Chapter 4). Understanding emotions lets leaders decide when to speed up or slow down, reallocate responsibilities and remove unnecessary work to free capacity. However much of a "people person" you are, do not rely on gut instinct; build a formal, rigorous, regular mechanism now. Its components:
- Format. An anonymous pulse survey taking about one minute.
- Questions. On employees' emotions, confidence and capacity (the standard list is in Chapter 4).
- Frequency. Every one to two weeks, to track the ups and downs.
- Tool. An app or web form to capture and collate responses.
- Review process. A consistent group of leaders meets after every survey to review results, discuss the most salient emotions and decide on fast, visible, proactive actions.
- Communication process. Share highlights with the organization along with the actions being taken.
Design it now, while you have bandwidth, but do not switch it on until at least 100 days after launch, once bottom-up planning in the Starting phase is done. Early sentiment is extremely noisy, too inconsistent a signal to guide structured analysis and targeted action.
Tactic 5: Predict momentum
Keep thinking a move or two ahead. The Deciding phase's premortem imagined the program failing; now form a continually updated view of when momentum will run high and low, in effect a momentum map. By the start of the next phase you should know which initiatives get extra resources for early wins and which to save for periods of momentum loss. Focus above all on predicting loss by marking in the calendar:
- When early wins will run out.
- When the difficult initiatives, with the greatest support needs, will begin.
- When a major operating shift lands, caused by something you introduce: a new tool, process, policy or organizational structure, or new customers.
Against those dates, schedule the Chapter 7 interventions: show belief, promote wins (especially behavioral wins), introduce new challenges and engineer fresh starts.
Tactic 6: Renew your vows
Never take the executive team's agreement for granted, especially with so much new information from planning. Just as they formally, officially and jointly agreed to embark, they must formally agree to the operational decisions made in this phase. False alignment (Chapter 1) leads to one of three pitfalls: paralysis (much talk, no action), hyperactivity (much activity, no progress) or tunnel vision (progress on the wrong things). Prepare a document listing every important decision since the original agreement; better still, have every executive sign it, then publish it. Renew your vows before you go public.
Hany Fam, founder and CEO of Markaaz, which he calls a category-defining global network business, kept the company in stealth mode far longer than most during its growth transformation, at real sacrifice, pain and expense. Saying "not yet, not ready yet," he argues, takes more courage than rushing. Stealth gave three things: time to prepare everyone for the marathon, not just the sprint; the chance for everyone to speak with authority about what they were building; and accumulated proof points (successes, failures, lessons) so that at launch nobody was asked to take a leap of faith. Planning for optionality rather than a linear pass/fail path, he says, is what makes acceleration possible afterwards.
Pro tip: practice your new norms now
The circle has grown beyond the Deciding phase (Transformation Office, Workstream Leaders, some Initiative Owners) but is still tiny relative to the organization. Use it as a safe place to experiment with the agreed Leadership Principles, Operating Norms and Role-Model Behaviors and to ask for feedback. Some behaviors will feel awkward; confront that now, before larger audiences. If a norm says every meeting opens with a positive moment, start immediately, and if nobody does it, do it yourself. If a role-model behavior is to appreciate unseen contributions, look for chances to praise publicly. Spending the cognitive effort now builds habits that pay off once execution begins.
If you are pressed to rush
Pressure to shorten planning is common: the board wants to launch at the start of the fiscal or calendar year, there is an investor meeting where a positive story would help, or performance is so dire the program cannot wait. Then plan only the essentials.
- Goals and measures. The specific goals and measurement criteria.
- People. Workstream Leaders and Initiative Owners.
- The change story.
- Key rituals. The ritualized meetings most needed to deliver early wins.
- Rewards. The system of rewards and recognition for your customers of change.
That keeps you about two weeks ahead of day-to-day delivery, which in the authors' experience is just enough to keep working the to-do list while starting change. Alternatively, set up a ring-fenced, properly resourced team to launch a few initiatives while the main program is planned, and tell the rest of the company what it is doing, or speculation will hurt the program.
The apparatus here (four meeting types, stage-gates, five incentive tiers, a CTO with twenty weekly meetings) is a consulting-scale model; mid-sized firms will need to prune. The 22% incentive figure is an average from workplace incentive studies, not a measured effect on transformations, and the chapter's case for holding the emotion survey back for 100 days rests on the authors' experience rather than cited evidence.
Takeaways
- The rationale. Planning lets groups move faster and more efficiently, creates certainty about what lies ahead, prevents backsliding into old habits, and anticipates challenges and new opportunities.
- The time frame. One to two months, depending on circumstances.
- The six tactics. Design your rituals; write the change story and teach every executive to tell it; set up an incentives program with financial rewards; set up a mechanism for measuring emotions; predict momentum; renew your vows.
Starting Change
After months, perhaps most of a year, held by a small circle, the transformation now goes to hundreds or thousands of customers of change, and it will define the leader's time at the company one way or another. Starting Change runs four to six months in three parts: kickoff, one hundred days of bottom-up planning alongside early wins, and early execution. Start with a bang, then hand the detailed planning to employees, because the plan only becomes theirs when they help build it.
How the phase is defined
The phase has three parts, which together take roughly four to six months.
- Kickoff. Start with a bang: carefully orchestrated announcements and events for everyone in the organization.
- Bottom-up planning and early wins. For about one hundred days, two activities run side by side. Workstream Leaders, Initiative Owners and Project Owners draw up detailed bottom-up plans to deliver the top-down goals; this is more planning, but now employees are involved, bringing specialist expertise and gaining the agency they will need (the IKEA effect). At the same time, leaders work with them to fully execute a first tranche of early wins, showing tangible impact from the outset.
- Early execution. The organization settles into the planned rhythms and rituals and moves the remaining initiatives through their implementation plans.
- Agency. People who help design change act with higher agency in execution (the IKEA effect); experiences of decision-making, influence and representation raise commitment.
- Parkinson's law. Work expands to fill the time available, so long deadlines invite procrastination.
- Remove take up obstacles. New behaviors are adopted by closing gaps in knowledge, skills or permission, removing time or resource constraints, and shifting perceptions positively.
- Endowed progress effect. Employees who see early wins are more likely to generate their own.
Part 1: Kickoff announcements and events
All announcements and events should share a common set of core features.
- Tell the change story designed in the Planning phase.
- State the goals clearly. The financial, operational and behavioral goals, with specifics for every workstream and any important strategic initiatives already defined.
- Explain what is in it for employees. Recalling "Motivation" in the COM-B framework (Chapter 3), appeal to what actually motivates people: personal achievement (promotions, better job titles, the chance to work on exclusive projects), participation in teams (rewarding relationships with colleagues) and community action (improving the lives of local people).
- Express leaders' personal commitment.
- Show how executives will change the way they themselves work.
- Set out expectations for everyone involved.
Timing matters. The fresh start effect (Chapter 7) shows that people are significantly more likely to pursue goals, such as exercising, right after temporal landmarks: Mondays, the start of a month or year, holidays, or company milestones such as the founding anniversary. One study found gym attendance 33% higher at the start of the week. Launching at the right moment improves early engagement and long-term momentum.
First impressions last. A strong start boosts commitment and take up among the most proactive early adopters and nudges doubters to suspend skepticism while momentum builds. Research shows that first judgments of people form remarkably quickly, within the first one or two encounters.
Part 2: Bottom-up planning and early wins
After kickoff, leaders do two things at once: get Workstream Leaders and Initiative and Project Owners to build bottom-up plans for the top-down goals set in the Deciding phase, and execute some early wins to completion.
Why bottom-up planning is worth the time
It may seem the Planning phase was planning enough, but this stage gives customers of change real agency and harnesses the IKEA effect, while producing plans detailed enough to execute with certainty. All three kinds of agency experience are in play.
- Decision-making. Initiative Owners, Project Owners and team members choose KPIs, detailed cost-benefit trade-offs and implementation timelines within the parameters leaders have set.
- Influence. Advisers around each owner shape the design. For a procurement initiative to cut office-supply costs, the owner typically recruits part-time advisers from every department to decide which products to keep, reduce or drop.
- Representation. The advisers' peers know someone is in their corner advocating for their needs, though they are not directly involved.
Bottom-up planning also gives everyone granular clarity about what must be done, defeating the mathematics of misalignment from the Introduction. Skipping it repeats the familiar trap of treating yourself as the customer of change, and employees notice. One former frontline worker said there was no consultation period and staff were thrown into the deep end without training. Things improved only after she complained: leaders got serious and began asking for specific feedback, and once workers' voices were heard, the workforce felt more positive. Had she been involved earlier, the authors argue, much distress and confusion could have been avoided.
Bottom-up planning actions
- Commence the rituals. Start the ritualized meetings designed in the Planning phase.
- Run ideation sessions for each workstream. Review the initiatives already identified (how well they will hit the workstream's targets, how best to break them into projects, what execution will take); ideate new initiatives and projects; then assign every initiative and project, old and new, to a specific person who builds its plan.
- Help owners with the detail. Work through value, cost and implementation, including interdependencies with other teams, individuals and vendors. Challenge plans constructively to accelerate them or improve outcomes, run regular sense-checks for best-case bias (Buehler, Chapter 9), and ensure owners follow the five take up steps.
