A few years ago I sat in on a change programme that, on paper, had done everything right. There was a clear rationale, a phased rollout, an engagement plan, workshops, FAQs, a communications calendar. Leadership had genuinely tried to bring people along.

Three months in and adoption had stalled, but not through open resistance. People turned up, nodded, used the new process when someone was watching, but underneath, nothing had really moved. In the exit interviews that followed the wave of departures later that year, one phrase kept turning up in different words: it was done at us.

That's the pattern that caught my interest, because the change was not wrong and it wasn't that people were difficult. There was something else happening underneath the good design.

The more thoroughly we manage a change, the more we risk removing the one thing that makes it stick; people's sense that they authored and shaped it.

This isn't really about communication quality, or how well the "why" was explained. You can explain a decision beautifully and still take something away in the act of explaining it, because the decision was already made, somewhere else, by people who were not in the room where the work actually happens. What is offered at that point is not participation. It asks for acceptance.

Most change practice still asks: how do we get people to accept this well? The more useful question is: what would this look like if the people closest to the work had shaped it first?

It’s a different starting point and it assumes people are already capable of working out how something should function in their own area and that the job of leadership is less to install a solution and more to remove whatever's currently stopping people from solving it themselves.

Most teams know exactly where the friction is. Yet they are rarely asked before the answer arrives.

This isn't a claim that every decision is open. Some things are genuinely fixed, and there's a real difference between an organisation that says so plainly and one that runs a consultation over a decision that's already made. People can tell the difference and the second costs far more trust than the first.

‍

A practice worth trying

Before your next change; perhaps a new process, a revised structure, a new tool, try reversing the usual sequence. Instead of designing the change and then consulting on it, bring the people who'll actually live with it into the room first, and ask them to draft the first version of how it should work. Leadership's role shifts from author to editor: testing what comes back, adjusting where it genuinely needs adjusting, and being honest about where non-negotiables sit, but starting from their draft, not yours.

It's a small structural change with a large effect. It relocates authorship to where the knowledge already is.

And this goes beyond fairness. The people closest to the work almost always carry ideas about how it could genuinely work better, ideas formed from a proximity no leadership team has, however well-intentioned. Pair that view with the organisational perspective on where things need to go, and you have the raw material for something better, not just something more accepted.

But that combination only happens under one condition, and that is to disrupt old beliefs, assumptions and worldviews. Otto Scharmer's Theory U work points at exactly this; that meaningful change asks for a different pace, one that includes stopping, letting go of what we assumed we already knew, and becoming genuinely present to what's actually there and what could be possible before deciding what to do about it. Skip that, and "consultation" just becomes a faster way to arrive at the same answer leadership was always going to reach.

All of this shows up in team dynamics as much as organisational ones. The manager who solves a problem before the team has finished describing it, the leader who reads "consultation" as informing rather than involving.

It also depends on what the leader honestly believes about the people in the room. A leader who assumes people need to be told what to do will treat consultation as a formality, however good the process is designed. A leader who assumes people are already capable will find the process almost looks after itself.

It shows up culturally too, in how quickly an organisation's habits default to deciding-then-explaining rather than the slower work of deciding together.

And it showing up in a newer place: AI-enabled transformation moves faster than most change ever has, which makes it easier than ever to skip the step where people co-shape what's coming rather than simply receive and accepting it. Speed makes the skipped step harder to notice.

None of this is about permission for endless debate, or leadership abdicating a call that's genuinely theirs to make. It's about which decisions actually belong to the people closest to the work and being honest, rather than procedural, about where that line sits.

‍

Reflection for the month

A question to carry into your conversations:

• Where, this month, are we asking people to comply with a decision they had no real hand in shaping?
• Where have we already decided the answer before we asked the question?
• Whose role has quietly become "accept this" rather than "shape this"?
• What would we hear if we treated hesitation as information, rather than a problem to manage past?
• What would it cost us to say plainly that some part of this isn't open, before someone works it out for themselves?
• Where are we asking for people’s input while still assuming we already know the answer?
• ‍

Change that people author tends to travel. Change that's only administered tends to reverse eventually.

If this surfaces something worth exploring in your context, I am always open to thinking it through with you.