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  • Translating a plan to tangible actions

    Making a Plan Is Not Implementing Change

    One observation has followed me through almost thirty years of organisational change. There is often a significant gap between planning a change and actually implementing it. Much of the change management I have experienced has been heavily weighted toward planning.

    We produce change impact assessments, stakeholder analyses, communication plans and implementation plans. These are valuable because they provide direction and help organisations understand what lies ahead. But they do not, on their own, move people from where they are today to where they need to be tomorrow. That is transition.

    It raises an uncomfortable question. Have we confused producing a plan with implementing a change?

    The comfort of planning

    Bringing a change manager into an organisation is a significant decision. As consultants we naturally want to add value and leave something useful behind. The result is often a familiar pattern of gathering information, completing impact assessments and producing a comprehensive change plan.

    These activities matter because they create understanding and provide structure. However, they stop short of the real work. They describe the journey rather than helping people travel it.

    Justin Balaski talks about ‘big heavy planning’. I have seen this many times. Detailed plans are produced, endorsed and carefully stored on SharePoint. They satisfy the need to have planned.

    Yet when implementation begins, the plan often becomes a reference document rather than an active guide. Designing a plan and implementing a change are different disciplines. Planning seeks certainty, sequence and control, while implementation requires adaptation, learning and responsiveness.

    What implementation really means

    Imagine a large organisational restructure affecting five thousand people. The future organisational design has already been determined, a project team is responsible for delivery, and Human Resource Business Partners support implementation. Senior leaders provide direction while frontline leaders are expected to lead their teams through the change.

    Implementation is often treated as the delivery of the plan rather than the movement of people. The plan reflects the organisation’s understanding of the change, but not necessarily how people experience it. Nor does it account for the reality that transition unfolds differently across teams, functions and individuals.

    When implementation is measured only by whether activities in the plan occurred, resistance becomes something to eliminate rather than something to understand.

    Separating change from transition

    The planning process remains essential. Understanding the change, assessing impacts and preparing leaders are all critical activities. What needs to change is our expectation of what the plan is supposed to do.

    The plan should provide enough direction for leaders to begin implementation while creating space for learning. The real work sits alongside the formal project in the ongoing management of transition. As implementation progresses, leaders observe, listen, adapt and refine their approach.

    The implementation itself generates new information. That information becomes the guide for the next stage of the transition. Implementation becomes less about following a perfect plan and more about using the plan as the starting point for continuous learning.

    The coach, not the planner

    Rather than becoming the owner of the plan, the change manager becomes a coach and facilitator of implementation. Much of this work involves supporting leaders rather than directing them.

    Helping leaders understand the difference between change and transition is a good place to begin. Change is what is happening to the organisation. Transition is how people move through that change.

    William Bridges and Virginia Satir both provide valuable ways of understanding this human experience. The conversation shifts from asking, ‘Are people resisting?’ to asking, ‘Where are people in their transition?’

    Leadership behaviours matter

    Implementation ultimately succeeds or fails through everyday leadership behaviours. Senior leaders provide direction while frontline leaders create the daily experience of change. The role of the change consultant is to help bridge that gap.

    This is less about producing another template and more about helping leaders develop habits. Creating ongoing dialogue, listening consistently and creating routines all provide stability during uncertainty.

    People rarely remember every slide. They remember the conversations they participated in.

    A different way of thinking about implementation

    Perhaps we need to rethink what good change management looks like. Plans remain important because without them we create unnecessary confusion. But implementation is not the execution of a document.

    It is the continuous process of helping people move with change while learning from their experience. The best change managers help leaders have better conversations, create space for learning and quietly coach organisations through uncertainty.

    Maybe that is where the real value of change management has been all along. Not in making the plan. But in helping people use it.

  • Leader Led Transition Plan

    Every organisation has a change plan. Far fewer have a transition plan. The distinction matters because implementing change and transitioning people are not the same thing. Projects implement change. People experience transition. One is largely technical. The other is deeply human.

    Over the years I have noticed that organisations often invest enormous effort into project plans, governance, communications and training. These things matter. But they do not, by themselves, help people navigate uncertainty. They help deliver the change. They do not necessarily help people move with it.