- Use stage-gates. Steer every initiative and project through the three planning gates, at increasing levels of detail.
- Identify and execute early wins. With executives, leaders and owners, across the four win types of Chapter 7.
- Prioritize. Near the end of the hundred days, review everything collectively against resource and capital limits.
The stage-gates
| Gate | Deliverable | What it contains |
|---|---|---|
| Stage-gate 1 | Charter | Describes the initiative, the changes to be made and who owns it |
| Stage-gate 2 | Business case | Cost-benefit analysis of financial, operational and behavioral improvements, plus the cost and effort to deliver and sustain them |
| Stage-gate 3 | Implementation plan | Detailed roadmap with milestones every two to three weeks, each with named milestone owners |
| Stage-gate 4 | Implementation complete | All work done; value begins to appear |
| Stage-gate 5 | Benefits realized | Value confirmed in the P&L or named KPIs |
Early wins
Work with executives, Workstream Leaders and Initiative Owners to find and execute wins that prove the program delivers, across the cultural, leadership, financial and strategic categories. Some will have been spotted in the Planning phase; others surface organically in bottom-up conversations. Early wins must meet three conditions.
- Executed, not just started. They must be completed within the hundred days, reaching stage-gate 4, so value begins showing in the P&L or KPIs.
- Meaningful. They should carry emotional or cultural significance, showing powerfully that real change is happening.
- Spread out. They should come from multiple workstreams, not one.
Prioritizing the pipeline
Owners asked to maximize benefits will, collectively, ask for more resources and capital than exist. That is good news, the sign of a true pipeline of opportunity, but it forces choices. Near the end of the hundred days, executives review all initiatives together. Some proceed as designed; others need trade-offs for the strategic goals (if year-one cost reduction matters most, a large systems implementation may wait until year two).
Initiatives not taken forward are paused, not canceled, so they can return in a later stage. Immediately after the decision, appreciate the work that went into the plan, acknowledge the disappointment some will feel, and give people a chance to reflect on their personal growth. Vulnerability researcher Brené Brown suggests a script along these lines: start by saying how grateful you are for important work that you counted on them to do well and that they delivered; explain that, because of something like a supply-chain problem or a shift in strategic priority, the team is being asked to change direction; and take a moment to acknowledge the cognitive and emotional energy it takes to walk away from good work and start anew, then check in on how they feel.
Portfolio disciplines
- Keep deadlines short. Parkinson's law says work expands to fill the time allowed. In the authors' experience, more than a few weeks on any component of a bottom-up plan does not improve it, hence the 100-day cap; shorter, externally imposed deadlines raise expectations and are linked to fewer delays and better performance.
- Avoid the "Small Potatoes" trap. With hundreds or thousands of people planning hundreds of initiatives, the distributed approach creates agency but carries risk. Check that every financial, operational and behavioral goal is fully covered by the initiatives together; many productive initiatives can still be too small to meet the goals.
- No double counting. Similar initiatives must not claim benefits against the same baseline.
- Stagger milestones. A major reorganization should not land the same week as a major product launch. The same applies to departments and people: a sales team given a new pay scheme and ordering system at once will not give either due attention, and a key person such as the head of Learning and Development should not carry several large milestones at once without a specific resourcing plan.
- Know the critical path. Identify milestones whose miss would put large projected value at risk, cause major disruption for customers or employees, or have downstream effects on many other initiatives. Manage the details without losing the big picture.
By day 100 you should have a detailed, customized road map: every initiative and project with a written charter, business case and implementation plan, targets and dates committed by named owners and signed off by accountable executives. That lets you manage proactively through leading indicators, known critical-path milestones and clear roles.
Leaders frustrated by long lists ask to focus only on the two or three biggest initiatives. Picture filling a jar: big rocks take most of the volume, but only pebbles and sand make it full. Small initiatives make indispensable contributions, raise agency across the organization, and improve the sustainability of outcomes and capabilities; as many people contribute their sand, shared ownership keeps growing.
Part 3: Early execution
Early execution opens with another round of events, as at kickoff, first for senior leaders, then for all employees. Repeat the change story, show how the early wins fit it, then look ahead: share the bottom-up plan and demonstrate that the planned initiatives will collectively meet the financial, operational and behavioral goals. Workstream Sponsors and Leaders explain in detail how they will meet their workstream goals. As always, lead with culture and behavior, not dollars.
Then comes two to three months of intensive work on the plan through the weekly rituals. Many people will be excited to see the whole plan laid out; the job is to turn excitement into progress.
- Expect early stumbles. Some initiatives will slip at once because their teams underestimated the intensity of the work. The planning fallacy makes us underrate obstacles and overrate speed, so predictable stumbles feel like major setbacks.
- Respect slow compounding. The brain struggles to grasp exponential growth, so we undervalue what consistent effort over a long period can achieve. Tackle both biases now and throughout.
- Push the laggards. Where progress is slow, ask what could be done differently to move faster.
- Raise up the fast movers. Some areas will outrun the plan, led by people who have waited years to make a difference; recognize and celebrate them, because this sets the tone for the whole transformation.
One final task in this part: switch on emotion measurement. The noise of the hundred days has settled, so feedback is now meaningful, and leaders can act to help people with complex emotions, build their confidence and provide resources for capacity constraints.
Five tactics for the Starting phase
Tactic 1: Hold big, memorable, emotional kickoffs
Kickoffs are moments that truly matter: an idea held by a few senior people goes to hundreds or thousands. It must be clear, emotional and memorable; this is the time for fanfare.
The senior leaders' off-site. Hold a two- or three-day off-site for roughly 100 to 150 people: all executives, the Transformation Office, Workstream Leaders, key Initiative Owners and most other direct reports of the executive team (Project Owners are usually not yet known).
- Inspire. Show the true agreement the executive team has reached and the scale of investment and commitment.
- Explain through two formats. Formal presentations on the Why, What and How, plus informal "gallery walks", where everyone reviews large printouts of analysis and research on the walls and posts comments on sticky notes, so leaders feel they are shaping the program.
- Dwell on the why. Spend at least a full hour on it and return to it constantly. Banking executive Ira Robbins says people need not know exactly how the vision gets made, but they must know why it makes sense: for the client, the shareholder, the community and each associate, and the last two matter most for connecting with people.
- Use the change story and test whether it actually motivates and mobilizes these leaders.
Questions to ask these first customers of change:
- How do you feel about the planned change program?
- What are you worried about?
- What are you excited about?
- What do you think you need to be successful?
- How are you going to commit to change?
The gathering communicates passion, purpose and potential for individuals as well as facts, and it is itself symbolic: the whole executive team giving up half a week speaks volumes.
Leaders at one company asked each senior leader to write on a cardboard brick the one big thing that would stop them making the desired change. They built a giant wall from the bricks, and at the end of the meeting everyone was invited to charge through it, bringing it down along with the obstacles. Hokey, perhaps, but messages received through words and symbols together are better understood, remembered and acted on (Chapter 6).
The company-wide kickoff. Then jointly devise a spectacular multihour town hall for the whole company.
- ING. The financial services firm invited every employee to a famous sporting arena and staged a photo of everyone jumping at the same moment, signalling liftoff for the new organization.
- "Reaching beyond." Another company themed its launch on space: a cavernous room with stars on the ceiling, astronaut posters and a former astronaut speaking on the courage and collaboration needed to boldly go where no one has gone before.
Cover the same Why, What and How in less detail, focusing on what it means for employees rather than leaders, address all motivators (not just the financial case), and spell out how people can participate. Mark the occasion with symbolic objects: unusual gifts can be valued more than money or public recognition. In one of the authors' experiments, participants offered small cash prizes, gift items or public recognition for completing a survey most often chose bucket hats.
Tactic 2: Select Initiative Owners to maximize agency
Every employee should feel connected to the program: give some employees decision-making, many influence and all others representation (Chapter 2). Choosing Initiative (and Project) Owners can make or break the transformation, so do it well.
- Determination. The persistence to deliver their initiatives.
- Adaptability. The flexibility to change how they work.
- Relationships. Trust with the employees involved, and the ability to listen and persuade.
- Expertise. Knowledge of the domains the change requires.
- Stake. They are personally affected by the initiative's success or failure.
- Selection process. Some owners matter more because their initiatives deliver the lion's share of value and set up future success, often critical new products, processes and organizational structures. The CEO commonly hand-selects these owners with Workstream Sponsors and Leaders; for other initiatives, Sponsors and Leaders decide themselves. The same applies to Project Owners where they exist.
- Role definition. Owners must deliver outcomes and also run a well-organized, transparent process as taught in onboarding and role-model key behaviors, including applying Chapter 2 themselves by involving affected employees, representing them and letting them influence design choices.
- Capacity. Owners need time to exercise their decision rights: usually 25% to 50% of their time (Project Owners may need less), and for the largest, highest-stakes initiatives consider 100%, freeing them from their day jobs. It is hard, so challenge yourself and your teams to find run-the-business activities to pause or stop, or someone ready to step into their role.
