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Why Most Change Management Fails (And the Three Dirty Secrets Your Consultants Won't Tell You)
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Nobody warned me when I started consulting twenty-three years ago that I'd spend 87% of my time cleaning up botched change initiatives. Yet here we are, and apparently I'm some sort of corporate archaeologist, digging through the ruins of failed transformations across Sydney, Melbourne, and every CBD in between.
Here's what really gets me fired up: everyone's doing change management backwards.
I was chatting with a mate over coffee in South Yarra last week (terrible coffee, by the way – how do you mess up a flat white?) when he mentioned his company had just hired their fourth change consultant this year. Fourth! That's not change management, that's change roulette.
The dirty truth? Most change fails because leaders are trying to manage people instead of leading them through uncertainty. Big difference.
The First Dirty Secret: You're Over-Planning and Under-Communicating
Look, I love a good Gantt chart as much as the next business nerd. But when your change plan looks like a NASA launch sequence, you've already lost half your team. They're not astronauts. They're humans trying to do their jobs while you reorganise their entire world.
Microsoft figured this out years ago. Instead of announcing massive restructures via company-wide emails (looking at you, every Australian mining company), they started with small pilot groups. Test, learn, adjust. Revolutionary concept, right?
Here's the thing: people don't resist change – they resist being changed. When Sarah from accounts finds out her role's being "enhanced" through a corporate announcement, she's already mentally updating her LinkedIn. But when Sarah helps design her new role? Completely different story.
The Communication Catastrophe
I once worked with a Perth-based engineering firm where the CEO announced a digital transformation by... sending a PDF attachment. A PDF! About digital transformation! The irony was lost on precisely nobody except the executive team.
The second dirty secret is this: your communication strategy is probably rubbish. And I say this with love, having been guilty of the same thing early in my career.
Most change communications read like they were written by a committee of lawyers and HR professionals who've never actually worked a day on the floor. "We are implementing synergistic solutions to optimise operational excellence." What does that even mean?
People need to know three things:
- What's changing for them specifically
- Why it matters to their daily work
- Who they can talk to when things go sideways
Everything else is just corporate wallpaper.
The Third Secret: You're Trying to Change Everything at Once
This is where I get a bit ranty, so bear with me.
Every second organisation I work with wants to simultaneously update their technology, restructure their teams, and implement new processes. It's like trying to renovate your kitchen, bathroom, and living room while hosting a dinner party.
Qantas (and I'll give them credit where it's due) has actually done this well with their recent operational changes. Instead of overhauling everything simultaneously, they tackled ground operations first, then moved to digital customer experience, then crew scheduling. Sequential, not simultaneous.
The human brain can only process so much change before it just... switches off. We call it change fatigue, but it's really just cognitive overload with a fancy name.
What Actually Works (From Someone Who's Seen It All)
After two decades of watching companies get this wrong, here's what I've learned actually moves the needle:
Start with the willing. There are always early adopters in your organisation – find them, love them, make them your champions. They're worth their weight in gold.
Be brutally honest about timelines. If your transformation is going to take eighteen months, say eighteen months. Don't promise six and then spend the next year explaining delays. Trust me on this one.
Create feedback loops that actually work. Not quarterly surveys that nobody reads, but real channels where people can voice concerns without fear of being labeled "resistant to change."
The Brisbane Banking Example
I worked with a mid-sized bank in Brisbane (can't name them, but their offices overlook the river) who were implementing new lending software. Instead of the usual "train everyone in two weeks" approach, they created what they called "Coffee and Concerns" sessions.
Informal. No PowerPoints. Just the project lead, some decent coffee, and honest conversations about what wasn't working. Game changer.
Resistance dropped by about 60% in the first month. Not because the software got better (it was still pretty ordinary), but because people felt heard.
Where Most Consulting Firms Get It Wrong
Here's something that might ruffle some feathers: most change management methodologies are academic nonsense designed to justify consultant fees.
ADKAR, Kotter's 8-Step, Lean Change – they're all fine frameworks, but they're not magic formulas. I've seen brilliant transformations that ignored every "best practice" in the book, and catastrophic failures that followed the methodology to the letter.
The real secret? Change management is just good management with extra communication.
The Technology Trap
We need to talk about technology for a minute, because this is where things get properly messy.
Every piece of change software promises to "streamline your transformation" and "increase adoption rates." Most of it is snake oil with a dashboard.
Your people don't need another app to tell them how they're supposed to feel about change. They need leaders who can have difficult conversations without hiding behind process documents.
I watched a Melbourne-based retail chain spend $200,000 on change management software while their store managers were finding out about new procedures through Facebook posts from other stores. Priorities, people.
The Real Work Starts After Go-Live
This is probably the most important thing I'll say in this entire piece: implementation day is not the finish line. It's kilometer two of a marathon.
Most organisations celebrate go-live like it's mission accomplished. Then they're shocked when everything falls apart six weeks later when the consultants have packed up and left town.
Real change happens in those messy weeks after launch when nothing works quite as expected and everyone's figuring out workarounds. That's when you need your stress management training and your best people on the ground, not in celebration mode.
The Australian Context Nobody Talks About
We Australians have a particular relationship with authority that makes change management... interesting. We'll nod politely in meetings, then have the real conversation at the pub afterwards.
Smart leaders know this and work with it, not against it. Create space for the real conversations. Make room for the eye-rolling and the skepticism. It's not resistance – it's our cultural way of processing change.
I've seen too many American-designed change programs crash and burn because they didn't account for our tendency to say "yeah, nah" to anything that sounds too polished or corporate.
The bottom line? Stop managing change and start leading people through uncertainty. The difference will surprise you.
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