    A transition plan starts from a different premise. It recognises that the most difficult part of organisational change is rarely defining the future state. It is helping people leave the old one behind while continuing to deliver today’s work.

    A map, not just a project plan.

    People need a map of the journey they are about to take. Frameworks such as Virginia Satir’s Change Model or William Bridges’ Transition Model are valuable because they remind us that uncertainty is normal. They help leaders anticipate what their teams are likely to experience rather than being surprised by it. The destination may already be fixed. The journey almost never is. Good leaders prepare people for the ambiguity between today’s way of working and tomorrow’s.

    Build a network before you need one

    William Bridges argued that successful transitions depend on trusted people throughout an organisation. Not another steering committee. Not another governance forum. Trusted colleagues. The people others naturally turn to when things become uncertain. These people become the stabilising influence during transition. They help translate the change into everyday language, create confidence through relationships and provide feedback that formal reporting structures often miss.

    Move beyond communication towards dialogue

    Most change programs communicate well. Relatively few create genuine dialogue. Communication tells people what is changing. Dialogue allows people to explore what the change means for them. This is where leaders make the greatest difference. Regular stand-ups. Lean coffee sessions. Team conversations. Unscripted discussions where people are listened to with genuine respect. These are not “soft” activities. They are how people make sense of change together. They also surface the questions that matter. How do we maintain business continuity? How do we support one another? What changes in our roles? What stays the same? These conversations create ownership that no email or presentation can achieve.

    Business continuity comes first

    During organisational change, the business still has to operate. Customers still expect service. Patients still need care. Students still need teaching. Communities still rely on government. That means transition planning must place business continuity at its centre. Simple practices such as visual management, regular team reviews, shared workload discussions and continuous improvement routines help teams adapt while continuing to deliver. Transition should reduce operational risk, not increase it.

    Capability already exists

    One of the biggest assumptions in organisational change is that capability must be built through training. Often the opposite is true. Most employees already possess enormous operational knowledge. The task is not to replace that knowledge. It is to help people adapt it. The most effective learning happens through practice, coaching, experimentation and reflection—not simply through formal courses. When leaders involve teams in identifying what they need to learn, capability becomes something people build together rather than something delivered to them.

    Leadership is the transition plan

    Perhaps the biggest lesson is this: A transition plan is not another document. It is a way of leading. It is leaders creating space for conversation. Leaders protecting business continuity. Leaders building trusted networks. Leaders helping people carry the best of the past into the future. Projects may deliver change. But leaders help people arrive. That is the difference. Question: Does your organisation have a change plan, a transition plan, or are they treated as the same thing?

  • The Behaviour of a Change Consultant

    One of the most important aspects of working as a change consultant is behaviour. How we conduct ourselves should reflect the very change we hope to see in others.

    If we advocate for change to be managed in a simple, practical way, then we must demonstrate simplicity and practicality in our own actions. If we ask leaders to listen, we must listen first. If we encourage adaptability, we must be willing to adapt ourselves. Credibility comes when our behaviour aligns with our message.

    More broadly, change consultants need to embody the qualities that support change rather than merely describe them. Flexibility. Humility. The ability to distil complexity into simple, meaningful messages. Deep listening. Without these behaviours, we never truly understand the system we are trying to influence.

    Ideas are central to a consultant’s craft. Yet ideas are not imposed; they are carried.

    Useful ideas spread because people find value in them. They cannot be forced through rigid adherence to a methodology or an insistence that one framework has all the answers.

    Strong ideas persuade on their own merits.

    The real measure of an idea is not whether it survives unchanged, but whether it leaves behind greater capability. Its success is found in what remains after the consultant has gone.

    I have been thinking about this while developing a template on change impact. The template is intentionally simple because simplicity gives it the best chance of gaining traction. But the template alone is not enough. It must be accompanied by behaviours demonstrating how change should be experienced.

    In that sense, the conversations I have with colleagues about the template are just as important as the template itself. Listening to feedback, inviting challenge, and being willing to reshape the tool so it works in their context—this is where change capability is really built.

    The template will almost certainly not survive in exactly the form I created it. Nor should it. What I hope survives is a shared understanding of how to think about change impacts and how leaders can respond with confidence. That residue of understanding is the true contribution of a change consultant.