Tactic 3: Teach employees the rituals, and don't give an inch
The system of ritualized meetings must now be taught to Workstream Leaders, Initiative Owners and Project Owners, along with how to lift these rituals above business-as-usual meetings. That requires a formal training program, including some in-person training. Following adult-learning best practice, build e-learning modules led by the company's own transformation leaders, rolled out over time, covering at least:
- The Why, the What and the How of the transformation.
- The structure of the transformation.
- Key leaders in the transformation.
- Methodology and approach, including requirements at each stage-gate.
- Attendees and agendas of workstream meetings.
- Meeting style: substantive debate, not one-way progress updates.
- Role-modeling guidance for new behaviors in workstream meetings (Workstream Leaders only).
Afterwards, offer role-plays so people can practice and build "change muscles." The rituals will feel strange at first, and failing safely in practice builds confidence and persistence.
Then expect adherence and do not give an inch: rituals protect people from decision fatigue and free capacity for real work (Chapter 5). When people resist:
- Ask why. There may be a learning gap or misunderstanding you can fix.
- Restate the rationale. Repeat expectations and the reasons, sharing the behavioral science.
- Make the stakes personal. Make clear their personal success at the company depends on following the rituals.
Leaders must follow the rules with unimpeachable consistency: as referee of the new rules, any lapse is noticed. Be visibly obsessive about the process: attend every meeting, arrive on time, stick to the norms. Rituals will take 50% to 60% of your time at first, falling gradually to 30% to 40%. That feels like a lot, but change at scale and pace, executed through others, needs real structure and consistency; improvisation does not last.
- 1,801 transformation programs in one of the authors' studies.
- +5.9 percentage points of total shareholder return for firms with a formal, structured program versus those that improvise.
- 50-60% of a leader's time on rituals at first, easing to 30-40%.
- Other long-term studies tie success to repetition, institutional memory and continual adaptation, part of joining the successful 25%.
Encourage Workstream Leaders and Initiative Owners to add their own rituals: daily stand-ups to review actions and ask for support, weekly working sessions or office hours. Designing them themselves gives teams agency and the sense that the rituals fit their needs.
Tactic 4: Teach people to be fanatical about take up
Every initiative depends on employees taking up new tools, processes and structures, which means changing behavior. In weekly workstream meetings, make a habit of asking owners what they are doing to secure take up, and require each business case to include a take up plan and its resources. The owner's job goes beyond high-quality business cases and plans to making sure behavior truly changes so outcomes are achieved and sustained.
To get into the detail, owners work through Chapter 3's five steps:
- Define whose behavior needs to change.
- Specify the changes in behavior you expect.
- Identify barriers: knowledge gaps, skills gaps, time constraints, resource constraints, permission gaps, the perception there is little to gain, and the perception there is something to lose.
- Act to minimize the barriers.
- Measure take up and collect feedback.
This starts with the leader, who must understand every behavioral change in every initiative and project; small changes add up, and the overall goals fail if they do not stick. Owners tend to focus on their own tasks rather than the wider behavior change they must drive, the "Go It Alone" trap, so use weekly meetings to keep redirecting attention to the behavioral assumptions behind each initiative.
Tactic 5: Demonstrate early progress
Trust and further progress depend on showing progress from the earliest moment (the endowed progress effect and progress principle, Chapter 7), and the hundred days are the critical window. Find and accelerate early wins that can be executed immediately, drawn from the Deciding and Planning phases or from Workstream Leaders and owners, meeting the three conditions: executed within 100 days, at least some with emotional and cultural significance, and spread across workstreams. Give them special attention, for example dedicated working meetings with their owners on top of the weekly workstream meetings, to keep them moving and remove roadblocks at once.
An owner of an initiative to cut employee travel costs says it will take five months to tender for a new travel agency, agree better terms and realize the savings. Better to work in steps: first, have procurement managers call the current agency and negotiate an immediate saving, however small, which lands within the hundred days as an early win; next, a project for further savings by changing the policy on who may travel and when; finally, the original plan, shopping for a new agency at the best market value. Breaking work down this way teaches owners to balance short- and long-term outcomes.
Handling early failures well also protects momentum. Large-scale change always includes things that go wrong, but promoting a growth mindset reduces the sense of lost momentum: this initiative is not working as expected, so what are we learning and what do we do next? As the authors often say, if no initiatives are failing, the transformation is not ambitious enough. Leaders who model learning from setbacks encourage people to raise problems earlier and ask for help.
Pro tip: communicate, communicate, communicate
After the kickoff, do not go quiet: without new information people fill the void with speculation. Keep a steady drumbeat.
- Weekly newsletters and video updates.
- An online resource with all the information people need.
- Town halls and lunch-and-learn sessions.
- Transparency above all: when you do not know an answer, say so and commit to circulating it quickly.
Former bank executive Marijke Brunklaus ran in-person Friday afternoon updates every week. Two executive team members always attended to share the latest news, brief staff on the week ahead and ask for input and support; that part was recorded and broadcast unedited to the whole organization on Monday morning. Afterwards the conversation continued over a beer and a bite to eat, with executives staying as long as people wanted. Rotating two different executives each week forced the whole team to become consistent in how it described the transformation.
When the to-do list overwhelms you
Leaders expect an orderly procession; what they get is what the authors fondly call the "organized chaos" phase. Employees will experience the new activities as chaotic, but if planning was done properly, the phase will in fact have real structure, process and clarity. Ownership has moved from a few senior leaders to hundreds or thousands of customers of change, who will offer plenty of feedback and proposals, solicited and unsolicited. That is normal and positive, a sign of engagement. Leaders must keep judging signal from noise: when to tweak the plan and when simply to thank people. Executives often call it the busiest period of their careers; the authors' advice is to embrace the chaos and bring energy every day, because a well-run Starting phase lays the foundation for success.
The +5.9-point TSR gain comes from the authors' own BCG study and likely reflects selection, since firms able to run structured programs differ in other ways. The bucket-hat finding is a single survey-incentive experiment, a light basis for advice on kickoff gifts, and the 33% gym figure measures a weekday pattern rather than a launch effect.
Takeaways
- The rationale. Starting Change introduces the organization to the transformation so it becomes theirs, not just the leadership team's: every part and level learns the Why, What and How, individuals and teams get responsibility and authority to make detailed plans, and early wins are delivered and celebrated.
- The time frame. Four to six months: kickoff announcements and events, bottom-up planning and early wins, then two to three months of early execution of the full plan.
- The five tactics. Hold big, memorable, emotional kickoffs; select Initiative Owners to maximize agency; teach the rituals and don't give an inch; teach people to be fanatical about take up; demonstrate early progress.
Persisting with Change
Six to fourteen months in, with early wins and early setbacks behind it, the program enters "the messy middle", a phase of six months to two years in which most of the value, the hardest initiatives and the biggest behavior change are delivered. Momentum now leaks for programmatic, human and contextual reasons, and the leader's job is to plug every leak with eight tactics, from retelling the story in the present tense to enforcement as a last resort. Never pause a transformation: once the flywheel stops turning, restarting it takes an extraordinary effort.
The end of the beginning
The authors borrow Winston Churchill's phrase: the program is running, and this is "the end of the beginning." After six to fourteen months there have been early wins, early setbacks and some initiatives that missed plan. What the next phase demands is persistence.
Consumer industry executive Elaine Boltz has long used as a mantra a remark from her Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter (developed in Kanter's 2009 HBR piece "Change Is Hardest in the Middle"): in the middle, everything looks like a failure. Boltz adds that momentum is nonnegotiable; a remarkable number of obstacles can be beaten simply by not slowing down.
How the phase is defined
Persisting usually begins four to six months after kickoff, or two to three months after bottom-up planning ends. It continues the early execution of the Starting phase, so it has no clean start date, but it has recognizable features:
- Rituals have set in. People follow the transformation rituals consistently.
- Wins and failures are both behind you. There have been big successes and early disappointments.
- Performance has diverged. Some teams are doing well (and growing complacent); others are struggling (and growing anxious).
- Big decisions loom. Initiatives of strategic importance need major choices.
- Cross-functional strain. Large cross-functional initiatives are in execution and some people struggle to partner in new ways, possibly including members of the executive team.
Three or more of these features means you are in the messy middle. It lasts six months to two years and is where leaders usually deliver most of the value: the most important initiatives, the largest behavioral shifts, the hardest fight to keep everyone moving, and the most personal growth for leaders and employees.
- Progress principle. What employees need most in the messy middle is the feeling of making progress (Amabile and Kramer's idea, Chapter 7).
- Urgency fog. Constant time-sensitive pressure makes it harder to process information, weigh trade-offs or invent solutions (Chapter 5).
- Habit formation. Individuals may need months to adopt new behaviors, organizations years; lasting change means aligning people, processes and systems.
What should happen in the phase
The central risk is losing momentum, which has three sources.
- Programmatic. The program reaches its harder initiatives: deep cross-functional collaboration, revenue growth from new products, complex behavioral change. Teams are stretched beyond recently acquired skills, and some initiatives help one unit while burdening another, forcing executives to put the enterprise ahead of their own areas.
