Change Management Starts One Decision Too Late

source: canva

There is a sentence I hear from change professionals all the time:

"I could see it coming. But by the time they brought me in, the decision had already been made."

The new system had been selected. The operating model had been designed. The restructure had been approved. The budget had been committed. And now the change team was being asked to get everyone on board.

Sound familiar?

For years we've talked about transformation failure as an adoption problem. People resisted. Leaders didn't communicate enough. Managers weren't engaged. Training came too late. The organization wasn't ready.

All of those things matter. But I think we're missing something that happens much earlier.

Sometimes what looks like resistance to change is actually a problem with how the change was defined in the first place.

We know change management works

This isn't an argument against change management, quite the opposite.

Prosci's Best Practices in Change Management research reports that 88% of initiatives with excellent change management met or exceeded their objectives, compared with just 13% of those with poor change management. That's an enormous difference, and it's why the discipline exists.

And yet the results across our industry stay stubbornly uneven. You'll often see the claim that 70% of transformations fail - but you don't need a contested statistic to recognise the pattern. Almost everyone reading this can name a change programme that was well run, competently executed, properly resourced and still didn't deliver what it promised.

So perhaps we need to ask a different question. What happened before the change management process began? 
Because adoption cannot rescue a poorly framed decision.

I watched a programme where a project manager was appointed to get it done, and started - correctly, by their training - with the charter. Nobody checked whether the problem was clear, what value looked like, or whether alternatives had genuinely been examined.

The functions who would have to live with the result were consulted after the shape was already fixed, which is another way of saying they were informed. Silos deepened, because each group was defending a decision it had never been part of.

Fourteen months later it was described as an adoption problem.

It wasn't. It was a framing problem that had finally become visible.

The change profession is already moving upstream

I went through 15 change and transformation roles advertised in the last week. Alongside the familiar communications, training and resistance-management requirements, here is what organizations are now asking change professionals to do:

• shape governance frameworks and portfolio strategies

• develop transformation roadmaps

• build compelling business cases

• create ideation frameworks and secure executive buy-in

• lead through ambiguity without direct authority

• align complex stakeholder networks

• evaluate solutions against business needs

• identify risks and opportunities

• measure outcomes and value realization

That is a very different job. We are asking change and transformation professionals to operate before, during and after the decision. And I think that's exactly where the profession should be going!

But there's a problem. Many practitioners have been given responsibility further upstream without being given a structured process for working there.

We have excellent tools for helping people move through change. What we need alongside them are tools for helping organizations decide what change they should make in the first place. That's where opportunity framing comes in.

Before you manage the change, frame the opportunity

Imagine you're told: "We're implementing a new CRM."

Most teams immediately start moving. Who is impacted? Who are the sponsors? What's the communication plan? What's the training strategy? Where will resistance come from?

All useful questions. But I would start somewhere else.

Why are we implementing a CRM? And I don't mean the answer in the business case.

I mean: what is actually happening in the business that we are trying to change?

Maybe commercial teams don't have a shared view of customers. Maybe renewals are being lost. Maybe data quality is poor. Maybe teams are maintaining their own spreadsheets because they don't trust the existing system.

Suddenly "we need a new CRM" becomes "how might we create a reliable, shared view of our customers that helps commercial teams improve retention?"

Those are not the same opportunity. The first has already decided the answer. The second creates room for a decision.

And that room is where enormous amounts of value are won or lost.

This is the conversation I want change professionals in

You may be thinking: I don't get to choose when I'm brought in. That's fair - usually you don't. But these questions work just as well when you're late. Asking them out loud, in front of a sponsor, is exactly how people discover you can do this work. It's the most reliable route I know to being invited earlier next time.

So before the solution is chosen or as soon as you arrive, whenever that is ask:

• What problem or opportunity are we actually solving? Not the symptom. Not the requested system. Not the solution somebody put into the budget eighteen months ago.

• What does success look like? What would actually be different in the organization if this worked? How would we measure it?

• What creates value here? Speed? Cost? Customer experience? Reliability? Employee experience? Risk reduction? Capability? Because without agreeing what matters, how can we compare solutions?

• What are we treating as facts that are actually assumptions? "We have to implement this system." "The regulator requires it." "Operations won't accept that." "We need it by January." "We can't change the process." Maybe. But which of those are genuine givens, and which have simply gone unchallenged?

• What alternatives have we genuinely considered? If there is one preferred option and two options nobody seriously expects to select, that isn't decision-making.

• Who needs to be in the room while there are still meaningful choices to make? This may be the biggest one. We talk endlessly about stakeholder engagement. But engagement after the important decisions have been made is very different from participation while those decisions are still being shaped. By then you're often not asking "what do you think?" You're asking "how can we get you comfortable with what we've already decided?" People can tell the difference.

Capital projects learned this lesson a long time ago

I came to this from the world of major capital projects, in the oil and gas.

When the decision you're making may commit hundreds of millions - sometimes billions - you cannot simply choose a solution and hope execution sorts it out.

Top oil and gas companies developed structured front-end processes precisely because the cost of getting the early decisions wrong is enormous. You frame the opportunity. You define value. You surface assumptions. You explore alternatives. You sequence decisions. You bring the right stakeholders into the conversation. You test the maturity of the opportunity.

And only then do you progressively commit more capital.

There are decision gates for a reason. The purpose of a gate isn't bureaucracy. It's to ask one question: do we know enough to make the next commitment?

I increasingly believe change and transformation professionals need this capability too.

Not instead of change management. Before it.

Because your job is changing

If your role now asks you to shape governance, influence investment decisions, develop business cases, evaluate solutions, build roadmaps and demonstrate value realization, then you are no longer only managing the people side of somebody else's decision.

You are participating in the decision itself.

That's a much more powerful position. But it requires a different set of tools.

You need to know how to take something messy and ambiguous and structure it. How to separate a given from an assumption. How to move a team from "we need X" to "how might we achieve Y?" How to define success before selecting a solution. How to create meaningful alternatives. How to structure decisions and decision gates. How to bring stakeholders together before positions become entrenched.

And how to build a roadmap around the decisions that matter - not simply the activities that need to happen.

That's not traditional change management. But I believe it is becoming part of the job.

Try four questions on your next transformation

The next time someone hands you a programme where the solution appears to have already been decided, don't immediately start with the change plan.

Ask:

1. What problem are we actually solving?

2. How will we know we've created value?

3. What alternatives did we genuinely consider?

4. What are we currently treating as a fact that might actually be an assumption?

Then watch the conversation.

You may discover that the organization isn't ready for a change plan yet. It still has a decision to make.

And perhaps that's exactly where you should be involved.

This is what I teach in my Decision Gate Process and Opportunity Framing programme - the front-end disciplines from major capital projects, made practical for people working in change, transformation, PMOs and consulting. If you've ever thought "I could see the problem, but I was brought in too late," it was built for you. Next cohort starts next Thursday.

→ Explore the Academy and the next cohort