    When I reflect on consulting in this way, I am reminded of my foundations in social work. It is a professional practice where the state of being is just as important as the state of doing. Both demand continual reflection. Both require humility, curiosity and learning. Ultimately, it is this ongoing attention to our own practice that enables us to make a lasting difference in the practice of others.

  • The end (without saying it)

    As a five-year-old, I remember being told by my mum I’d one day sit in my suburb as an old man, talking with a school friend. It was reassuring. It spoke to continuity.

    Looking back now, I realise—that future quietly disappeared. That memory always stayed with me. It spoke to continuity—of place, of people, of the quiet stability of political, economic and social life.

    The old social contract, if you like.

    It’s the kind of community we rarely see now in “international cities” like Sydney—
    yet we recognise it instantly, and even long for it, when we see it elsewhere.

    Then, perhaps twenty years later, things began to shift.

    Very few people I grew up with settled in the suburb they were raised in. If they did, it came at a considerable financial cost. Prices kept rising, as did the population, and gradually we found ourselves waving goodbye to the idea of staying where we had grown up.

    Our suburbs changed because they had to. More housing. More density. More movement.

    But something else changed too.

    This was not just economic or demographic. It was a profound social shift—one that altered our trajectory and that of our children. We were no longer handing on a future that resembled our own.

    And what strikes me now is this:

    There was no ending.

    No acknowledgement of what was being left behind.
    No shared moment of recognition.
    No stewardship, no gentle guiding hand.

    Just change—continuous, necessary, but largely unmarked.

    And perhaps just as important—consent was only ever partial.

    What unfolded was a negotiation between property owners, developers and government. But many were not part of that conversation. Renters. Young people. Those without a stake in land—but with a deep connection to place. They experienced the change, but did not meaningfully consent to it.

    It strikes me that most organisational change does not manage transition well.

    The goodbye is incomplete—or ignored altogether. Consent is partial. The past is not respected. And the future is often shaped by, and for, a privileged few. So where do we start?

    With dialogue.

    Not surface-level communication, but honest dialogue about the real reasons for change—what is driving it, what is at stake, and what trade-offs are being made.

    Consent, in many ways, falls out of this.

    The weakness of globalisation has often been the broken link between the macro and the micro—where large-scale shifts are not translated into honest conversations about what they mean for people’s lives.

    If my suburb had to change, then a conversation needed to occur.

    One that held the past, the present and the future together.
    One that prepared people for the choices ahead—and for a long goodbye.

    Because that is what was required.

    A long goodbye.

    One that acknowledges what is being lost, respects what has been built over time, and creates the possibility of carrying something forward.

    In conditions of continuous change, nothing dislocates people more than the elimination of shared experience over time.

    So the question becomes:

    What do we carry forward?
    And how do we carry it?

    There are places that have done this well. Post-war Tokyo is one example—where modernisation occurred, but not without a conscious effort to retain continuity, identity and cultural memory.

    Perhaps the work of leadership in continuous change is not just to move people forward—
    but to help them let go, make sense, and carry something of themselves with them.

    What endings are we asking people to move past without ever naming?

  • Start with the Ending

    Whatever the transition, it always begins with an ending, as William Bridges reminds us. Too often in organisational change, we focus on the destination without adequately addressing the baggage people carry and how this load shapes their ability to operate in the future state.

    It can sound overly psychodynamic, but it is not. There are simple techniques that shift what is often labelled “change resistance” into a natural human response—one that, if understood properly, can help shape and improve the change itself. This is where the change practitioner becomes a reflective practitioner and begins to add real value.

    Surface the Late-Stage Status Quo

    Leaders often assume employees understand the late-stage status quo they are operating in. This assumption has significant implications for how change and transition are experienced. Employees rarely see the strategic thinking behind a change, and by the same token, change leaders do not experience the late-stage status quo in the way employees do.

    The picture is further complicated by the dissonance of a late-stage status quo. Low energy, unclear direction and diminishing performance are often felt but not named. Where they are identified, they represent problems requiring high levels of management skill—capability that is not always available or consistently applied.

    It is in this context that the late-stage status quo needs to be surfaced. Change leaders act as catalysts for dialogue about the current reality and how it impacts individuals and the broader organisation. This can take the form of coaching conversations, where individuals and groups are asked reflective questions about their experience of the current context.