- Human. Many people now want to ease off. Teams with big early wins grow complacent and want fewer ritual meetings or less program time: the "Autopilot" trap. Teams burned by early failures want to escape a process that brought stress or peer criticism; having learned that the Transformation Office holds them to commitments, they start overestimating timelines and underestimating value: the "Sandbag" trap. Fellow leaders, more than a year in, may be tired just when they must be sharpest.
- Contextual. In some programs the context shifts: new macroeconomic conditions, new technologies in the market, or a downturn that loads business as usual. Such events distract leaders from the transformation or pile pressure on it to deliver.
| Cause | What it looks like | The leader's response |
|---|---|---|
| Programmatic | Harder, cross-functional initiatives; one unit's gain is another's cost | Lean into problem-solving; brief the steering committee well before big decisions |
| Human | Autopilot (winners cut rituals); Sandbag (burned teams pad estimates); fatigue | Defend the rituals; coach, add resources, then replace strugglers |
| Contextual | New macro conditions or technology; weaker results; a lost big customer | Solve through the process, not around it; deputize; never pause |
The leader's responses
- Embrace the complex initiatives. Join the problem-solving with workstreams personally. The biggest initiatives need special attention from specific executives, even ones who are not the final decision-makers, and each should feel agency over the work and the key decisions. Give the steering committee detailed updates well before it must decide, so it can decide quickly when the time comes.
- Defend the rituals. Owners with early successes may think they have "graduated" from the rituals; it is almost always too early, and teams that drop them now rarely return. One study put personal habit formation at a median of 66 days, and up to 254 days. Because the brain struggles with exponential growth (Chapter 10), teams undervalue steady effort, so leaders must keep saying that incremental progress compounds.
- Help strugglers in three steps. First coaching and encouragement, then added expertise and resources, finally replacing people who are not delivering.
- Route shocks through the process. If a business-as-usual problem such as losing a large customer distracts people, have workstreams work out what it means for their initiatives. If urgent events squeeze leaders' capacity, deputize suitable activities so the rituals hold.
Paused transformations are very hard to resume. Once momentum stops and the flywheel stops turning, restarting it takes an extraordinary effort; far better to make small, strategic modifications that keep everyone working toward the agreed goals.
Two recurring activities
- Rerun the culture survey every year. The Deciding-phase survey shows whether the targeted behaviors are improving. Later rounds supply a series of wins to talk about and usually yield new behavioral goals, so culture improves in stages.
- Run an initiative refresh. About six months into the phase (often a year after launch), refill the pipeline of initiatives, prioritize it and launch a new wave: time has passed, context has changed and the first wave has taught lessons. Refreshes often fuel years two and three.
Persistence is needed because company habits change slowly: a 2023 Gallup article by Allan Watkinson and Rohit Kar suggests three to five years. John Kotter (1995) warned that until changes sink into a company's culture, new approaches stay fragile and liable to regress. Continuous reinforcement and reengagement, the authors conclude, produce more durable shifts and better odds of success.
Eight tactics for the Persisting phase
Tactic 1: Tell the change story in the present tense
At kickoff and through early execution the executive team told the change story in the future tense: what would happen. Now everyone is living the story, so it should be retold in the present tense, enriched with the early wins already helping the company avoid the threat, become fitter or fulfill its destiny (the three story types of Chapter 6). Workstream Leaders and Initiative and Project Owners should do the same exercise, which lets them recognize their own progress. Telecommunications executive Ana White told the authors a change story works best when it acknowledges wins already achieved and names the specific ways employees are making an impact.
Kickoff and early execution. Future tense: the threat we will avoid, the fitness we will build, the destiny we will fulfill. Goals and promises, told by executives.
Persisting. Present tense: wins already achieved, the specific teams and people making an impact, progress owners can see in their own work. Retold by executives and owners alike.
Tactic 2: Show sustained progress
Over six months to two years, leaders must use the full arsenal of momentum tools every month, every week and, where needed, every day. The four techniques of Chapter 7 return with concrete action lists.
- 1. Show belief. Stress the change's link to the mission and your personal commitment. Bring in guest speakers to vouch for it (board member, shareholder, customer, supplier, even another company's CEO); forward positive headlines; get on national or local TV news and circulate the clip; use culture-survey results to show shifting behaviors; where frontline processes changed, visit sites and perform them yourself if you can.
- 2. Promote wins. Run a structured weekly process to collect win stories (financial, operational, behavioral) and share them via town halls, newsletters and filmed interviews. Give cash "spot rewards", including to people outside formal incentive plans. Build a visible system of nonfinancial rewards (gift cards, merchandise, points for third-party marketplaces), given also for role-modeling processes such as keeping tracking tools updated. Publicize old pain points being fixed (classically, upgrading decades-old software). Hold community events funded by cost savings. Put up a value thermometer, in the office and online, rising toward the goal.
- 3. Set new challenges. Give strong performers stretch goals, tighter timelines, new skills for driving peer behavior change, and tracking against competitors. Add one new organization-wide behavior (communicating directly, being entrepreneurial, asking for help earlier), ideally one that fixes a long-standing frustration. Run internal competitions on key metrics (a bank's branches competing on deposits), playing up executives "challenging" executives, plus light contests such as predictions for TV shows or sports.
- 4. Engineer fresh starts. Break the doom loop (delay, lower energy, more delay, poor results). For workstreams unlikely to recover, reset timelines and metrics, replace the Workstream Leader if it helps, and hold a new kickoff just for them on an emotionally significant date (new season, quarter or month, or the one-year anniversary), in forward-looking language. Every few months, let owners of initiatives long "in the red" inside healthy workstreams reset their plans, discussing what they learned; endless red reports only demotivate. A fresh start may also need new owners with new capabilities.
This takes a meaningful share of a leader's energy; recycling the same one or two early wins will not do. Banking executive Paolo Kartadjoemena admitted the pull of quick wins at the expense of engagement across the bulk of the work. Doing it again, he would have engaged the 80% of the workforce doing that work far more deliberately from the first or second wave, with more intensive, tailored communication.
Tactic 3: Respond proactively to employees' emotions
The emotion tracker set up in Planning (probably a pulse survey such as Chapter 4's Sentiment Check) pays off only if each round is analyzed immediately, discussed with senior leaders and acted on, and that is the leader's own job. The authors prescribe a "readout" discussion for a small group of senior leaders as soon as analysis is done (another ritual), which flags areas struggling or thriving on reported emotions, confidence and capacity and agrees actions for each.
| Readout finding | What leaders provide |
|---|---|
| Struggling areas | More resources (money or people), more time for hard changes, more information about what is coming, coaching for leaders and key managers, more training in new processes, and always an expressed belief that they can do the work |
| Thriving areas | New challenges, more chances to lead, including by connecting them with struggling areas, and praise, gratitude and thanks, often what employees say they want most (BCG's 2014 "Decoding Global Talent" survey) |
Two mistakes are common. One is treating emotions as an HR matter; the authors insist it is the transformation leader's issue, so senior leaders must see results regularly and act. The other is pausing surveys in intense periods to "let things settle" or "give people a break," whether from concern about the burden or fear of bad news. A well-designed survey costs people very little, they value the channel and resent losing it, and there is nothing to fear from the truth: measure, act, keep measuring, act again.
Manufacturing executive Tuomas Laine got unambiguous survey feedback: people felt overloaded. Cutting workload was not feasible, so leaders raised employees' sense of control, giving more flexibility in organizing their time and encouraging managers to reprioritize. Being told a task can wait until after Christmas, Laine noted, really does lift the mental burden. These small, empathetic moves eased the strain, and scores began to improve.
Tactic 4: De-average your interactions with team members
In the Starting phase workstreams report similar experiences; by now consistency is gone. Some meetings show off progress, celebrate people and offer to do more; others bring reasons (and sometimes excuses) for missed expectations. The gaps usually reflect different mixes of the seven take up barriers of Chapter 3: one team lacks time or resources, another a critical skill or the permission to proceed.
So leaders must calibrate meeting by meeting. Strong teams need attention to detail and new challenges against complacency; struggling teams need clear expectations, problem-solving help and encouragement. Employees must believe the leader understands their work, and they notice at once when a leader applies yesterday's lesson from another team to them. Reading the room is hard, so the authors suggest a routine: get a pre-brief from the transformation team on special context (including team members' personal circumstances); spend the first five minutes gauging moods and using mirroring to earn trust; then get to work.
Workstream Leaders deserve particular care: they are among the most important customers of change and the leader's points of highest impact on value and people. The authors recommend one-on-ones every few weeks inviting candor about what works and what is hard.
Tactic 5: Recognize displays of high agency
A high-agency mindset (Chapter 2) drives this transformation and builds high performers for future ones. Here agency means ownership: employees taking long-term responsibility for initiatives the transformation team designed. If an initiative built a new sales-lead process, the Initiative Owner did the work, but ownership must pass to the sales team before the initiative counts as complete; that is far easier if sales staff had experiences of decision-making, influence and representation along the way.
When such handoffs succeed, leaders should celebrate them visibly and deliberately, using the win-promotion menu above, to show that moving work from "change" to "business as usual" is valued and rewarded. Of everything worth celebrating in the phase, these moments matter most for the culture, mindset and behaviors that sustain success after the program.
Tactic 6: Create novelty within your rituals
Rituals were meant to happen every week, with the same people, in exactly the same way, which gave structure, certainty and capacity. Now they also need novelty and surprise to keep people coming. The rule: drop no ritual; add new elements inside it. The authors' analogy is a gym class every Saturday at 9:15 a.m., same place and instructor: a good ritual, but the same workout fifty-two weeks running would bore anyone.
- Newsletters. Keep them, but add a new section.
- Awards. Add a category, such as "Most Consistent Team" or "Greatest Growth in Growth Mindset."
- Meetings. For one week, add something to every workstream meeting you attend: recall where people were in week one, or name something that surprised them.
- Small treats. Occasional doughnuts count as novelty too.
Tactic 7: Hold executives to their agreements
Executives agreed at the start on the Why (the story of why change is needed), the What (specific financial, operational and behavioral outcomes) and the How (the Leadership Principles, Leadership Team Operating Norms and Role-Model Behaviors). Most keep their word; some who were on board back away, struggle to deliver or act against the code of conduct they accepted.
The first signs are verbal, in the pattern "I know we said X, but...": value shrinking from $100 million to $50 million; a product due in May now likely in September; agreed Transformation Office ways of working dismissed because "these meetings are not very helpful for me." Then come behaviors: skipping rituals and lobbying peers that they are unnecessary; letting teams cut value and timelines without replacement; trying to block decisions from reaching the steering committee; defending their own teams instead of taking an enterprise mindset; or going directly to the CEO for exceptions. It also shows downstream: if a sponsor's Workstream Leaders and owners disengage and walk back commitments, the sponsor may be setting the example behind the scenes.
The causes: the transformation is not playing out as they expected (especially for them), their influence seems to be shrinking, or they lack the capability to drive the change. Talking about disengagement starts the fix.
- Seek to understand. Assume positive intent; have a heart-to-heart about what is really in the way and how to support them better.
- Ask hard questions. "I thought we were clear; what has changed since we agreed?" Commitments may change, but only on a significant shift in the underlying information.
- Run a public scorecard. Where agreed practices such as ritual attendance are ignored, track who participates and review it at every steering committee.
- Set deadlines for value gaps. The executive brings a weekly steering-committee update with refined pipelines to fill the shortfall.
- Reassure those losing influence. Tell them "We need you to be successful"; if their scope has shifted, consider more responsibility in return for changed behavior.
- Relieve the overwhelmed. Reallocate parts of their scope, including specific initiatives, to a new sponsor.
- Last step: exit. If behavior does not improve and undermines the change, the most constructive outcome is usually that the person leaves; where appropriate, saying why shows how serious leadership is.
Leaders who lack the authority to remove a peer should ask their own leadership to act. If nothing can happen yet, they should not let it go: keep naming missed commitments, show with evidence the harm done, keep the problem visible so a change becomes likelier later, and act on everything within their control.
Tactic 8: Enforce new behaviors, but only as a last resort
Leaders have rightly sought to earn take up, not expect it, from two groups: Workstream Leaders and Initiative and Project Owners adopting the methodology and rituals, and broader employees adopting new tools and processes. Both had every chance to opt in and take up has been good, but with hundreds or thousands of people it is never perfect. The authors' example: an initiative cuts emergency spare-parts costs by narrowing what sites may order through official channels, and some locations simply order through other channels.
Once leaders are sure no further persuasion will work, enforcement follows in sequence.
- Listen first. Learn, in the person's own words, what blocks take up; a misunderstanding may clear fast, or care for an overwhelmed employee may win recommitment.
- Restate expectations to owners. Document very detailed next steps, read them aloud at the meeting's end, set completion dates, and call rituals "commitments."
- Insist on common tools. Require the transformation-wide tools, reports and approaches, with no workarounds.
- Escalate visibly. Have laggards report at the steering committee and circulate lists of late initiatives with owners' names; repeat offenders emerge.
- Make it count individually. Make adoption a factor in owners' performance reviews.
- For employees: recommendations become rules. Document formal expectations, turn "recommendations" into "rules," state the consequences and actually apply them, and publicize what happened in early cases. Once people see leaders are serious, the vast majority comply.
Enforcement is expensive in money, management time and cultural capital: it needs people and systems to track behavior and chase laggards, and messages that are hard to hear. Sometimes the cost must be paid to set expectations and create the behaviors that sustain the change.
Pro tip: personalized retention plans for customers of change
Key transformation leaders must stay present and engaged and must not disengage, burn out or leave out of boredom, frustration or pressure. Manage them like key customers: meet regularly, watch them in the rituals, keep a personalized list of what each needs to stay motivated, and provide it or help them get it. After so much investment in these relationships and in teaching the rituals, a leader who serves the program well must stay, which means they must thrive.
Final thought: problems you didn't expect
They will come daily, given so much change, so many customers of change and such long time frames, and they will test the leader's resilience and self-belief. The advice: take it a day at a time; separate urgent problems from those that can wait (or never need solving); and rely on the seven principles, the authors' anchors in the storm.
The late turn to public scorecards, named late lists and exits sits awkwardly with Part One's insistence that take up be earned; the authors resolve it by sequencing, with no evidence on when enforcement backfires or what it costs in cultural capital. The 66-day habit figure (Phillippa Lally's 2010 study of 96 volunteers, cited via a 2024 Scientific American article) concerns simple personal habits, a loose proxy for organizational routines; the three-to-five-year culture figure comes from a Gallup practitioner article, and the Kanter and Kotter sources are essays, not studies. The executive cases are BCG interviews the reader cannot check.
Takeaways
- The rationale. Every transformation has a messy middle: as the organization changes, each person rewires habits, and complexity, uncertainty and frustration can stiffen resistance and pull people back to old routines. Persisting past the point of difficulty creates much of the value.
- The time frame. Six months to two years, depending on circumstances and goals.
- The eight tactics. Story in the present tense; sustained progress; respond proactively to emotions; de-average interactions; recognize high agency; novelty within rituals; hold executives to their agreements; enforce only as a last resort.
Ending Change
When a transformation is finally working, executives, employees, board members and investors all start asking "What's next?" The authors give leaders two duties: keep executing (letting up early is the "False Summit" trap), and formally decide to end this transformation on a set date after specific final milestones. People remember the peak and the end, so leaders who cannot touch every peak can still shape the ending for everyone.
The view from near the top
After months or years in the messy middle the work is paying off. Some of the business outcomes executives signed their names to in Deciding to Change are delivered, and there is a clear path to the rest. Teams collaborate well on hard cross-functional initiatives; some people even say they enjoy the change and have grown more than they expected. Successful transformations often take on a life of their own, changing the company's whole way of working and leaving it with new capabilities in fast, rigorous problem-solving.
Naturally the leader starts asking how the company can go further, and others ask too: employees in one-on-ones, and board members and investors pleasantly surprised that the program is beating the odds. Even with many months left, executives feel the need to see the next horizon; thinking ahead is their job. The authors assign two responsibilities.
- Keep concentrating on the current program. The job is not done. Too many executive teams let up too soon, the "False Summit" trap, a common way transformations fail.
- Decide to end the change. Reach a shared executive decision that this transformation will end on a specific date, after a final set of specific milestones. The company can keep transforming, but this specific transformation needs a clear and formal end.
Why end deliberately
The reason mirrors the case for true agreement at the start, years earlier: the benefit of the customers of change, in the long and the short term.
The long term: a good memory and better learning
Employees who worked through many hard initiatives deserve to feel the satisfaction of a job well done and to celebrate it, and giving them that improves their odds of success later, whether in regular operations or in another program. Behavioral science, the authors argue, shows the benefits are cognitive, emotional and learning-related.
- Making sense. Structured chances to consolidate experience let people make sense of what happened and organize their memories (the authors cite Karl Weick's 1995 Sensemaking in Organizations).
- The peak-end rule. Daniel Kahneman (then at UC Berkeley) and Barbara Fredrickson (then at Duke), dated by the authors to 1992, found that when people look back on an experience they weight two moments most heavily: the one of peak intensity and the end. Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow explains that memory evolved to store the most intense moment and the feelings at the close of an episode.
- Fewer regrets. A "well-rounded ending" leaves people more positive and with fewer regrets about their work.
- Tacit to explicit. Reflection turns what people have been learning tacitly into explicit lessons, improving individual and team performance on later work (the authors cite David Kolb's experiential learning and a 2024 meta-analysis of team reflexivity).
The application: looking back, employees will mostly remember their personal peak and how the transformation ended. Leaders try to shape the peak for hundreds or thousands of people but cannot touch all of them directly; they can shape the ending for everyone. End well and the workforce will remember a little of the stress and fatigue of the messy middle and a lot of the joy and pride of completion, and when change is needed again, the leader and their successors will benefit.
Later work has confirmed the point. In 2020 Bettina Schwörer, Nora Rebekka Krott and Gabriele Oettingen studied well-rounded endings of life phases, defined as endings that carry a sense of closure. Across seven studies, such endings went with high positive affect, little regret and an easy transition into the next phase.
The short term: less burnout
Where leaders fail to bring a program to a clear and decisive end, the authors observe high workforce fatigue and dissatisfaction, reactions to constant change that undermine any future program and can metastasize into corrosive cynicism. Social scientist Jeremy B. Bernerth of San Diego State University notes that an event's duration and temporal uncertainty shape the stress people feel; when change is seen as a discrete event with a beginning and an end, employees can predict and adjust their behavior.