    This process functions as sensemaking. It supports the decision to change and provides a foundation for meaningful change impact assessment.

    Announce the Ending and the Foreign Element

    Every meaningful change introduces both an ending and a foreign element. Regardless of efforts to make sense of the context with employees, these need to be clearly communicated. PROSCI links awareness and desire to this moment, and both depend on clarity.

    Communication needs to be consistent and sustained over time, allowing employees to process the ending and align it with their experience of the late-stage status quo. This does not mean everyone will respond positively, but it does mean people have more time to understand what they are being asked to let go.

    Consideration can also be given to transition management support at this stage. While communication is being delivered, transition resources can begin to understand how people are responding and how this aligns with their experience.

    Communication of this kind goes beyond written announcements. It involves cascading messages delivered in person, in writing, and importantly, inviting feedback. Where employees have been engaged in developing a shared understanding of the context, the messaging must align with that discussion. The change should clearly respond to the issues that have been identified.

    Some changes require confidentiality until formal announcement. There is little value in pretending this will not influence employee response. In these cases, change leaders need to work deliberately to align the pre-change context with the proposed change once it is announced.

    Understand What Is Being Let Go and What Is Carried Forward

    The fundamental difference between change and transition lies in what people believe they are losing. It is very difficult to move forward when the change is experienced only as a loss of identity, status, income, convenience or relationships.

    Change leadership needs to understand these losses—not to negotiate them away, but to clearly articulate the opportunities that sit alongside them. Virginia Satir observed that people will often choose the familiar over the comfortable. This highlights the importance of helping people see what can be carried forward into a new sense of familiarity.

    These conversations need to be detailed and sustained. Listening, empathy and reframing are essential to creating the conditions for genuine dialogue—dialogue that treats employees as adults capable of making their own assessments.

    Respect the Past

    Respecting the past is critical. I once worked with a change leader who failed to acknowledge the contribution of a senior manager with 39 years of service. The implications were far-reaching. Employees felt that their own efforts over many years had been disregarded. The proposed change became linked to the unresolved impact of past experiences, and goodwill quickly diminished.

    Throughout sensemaking, communication and understanding what is being let go, change leaders need to actively respect the past. This requires an empathetic understanding of both the internal and external dimensions of change. Zygmunt Bauman suggests that modern life is increasingly liquid—constantly changing—while organisations themselves are slower to respond. This dissonance is not the fault of employees.

    People come to work to do the right thing, and drift in this context is more often a process than a conscious choice.

    Symbols and rituals can help here. Marking endings, recognising contributions and creating space for closure supports people to process what has occurred. In many cases, people are asking a simple question: was it worth it?

    Wrapping Up

    Endings are hard. They are often made more difficult by a lack of attention to the simple practices that help people understand what change means for them.

    When endings are handled well, people are better able to enter the neutral zone with clarity, maintain a sense of identity and begin to stabilise. When they are not, risk increases, resistance hardens and change efforts falter—not because of strategy, but because transition has been neglected.

    William Bridges was clear that transition management is not optional. Investing in understanding the late-stage status quo, aligning it with the proposed change, building dialogue, respecting the past and helping people decide what to carry forward is a critical feature of successful change.

    This is the work I do with leaders—helping them understand endings, stabilise their teams and navigate change with greater clarity. Contact me directly at theodorehastings@208transition.com.au for more.

  • Visualising your response to change

    Quite often responses to change are framed as resistance and set in concrete. Those experiencing change “stay put”, hoping things will pass them by and no one will notice. Those responsible for the change frame those who are “not on board” as resistant and quite often a problem to be dealt with.

    Fortunately, there is a better way to understand individual responses to change and overall capacity to engage with change. This requires a pause by change leaders to make sense of how individuals are responding. It involves curious questioning of those impacted by change.

    What does curious questioning look like? First, change leaders need to take the time to understand where their people are in relation to the proposed change, or the context the change is designed to address. Too often change is announced by leadership and the assumption is that it automatically makes sense.

    This requires getting to the detail of how employees are responding to the context the proposed change is trying to address. How do individuals feel about the current situation? Do they see it as a late stage status quo slowly trending downwards? Are they satisfied with the current situation? Have they been able to put words to how they feel about it?