How the phase is defined
Ending Change begins as Deciding to Change ended: with a formal decision and agreement among the executive team. Discussion often starts many months earlier, during Persisting, which is reasonable, since executives think in three- to five-year horizons, but as with Deciding, a formal moment of true agreement must bring it to a clear outcome. The phase ends when everyone has stopped all transformation activities. Winding down typically takes one to two months, depending on size, scope and remaining work, and the end usually comes one to three years after the formal decision to change.
- Peak-end rule. The end of an experience is often its most memorable part and can determine how people judge the whole.
- Need for closure. People seek clear, meaningful conclusions that give a sense of completeness and create momentum for what's next.
- Corporate amnesia. Organizations forget what they don't deliberately capture: lessons, goals and culture fade just when they are needed most.
What should happen in the phase
Through Persisting, executives discuss goals, strategy and the transformation's progress in the ordinary course of business, including its expected end date. In those discussions they should agree which strategic goals come next and what kind of change they require. That choice shapes future change work and its infrastructure, and it usually points one of three ways.
| Direction | When it fits | Change infrastructure afterward |
|---|---|---|
| 1. No further change required | The program solved the expected organization-wide challenges; return to business as usual | None: no Transformation Office, no CTO, no ritualized transformation meetings |
| 2. Further change in individual business areas | Many enterprise challenges solved, but some remain inside units | A change leader per area, defining goals, structure and rituals with that area's head; one or two central resources for project management, mostly coordination and reporting, not the TMO's strategic role |
| 3. Further change across all business areas | Large challenges with complex interdependencies still need central leadership, coordinated problem-solving and active management | Keep the Transformation Office and CTO, but cancel every old ritual in every calendar and launch new ones with a new structure and new name: a new chapter, not a continuation |
Rotate talent through the Transformation Office and workstream leadership. The TMO is a useful talent hub where emerging leaders learn the core skills of change leadership and build trusted connections across the company, after which they are usually best returned to the business to use those skills and networks in fresh contexts. Over time, rotation raises the quality of enterprise-wide change leadership, gives experiences of agency to many emerging leaders, and signals how much the leader values transformation.
- Environment. What business environment lies ahead: headwinds or tailwinds?
- Macrotrends. Which trends affect the sector, and how much uncertainty do they create?
- Disruption. How much change will come from new technology, products and entrants, and how fast?
- Complexity. Given the strategic goals, how complex and cross-functional is the coming work?
- Value source. Will most value come from one or two business units or all of them?
- Speed. How fast must the further identified initiatives deliver?
- Behaviors. What new behaviors must be developed and scaled that this program did not address?
- Capabilities. What change capabilities has the program built, and where are they strongest?
As agreement nears, bring the discussion to a head with a formal decision on when and how to end the transformation, what happens next, and how it will be communicated. Facilitate it exactly as the original agreement: formally, precisely documented, with a clear "yes" from every person in the room. The decision to end change, the authors stress, matters as much as the decision to start it.
Such programs usually form a sequence of two- or three-year transformations with different strategic goals, for example "Fixing the Fundamentals," then "Growth and Expansion," then "Innovation and Renewal." Nobody needs to set goals for the next five to ten years at the outset of the first one; often it is impossible, since each program's results rightly shape the next.
Whatever comes next, three wrap-up activities are always needed: consolidate and close out the work; celebrate; reflect, recharge and resolve. They help in every scenario, from no further change to a whole new transformation.
1960s-1990s Transformations were episodic: a specific threat met with a specific response, ending with option 1, no further change.
1990s-2010s Still episodic, but nearing the end companies saw the value of dedicated program support and installed continuous-improvement capabilities inside business areas (option 2).
2010s-now Option 3, always-on transformation: a permanent need for complex change in an uncertain world, often driven by profound new technologies affecting the whole organization and needing rapid cross-functional teaming.
Leaders of successful transformations often find better talent and greater cognitive capability in their organizations afterward, which lets them keep launching rapid, large-scale change as a competitive advantage.
Three tactics for the Ending phase
Tactic 1: Consolidate and close out the work
The program has completed a multitude of initiatives and projects and probably paused a few. Taking stock of all of them shows what worked and what didn't, which informs all future work, including further change.
- Document the achievements. Everything initiatives and projects delivered, with the insights and lessons from successes.
- Document the shortfalls. Everything they did not achieve, with lessons from failures that may apply to business operations or future change.
- Document the paused and deprioritized. These form a pipeline of future opportunities.
- Settle unfinished work. Decide what happens to initiatives running past the agreed end date: fold them into the next transformation or track their value as stand-alone initiatives.
- Leave recommendations. Brief successors and future leaders who may pick up deprioritized or incomplete work.
- Close out every programmatic ritual. For example, cancel all standing workstream meetings.
Tactic 2: Celebrate
A dramatic kickoff calls for a dramatic ending. Hold one memorable event for everyone (or as many as company constraints allow) and fund teams to hold their own smaller celebrations, with at least one executive at each. Every party, central or local, should include:
- A video of employee interviews and footage of memorable moments from the journey.
- A leader speaking passionately about the journey: where everyone started, what they overcame, the moments that mattered, the new leaders who emerged, and the value delivered.
- Before and after. Evocative stories of how things were then, set against how they are now.
Leaders should be generous with praise, gifts, awards and rewards, acknowledging the customers of change in a way that is highly visible, fun and unforgettable.
When Delta Air Lines emerged from bankruptcy in 2007 (the story first told in Chapter 6), leaders staged a celebration in an aircraft hangar filled with planes from a bygone era, the airline's new commercial jets and memorabilia from across the generations. A big screen showed the executives ringing the New York Stock Exchange bell live: the stock, delisted during bankruptcy, was back in business, and employees in the hangar answered with their own cowbells. They took home swag, including a video of the story of change. The "Fly Delta Jets" sign that greeted planes arriving in Atlanta, switched off during bankruptcy to save money, was relit and remains a beloved symbol. The event let the whole company recognize what it had achieved and reflect on its meaning.
The lesson: whatever comes next, even if the company goes again at once, find a way to celebrate everything accomplished. The customers of change need this moment.
Tactic 3: Reflect, recharge and resolve
Many people value reflection in their personal lives but rarely apply it to their organizations at scale, one reason so many companies suffer "corporate amnesia" (the authors cite James Walsh and Gerardo Rivera Ungson's 1991 paper on organizational memory). Dedicated reflection improves business results and culture. Employees, especially Workstream Leaders and Initiative and Project Owners, should reflect on how the company has grown stronger and how they have grown personally, which builds confidence and cognitive capacity for future hard challenges.
This holds even if a new program starts immediately: allow two to four weeks of dedicated reflection first, with no work at all on the next transformation, and give people structured reflection exercises to do with colleagues from the concluding program. The time is not wasted, for two reasons: people come back significantly more productive and motivated (another case of "go slow to go fast"), and executives use the pause to finalize the plan for the next chapter.
- Group: how far the company has come. "What surprised me about what we achieved?" "What decisions did we make that I didn't think we'd be able to make?" "Where could we have done better as a team, and how would we do it better next time?"
- Personal: how far I have come. "How did I grow, and what would I do differently?" "What challenges did I face and how did I respond?" "What am I most proud of?"
- Rest. Everyone who led or took part in the main activities takes a few weeks off; consider one or two company-wide days off, taken together like a company holiday so nobody feels pressure to stay engaged.
BCG colleague Paul Catchlove stresses that reflection can take many formats: purposeful thinking, journal entries, audio notes, pictures, or talking with a mentor or honest friend. What matters is finding what works and committing to examine experiences regularly: what worked, what didn't, why, and what to do differently next time.
Pro tip: let customers of change say "thank you"
The leader does much for customers of change at the end (events, time off, awards, swag, reflection), but should also let them do something: express gratitude.
The giver is lifted by expressing it and the receiver feels valued; the bond strengthens, building trust and willingness to cooperate later. Research on buyer-seller relationships (Mangus and colleagues, 2022) finds gratitude improves relationship quality and success, and workplace programs in which employees note what they are grateful for in coworkers can raise well-being, engagement and job satisfaction (Harty and colleagues, 2025).
The transformation has been a big part of everyone's life, so each person needs to feel they have personally closed the chapter. Three mechanisms help:
- Personalizable thank-you notes to send to people they admired during the program.
- A rewards-points system to give to people they worked for or alongside.
- A public thank-you wall of digital screens showing favorable comments about customers of change and their contributions.
Final thought: launching the next program before this one ends
The authors' answer is simple: don't. The company may have chosen always-on transformation with a new set of strategic goals, or just a smaller set of strategic change initiatives. Either way, the sequence is:
- Start small. Begin the conversation with only the executive team, plus perhaps a small working team of leaders key to the next change.
- Signal, don't detail. With one or two months to go, tell people a new program with a new purpose and goals is planned, but only after the current one has finished and after everyone has had a break. Saying something prevents a later sense that information was withheld; giving specifics early causes stress and frustration and can rob people of the ending.
- Rest. After the formal end, give two to four weeks for reflection and rest.
- Kick off afresh. Launch the new transformation with new kickoff events for senior leaders and the whole organization, as in Starting Change.
The book dates the peak-end rule to 1992 and once spells Fredrickson "Frederickson"; the key published papers (Fredrickson and Kahneman on duration neglect; the cold-water study with Schreiber and Redelmeier) appeared in 1993. The evidence is mostly from short, lab-style episodes (pain, film clips, vacations), and the leap to multi-year corporate programs is an analogy, not a tested result. More substantively, always-on transformation is presented as the modern norm, yet the chapter's whole case is that people need real endings; the authors reconcile the two only by renaming and re-ritualizing each wave, and offer no evidence on whether employees experience a renamed wave as a genuine fresh start.
Takeaways
- The rationale. Closure paves the way for future change: a deliberate ending lets executives and employees process unresolved experiences and turn their attention to what's next.
- The time frame. Discussions on when and how to end may take several months; once the formal decision is made, expect one or two months of activity.
- The three tactics. Consolidate and close out the work; celebrate; reflect, recharge and resolve.
Change Is a Choice
The authors close by restating their premise: organizations are communities of humans, and change succeeds under predictable, shapeable conditions of how people behave, feel and think. The seven principles are fresh statements of that idea, and the reference guides that follow compress Part Two into 26 tactics, ten sayings and a working glossary. Tools and tactics will shift in the age of AI, but the human fundamentals of change will not.
The fundamentals will not change
Changing an organization takes care and attention to how its people behave, feel and think, so the seven principles are, in the authors' framing, new articulations of an old truth: there are conditions under which people come together to create positive change, and those conditions can be predicted and shaped.
The authors write at the start of the age of artificial intelligence, which is already changing how everyone understands the human role at work. As in earlier moments of great disruption, companies will need change leaders who work with, rather than against, natural human tendencies. Specific tactics and tools will alter; the fundamentals will not.
A rough-water sport
Living by the principles has never been easy, and the authors say so as change leaders themselves. Successful leaders do more than follow a checklist; they draw on a nuanced reading of human nature to meet new challenges daily. Hence the authors' image of change leadership as a rough-water sport: Olympic canoe slalom, where competitors crash down surging whitewater, read the currents ahead, place the boat in the right spot at the right moment and recover when the unexpected happens. Change leaders must likewise predict and respond to shifting currents of behavior, emotion and thought. The work is messy and hard, and there is no perfect run.
Like canoe slalom, leading change is messy and tough, and there is no such thing as a perfect run.
Three decades without improvement
The book opened with the grim statistic that organizational change fails far more often than it succeeds, and the authors have seen no improvement in thirty years. Unless leaders change their approach, they expect another three decades of disappointment.
They insist a much higher success rate is possible and point to a precedent. After Claude Hopkins published Scientific Advertising (the Schlitz story of the Preface), advertising went through a revolution in sophistication and effectiveness: practice became more systematic, disciplined and scientific, testing of ad efficacy became standard, and new services appeared, among them George Gallup's first political opinion poll in 1935 and Arthur Nielsen's national radio ratings service in 1942.
1923 Claude Hopkins publishes Scientific Advertising, arguing that ads should be tested and measured.
1935 George Gallup runs his first political opinion poll.
1942 Arthur Nielsen launches a national radio ratings service.
Today The authors hope change management makes the same leap from craft to systematic, tested practice.
The book closes with an invitation to join a movement: make different choices in the change efforts you lead, share them with other leaders, and observe the people around you and their natural patterns of behavior closely. Through the accumulation of many small wins, the authors hope for a world where successful change is the expectation, not the exception.
The advertising parallel is suggestive but unproven: the book offers no controlled evidence that its seven principles raise the success rate, and the "70% of change fails" style statistic it builds on is itself contested in the research literature. The authors' BCG roles mean the "movement" doubles as a consulting methodology. The 1923 publication date of Scientific Advertising is standard but is not given in the afterword itself.
Appendix: the tactics checklist
The appendix offers two quick references for leaders in the middle of execution. The first lists every tactic in Part Two, phase by phase: 4 + 6 + 5 + 8 + 3 = 26 tactics.
| Phase (chapter) | Tactics |
|---|---|
| Deciding to Change (8) | 1. Reflect on your own emotions and anticipate your personal challenges. 2. Solicit employees' views. 3. Define specific behavioral changes for the entire organization. 4. Get agreement on how your leadership team will lead. |
| Planning for Change (9) | 1. Design your rituals. 2. Write the change story, and teach every executive to tell it. 3. Set up an incentives program with financial rewards. 4. Set up a mechanism for measuring employees' emotions. 5. Predict momentum. 6. Renew your vows. |
| Starting Change (10) | 1. Hold big, memorable, emotional kickoffs. 2. Select Initiative Owners to maximize employees' agency. 3. Teach employees the rituals, and don't give an inch. 4. Teach people to be fanatical about take up of their initiatives. 5. Demonstrate early progress. |
| Persisting with Change (11) | 1. Tell the change story in the present tense, not the future tense. 2. Show sustained progress. 3. Respond proactively to employees' emotions. 4. De-average your interactions with team members. 5. Recognize displays of high agency. 6. Create novelty within your rituals. 7. Hold executives to their agreements. 8. Enforce new behaviors, but only as a last resort. |
| Ending Change (12) | 1. Consolidate and close out the work. 2. Celebrate. 3. Reflect, recharge and resolve. |
Appendix: words for change leaders to live by
The second reference pairs ten working sayings with the behavioral concept behind each; the authors find them the most useful lines in day-to-day change work. Paraphrased here, with the chapter where each concept is explained.
| Saying (paraphrased) | Behavioral concept | What it means (chapter) |
|---|---|---|
| Your people don't see change the way you do | Change distance | Designers and those affected differ in behaviors, feelings and thoughts (Introduction) |
| Aligned in principle but not truly agreed means misaligned in practice | False alignment | Executives act more agreed on why, what and how than they are (1) |
| If your people build it, they'll believe in it | IKEA effect | People value what they helped create (2) |
| Ask what's blocking them, not what's broken in them | Fundamental attribution error | Blaming character instead of circumstance for low take up (3) |
| Your past transformations were harder than you remember | Rosy retrospection | Past events recalled as better than they were (4) |
| You don't know how people feel until you ask | Social projection | Assuming others feel what you feel (4) |
| Better decisions come from fewer decisions, not more time | Decision fatigue | Decision quality falls as choices pile up (5) |
| People remember the story, not the business case | Narrative vs. exposition | Stories are recalled and understood better than expository argument (6) |
| People make more progress when they see progress | Endowed progress effect | A head start makes people keen to finish (7) |
| End well; people will remember it | Peak-end rule | Experiences are judged by their peak and their end (12) |
Glossary
The book's working vocabulary. The terms nest into a single delivery structure, from the Transformation Office down to individual milestones, each level with a named owner.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Change | A deliberate effort in an organization to shift how people get something done together |
| Change distance | The gap in behaviors, feelings and thoughts between those who design change and those affected by it |
| Change leader | Anyone seeking to induce change in those around them: usually an executive, but also a manager or individual contributor |
| Change program | A collection of mutually reinforcing changes in an organization |
| Change team | The group delivering a major change; in a transformation, the Transformation Office, Workstream Sponsors and Leaders, and Initiative, Project and Milestone Owners (also called the transformation team) |
| Employee | A person whose day-to-day work keeps the organization running |
| Executive | A senior leader who makes strategic decisions for the organization |
| Initiative | A broad, strategic area of opportunity under a workstream's ownership |
| Initiative Owner | The person responsible for day-to-day leadership of an initiative |
| KPI | Key performance indicator: a financial or nonfinancial measure of success for projects, initiatives, workstreams or whole transformations |
| Milestone | An individual activity needed to complete a project |
| Milestone Owner | The person responsible for day-to-day leadership of a milestone |
| Project | A specific, structured effort to advance or deliver part of an initiative |
| Project Owner | The person responsible for day-to-day leadership of a project |
| Transformation | A large change program with deep impact on offerings and/or operating model |
| Transformation approach | The design decisions leaders make to give the execution of change structure and consistency |
| Transformation Office | The team that designs and executes the transformation approach |
| Workstream | A broad area of ownership, in two archetypes: functional (aligned to units or functions with P&L or budget accountability) and strategic (enterprise-wide priorities cutting across functions) |
| Workstream Leader | The person who leads a workstream's day-to-day activities |
| Workstream Sponsor | The executive accountable for the outcomes a workstream delivers |
Change "works," on the authors' account, when leaders choose to treat employees as customers of change and to design for how people actually behave, feel and think; those choices compound into the small wins that could make successful change normal.
Master Takeaways
The book reduces to one move: design change for the people who must live it, then hold that design steady with structure. Agreement, agency, earned take up and measured emotions make the change land; rituals, stories and manufactured momentum keep it alive; a deliberate ending makes the next change easier. Change succeeds when leaders stop asking employees to adapt to change and start adapting change to employees.
- Employees are the customers of change. Design, test and sell change to them as carefully as you would a product to buyers.