    Leaders have a responsibility to be curious about the context of the change in order to support employees to understand the risks and opportunities associated with changing or remaining with the status quo. Laying a foundation around the why of change gives employees the agency to properly explore their response and weigh the opportunities and risks of different paths.

    From here, leaders can facilitate a process where individuals consider what doing nothing — or changing — might look like over different time horizons. These could be weeks, months, or years. Something like six weeks, six months and six years can be helpful in gaining perspective and prioritising action.

    This approach also has the benefit of moderating some of the more extreme behaviours that can emerge during complex change. When people imagine what the situation might look like years from now, responses often become more measured and realistic.

    A further way to break down this reflection is to ask employees affected by change to consider the risks and opportunities associated with doing nothing or engaging with change. Evaluating potential costs and benefits over time can illuminate the energy required — and needed — to change. This can be a powerful motivator for people to understand their own capacity to adapt to changing circumstances.

    Employees can then examine the two perspectives and identify the patterns that emerge. Are there more risks associated with doing nothing? Do these risks appear immediately or gradually over time? Are the opportunities associated with either course of action too distant to be motivating? Encouragement should be given for people to discuss these reflections with trusted colleagues, friends or family. The assumptions sitting behind them often benefit from being challenged to obtain a clearer perspective.

    Finally, these reflections and patterns can help individuals assess where they sit on the change spectrum. This is not an exercise in shaming people who do not feel ready or willing to change. Rather, it is a balanced self-assessment that leadership can use to understand organisational capacity for change and to build appropriate feedback mechanisms. In fact, low levels of willingness to change can guide leadership on the scale and type of change required, and the tactics involved.

    Too often change is announced and individuals are expected to respond accordingly. Understanding how employees frame their context — and how they perceive the consequences of changing or doing nothing — is a valuable leadership tool. It sits firmly within the work of making sense of organisational change. If you have any questions about this approach, or would like to explore how it might be adopted in your organisation, please contact me here.

  • Just STOP – when doing less is more.

    Last Sunday, my 85-year-old mother fell after trying to clean a window in her bedroom. She sustained a nasty gash to her leg. She was lucky. It could just as easily have been a broken hip or a head injury. Now she has to visit her GP three times a week to have the dressing changed.

    Two days earlier I’d visited her, done her shopping, and completed paperwork for her aged care support. My mum has mobility issues and needs help at home with basic tasks like making the bed, vacuuming, and cleaning floors. We spoke about the need to be patient.

    This story is a reminder that action has a cost. And as we age, the margin for error shrinks.

    When it comes to older adults, you can understand why they take these risks. They are processing loss, loneliness, frustration — or they simply don’t want to bother their children.

    Organisational change should be different.

    And yet I’ve worked with many leaders who — metaphorically — insist on cleaning the windows without assistance. They fail to pause and calculate the consequences of their actions on themselves and others – the ripple effect of any action on a complex and adaptive system.

    Impatience. Vanity. Impetuosity.

    How else do you explain change programs that fail to account for employee wellbeing? That overlook co-design? That lock in unrealistic deadlines? That elevate tactics over strategy? Preferencing transactions over trust.

    In organisations, the fall is rarely immediate — but it is just as real: burnout, disengagement, avoidable conflict, attrition, rework, and the slow erosion of credibility. In some cases, trauma.

    I gave my mum Gallwey’s STOP tool:

    Step back. Think. Organise your thoughts. Proceed.

    It’s short, accessible, and it fortifies the thinking behind the urge to act. Activity should be built on awareness. There’s a reason that at 52 I no longer climb ladders.

    Every organisational change should apply a tool like STOP before making its move.

    Step back. As change leaders, pause with colleagues and employees and clarify the real need for change. What context are we operating in? Is this a response to an existential threat — or to impatience? What has been tried before? What legacy from previous changes is still living in people’s bodies and attitudes?

    Think. Process what you are hearing and seeing. Compare with other organisations. Check and re-check the information to establish what is factual, what is political, and what is assumed. Let time do some of its work.

    Organise your thoughts. Rarely are we facing a binary choice between “all-out change” and “no change.” What options exist between those extremes? What is the information — and the passage of time — telling you? Test your thinking. Change leadership is not a solo sport.

    Proceed. Not in a linear way. Movement is uneven and should be guided by feedback. Circumstances shift. New information emerges. Unintended consequences appear. Flexibility is not weakness — it is discipline.

    Speed feels like leadership.

    Process and patience are leadership.

    Where in your organisation are people cleaning windows and putting themselves at risk?

  • The Power of Stabilisation

    Over the last while I have been aligning much of what I talk about professionally with my personal and professional life. I have acknowledged that I am sitting in the middle of unending, continuous change.

    In my private life, I occupy an ending. My mum and mother-in-law are both over 85. Their end will be a foreign element introduced into our small family. There will be a period of chaos and ultimately change when they pass away. My wife and I will be orphans, facing a new set of questions about how we choose to live our life with our son and our daughter.

    In my professional life, I am starting my own consulting business. This comes after a period of continuous transition involving the end of my secure public service career, and a particularly difficult period where I tried to re-enter the workforce as an employee.

    If I align these two worlds with Satir curves, I am experiencing a late-stage status quo alongside a period of chaos. Shifting between these two stages makes competing and irreconcilable demands on my system. It also places our family under considerable strain.

    Recently I discussed the value of stabilisation in ongoing and continuous change. Without stabilising people impacted by change, there are very real risks relating to adaptation and wellbeing. In the worst cases, those impacted by change will experience burnout.

    I have experimented with my own plan to stabilise myself through personal and professional change. This has been greatly assisted by Doug Fleener’s work on the day, in particular the application of his six principles: the day, intention, responsibility, simplicity, improvement, and giving to get. For the last week I have been setting up each day through a checklist of questions spanning these six areas. Each night I review and reflect on my progress against them.

    This process has proven incredibly useful in managing the small (and large) fluctuations that have occurred in my mood and responses as I work my way through significant change. It has also attuned me to what constitutes performance in context. The latter is something I think is very important to managing change and transition in the workplace.

    So far, the key takeaways from this approach include:

    Increasing awareness of the day builds an understanding of your limits. This helps you understand what your boundaries are. It also allows you to implement the scripts required to maintain these boundaries. This preserves energy. A win.

    This type of reflection focuses on what is within your sphere of influence. Pausing to think more about what you can control — and then acting on it (even if it means being quiet) — preserves energy.

    As you think more about your boundaries and what you can control, you begin to understand the patterns around you. I am referring to patterns of behaviour and activity that have the potential to drain your energy and impact your wellbeing.

    This process can seem time-consuming. However, when you calculate it against the impact of slipping into a funk because of poor boundaries and self-control, it ends up saving time and enhancing performance.

    A former running coach of mine used to refer to cumulative effort — the gains built up over time from determined and considered effort. I have just started this approach, and early indicators suggest it helps you perform during times of unending or continuous change.

    The more I work with this, the clearer it becomes: stabilisation is not a luxury in continuous change — it is the discipline that makes change survivable.

  • Stabilisation and Continuous Change

    As I become more familiar with the ubiquitous nature of change and transition in the contemporary context, my thinking increasingly shifts toward understanding — and acting on — what those impacted by change can actually control.

    This is a departure from orthodox change thinking that focuses on developing and implementing overarching strategies designed to take people from point A to point Z.

    Daryl Conner’s work on change resilience touches on this, with references to what change recipients can reasonably absorb before they begin to display dysfunctional behaviour. He rounds this out with the idea of Human Due Diligence — the responsibility change leaders have for employees impacted by change. In other words: planning must account for what change actually costs people.

    Framing the impact of change as “resistance” is thankfully becoming outdated. Often it’s a sign of laziness.

    Making sense of prospective change now has to account for the human element. Consider this: in modern life, change occurs in non-stop overlapping waves across our professional and personal worlds. Sitting over the top of this are macro-societal shifts and pressures.

    It is not unreasonable to think change is unending — and the personal cost of this is profound.

    Zygmunt Bauman studied the continuously shifting nature of post-modern life and labelled it Liquid Modernity. In this context, “change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty.”

    There are opportunities in this environment — but they can only be realised through determined effort:

    • an effort by employers and policy makers to account for Human Due Diligence, and
    • an effort by individuals to exercise agency: to focus on what is within their grasp.

    In other words: to stabilise.

    What is stabilisation?

    A useful working definition of stabilisation is:

    Stabilisation is the deliberate act of restoring enough clarity, rhythm, and psychological safety for people to function well again — even while change is still unfolding.

    For the cricket fan, stabilisation is what happens between each delivery as batter and bowler reset.

    In football, stabilisation routinely occurs when a team is under pressure. Individual players — and the collective — go back to the basics of their game and their structure.

    Stabilisation sustains human performance.

    This is why workplace change sense-making must account for a mutuality of stability: the shared responsibility leaders and change recipients have for creating conditions that support stability during change and transition.

    It sounds contradictory: stability and change.

    But it hinges on how the organisation — and the individuals within it — frame agency, or their sphere of control.

    For the individual, stabilisation during change looks like managing the day and the flashpoints within the day. It involves developing “stability katas” such as:

    • prioritising and chunking tasks
    • regulating emotions (especially under pressure)
    • asking for help early
    • helping others
    • reflecting on what you can influence

    Over time, this becomes a pattern of cumulative effort that protects the individual during continuous change.

    For the organisation, stability is created through:

    • clear priorities for the next day or week (including what the organisation will not be doing)
    • predictable check-ins, decisions, and routines
    • leadership presence that is calm and non-reactive

    In this context, time slows — as much as possible.

    Organisational stability lowers the white noise of change without altering the momentum of change.

    Great sportspeople are adept at slowing the game down. They always look like they have a few seconds more to make decisions.

    In a world of non-stop change, stabilisation is the ability for organisations and employees to “slow things down” enough to perform — within what they can control.

    It should be simple, cumulative, and mutual.

    And over time, it builds change resilience.

  • Chats are the oxygen of transition

    Last night I was pleasantly surprised when Justin Balaski—a thought leader from Canada—referred to an experience I had with a hiring manager earlier this year. During the interview, the process was paused and I was told, “change management is more than having chats with people.”

    I was deeply shocked by the comment and withdrew from the recruitment. It did more than signal a misalignment with the role; it was an unintentional attack on something I care about deeply—understanding people.

    Understanding people is all about asking questions and listening. If we cannot build the basis for dialogue, we cannot build the basis for individual transition. PROSCI makes this abundantly clear: organisational change is the aggregate of individual transitions. Understanding people builds empathy, and empathy builds trust. It is in this stable environment that people will engage.

    I learned this as a social worker working in the mental health systems of Sydney in the late 1990s. More recently, my learning about dialogue and trust emerged through coaching my daughter’s football team. Despite being experienced with people and systems, I made the error of contracting with the team as an expert—handouts on formations, principles of play, and expectations of players.

    Unsurprisingly, the players glazed over. One even folded the handout up as if to tear it in two.

    Even with all my experience, I misread the situation. Footballers, employees, people in psychiatric hospitals—all respond to being heard and understood. They do not respond to a display of how technically proficient you think you are as a leader, football coach, or change manager.

    With this reminder, I pivoted my approach. I focused first on building relationships with each player and the broader group as a platform to impart knowledge. Alongside individual chats, a system of training and game preparation, I aligned players to positions that showcased their strengths. When the players saw that I cared deeply about how they played—and how they felt—it built trust.

    Over time, I noticed the players looked at me differently. I was no longer someone demonstrating how good I was, but someone investing in them—to build their performance and their sense of themselves. This is the most critical piece when coaching 16-year-old girls.

    Three months ago, this team won the grand final deep into extra time. They did not lose a game all season. They executed the game plan to perfection. My input on grand final day was encouragement from the sideline and individual tactical prompts in the dugout and before the game. The trusting relationships were already there.

    The best part? They were not the best collection of individual players in the competition. They were, however, the best team—powered by trust built on dialogue.

    For leaders and change practitioners, this experience reinforced two things for me:

    • Dialogue is not the opposite of delivery; it is the precondition for it.
    • When people feel seen and heard, execution follows. When they don’t, no amount of technical expertise will compensate.

    Chats aren’t the soft part of change.
    They are the oxygen of transition.

    Thanks to Justin Balaski for reflecting this experience in a recent post — a reminder that dialogue is not the soft edge of change.