- Failure is behavioral. Most programs miss their goals because leaders ignore how people behave, feel and think, not because the strategy is wrong.
- Aligned is not agreed. Get each executive's explicit, documented, signed agreement on the Why, the What and the How before going public.
- People believe what they build. Give some employees decisions, many influence and all representation; ignored input is worse than none.
- Take up is earned. Ask what is blocking people, not what is wrong with them, and remove all seven barriers.
- Never pause a transformation. Keep the rituals, solve crises through the process rather than around it; a stopped flywheel is brutally hard to restart.
- Mind the change distance. Executives feel more positive (68% vs 45%) and more confident about change than employees, and small miscalibrations compound into resistance.
- Run the five steps to true agreement. Clear parameters, an early written exchange, quality debate in one-on-ones, a formal individual verdict, then one unified message.
- Rank the fallbacks. When disagreement persists: disagree again, then subtract and defer, then an attractive exit; proceeding with a plan is the worst option.
- Measure feelings, don't guess them. A short pulse every two weeks on emotions, confidence and capacity beats instinct, which rosy retrospection and social projection distort.
- Close the loop visibly. Analyze each round at once, hold a senior readout, act for struggling and thriving areas, and never pause the survey to "let things settle."
- Make fewer decisions. Fixed weekly meetings (same people, time, agenda, never canceled) save judgment for the choices that matter.
- Defend rituals with HIIDE. Help, information, influence, duty and enjoyment keep attendance high; later, add novelty inside rituals rather than dropping any.
- Tell one story. Pick threat, fitness or destiny, keep it short, never mix story types, and retell it in the present tense once wins arrive.
- Show, don't only tell. Symbolic objects, actions and events engage a second processing channel and make the message stick.
- Momentum must be manufactured. Expect a dip around month six; show belief, promote wins, challenge overperformers and give underperformers fresh starts.
- Go slow to go fast. One to two months of planning (Transformation Office, hierarchy, rituals, story, incentives, emotion tracking) pays back in speed later.
- Hand detailed planning to employees. Cap bottom-up planning at about 100 days (Parkinson's law) and execute early wins to completion inside that window.
- Gate the portfolio. Charter, business case, implementation plan, implementation complete, benefits realized: value counts only when it shows in the P&L or KPIs.
- Small initiatives matter. Rocks, pebbles and sand: many small initiatives fill the gap big ones leave and spread ownership.
- Ambition implies failures. If no initiatives are failing, the program is not ambitious enough; respond with a learning question.
- Behavioral goals belong on the scorecard. Two or three quantified culture goals, with their own workstream, alongside financial and operational targets; rerun the culture survey yearly.
- Leaders must change first. Reflect on your own emotions, commit publicly, and expect 50-70% of your time on the program early on.
- Watch for Autopilot and Sandbag. Early winners want to drop rituals; burned teams pad timelines and shrink value; both bleed momentum in the messy middle.
- De-average your attention. Strong teams need detail and new challenges, struggling ones clear expectations and help; meet Workstream Leaders one-on-one every few weeks.
- Hold executives to their word. Commitments change only on significant new information; then use scorecards, weekly deadlines, reallocation and, finally, exits.
- Enforce last. After persuasion fails, turn recommendations into rules with real consequences, accepting the cost in money, time and cultural capital.
- Beware the False Summit. Letting up when success is in sight is a common failure; keep executing while planning the next horizon.
- End deliberately. Formally decide the end date, close out and document the work, celebrate lavishly and give people two to four weeks to reflect and rest.
- Start the next wave clean. Cancel every old ritual, rename and re-kick off; rotate emerging leaders through the Transformation Office and back into the business.
Frameworks & mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Change distance | Designers and the affected see the same change very differently | Sizing up how a plan will land |
| Mathematics of misalignment | Small gaps between assumptions and reality compound | Explaining why "minor" misreads matter |
| Why / What / How | Purpose, value targets and ways of leading must all be agreed | Testing whether a team really agrees |
| Five steps to true agreement | Parameters, early exchange, quality debate, formal verdict, unified message | Running an executive decision |
| Four fallbacks | Disagree again, subtract and defer, attractive exit, proceed with a plan | Disagreement will not yield |
| Agency tiers | Decision-making for some, influence for many, representation for all | Designing employee involvement |
| COM-B, seven barriers | Knowledge, skills, time, resources, permission, gain, loss | Diagnosing low take up |
| Five-step take up loop | Who, what behavior, barriers, act, measure; loop until on target | Rolling out a tool or process |
| Sentiment Check | Biweekly pulse on emotions, confidence, capacity | Tracking the human side of change |
| HIIDE triggers | Help, information, influence, duty, enjoyment | Keeping rituals well attended |
| Threat / fitness / destiny | Three change-story archetypes | Writing the case for change |
| Four momentum techniques | Belief, wins, new challenges, fresh starts | Countering a mid-program stall |
| Flip the pyramid, change the cockpit | Employees become customers; fix the context, not the people | Before any Part Two tactic |
| Five phases, 26 tactics | Deciding 4, Planning 6, Starting 5, Persisting 8, Ending 3 | Sequencing a transformation |
| Stage-gates G0-G5 | Charter, business case, plan, implementation complete, benefits realized | Managing an initiative portfolio |
| DARES | Determination, adaptability, relationships, expertise, stake | Choosing Initiative Owners |
| Rocks, pebbles, sand | Big initiatives take the volume; small ones fill the jar and spread agency | Building a balanced pipeline |
| Autopilot / Sandbag traps | Complacent winners drop rituals; burned teams pad estimates | Diagnosing messy-middle drift |
| Enforcement ladder | Listen, restate, no workarounds, steering-committee exposure, reviews, rules | Persuasion has truly failed |
| Three next directions | No further change; change by area; change across all areas (always-on) | Deciding what follows a program |
| Peak-end rule | Experiences are judged by their peak and their end | Designing the close of a program |
The approach is a BCG transformation method presented as behavioral science, and most cases (Pandora, Heineken, Aetna, Ericsson, Delta) come from the authors' network, told largely by the executives involved in BCG interviews that cannot be checked. The famous 70% failure rate rests on weak citations, and the authors offer no controlled test that their seven principles raise success rates. Several supporting findings (ego depletion, Pygmalion effects, the 66-day habit median, written goals being 42% more achievable, the Betty Crocker egg) are contested or thin, and lab effects such as the peak-end rule are stretched to multi-year programs by analogy. The late turn to enforcement and exits sits uneasily with "take up is earned," and the machinery of offices, stage-gates and 20 weekly meetings suits large firms and needs pruning for smaller ones. Still, the core advice (agree for real, involve people, remove barriers, measure feelings, keep a steady cadence, never pause, end well) is sound and well argued.
Who's who
| Name | Role | Why they matter |
|---|---|---|
| Claude C. Hopkins | Copywriter, Scientific Advertising (1923) | The book's model for making a craft measurable |
| Paul Fitts | WWII air force psychologist | Fixed the cockpit, not the pilots: context over blame |
| Alexander Lacik | CEO, Pandora (from 2019) | Cut 46 priorities to about a dozen; true agreement in action |
| Igor Maurell | Head of digital transformation, Ericsson | Built agency among a sales system's 40,000 users |
| John Allspaw | Etsy VP of Technical Operations | Blameless postmortems earned take up of error reporting |
| Brunello Cucinelli | Founder of his fashion house | Listening to employees' fear in March 2020 |
| Thibaut Boidin | CTO, Heineken Europe (from 2020) | Weekly rituals as "the drumbeat" for two years |
| Allison Ausband / Ed Bastian | Delta's Chief People Officer / CEO | VELVET story and symbols since the 2005 bankruptcy |
| Alan Mulally | CEO, Ford (2006) | A threat story that told employees they were winners |
| Katerina Guerraz | COO, Aetna | Momentum through wins and listening |
| Elaine Boltz | Consumer industry executive | "Momentum is nonnegotiable" in the messy middle |
| Paolo Kartadjoemena | Banking executive | Would engage the 80% doing the bulk of the work earlier |
| Tuomas Laine | Manufacturing executive | Eased overload by giving people control, not less work |
| Daniel Kahneman / Barbara Fredrickson | Psychologists | The peak-end rule behind deliberate endings |
Connect it
- AI rollouts. The authors' own example of an "AI Delivery Office" fits: an AI tool's value depends on take up, so run the COM-B barrier check and weekly usage measures rather than assuming adoption, and expect the Autopilot trap once early pilots succeed.
- Banking transformations. Several cases (Ira Robbins, Paolo Kartadjoemena, Marijke Brunklaus, ING's sports-arena kickoff) come from banks, where regulation tempts leaders to skip steps; the authors' advice is to name the risk of any omission and revisit it. Branch-versus-branch deposit contests are their own example of a messy-middle challenge.
- Enterprise architecture programs. The four-level hierarchy, stage-gates and critical-path milestone checks map directly onto large platform migrations, where staggering milestones across teams prevents change collisions, and the "three next directions" choice mirrors deciding whether a migration office is dissolved, federated or kept as a permanent platform team.
About this book
How Change Really Works: Seven Science-Based Principles for Transforming Your Organization by Julia Dhar, Kristy R. Ellmer & Philip Jameson, 2026. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions