What twenty years of Leadership taught me about the change you keep putting off

I have spent most of my career inside large companies while they tried to change, and I want to tell you the thing that took me a long time to understand, which is that companies never actually change. People change, one at a time, or they don’t, and everything else is stagecraft.

Years ago I stepped in as the change lead on a massive ERP, 6 months into 18, that had everything a change is supposed to have: There was a steering committee, a massive project plan (this was pre-agile implementation, kids!) with a color-coded stakeholder-differentiated readiness plan across 200+ departments statewide. I prepared to do my routine sponsorship assessment interviews and was told “no”.

I pushed back. I escalated through the PM and to the engagement manager. They wouldn’t budge. The chief sponsor on the client side called me and explained why it couldn’t be done: politics :(  and why it needn’t be done: different politics :). Everyone is aligned. No need to waste the time of important people. That is limited and we cannot squander it in this way. I explained that even if everyone wants this multi-year, many-multimillion dollar ERP, we may not truly have alignment on what success looks like, what the tradeoffs will be, who needs to compromise and how. Ultimately I had to settle for this being a formal risk they accepted: Not following best practices to conduct sponsorship assessment. Noted.

A big fat "No Thank You" on best practices - noted!

Eighteen months and several million dollars later, I sat in a meeting where the head of procurement explained, without a trace of irony, that they were STILL running the old system in parallel, just to be sure, and that they had no plans to actually sunset it because “The new one doesn’t really work for us.” The enterprise had changed on paper. This vital part of it had not changed at all, and neither had a few thousand people his system supported. This was a big win in the papers. Sure, we had hiccups, but at the end of the day we were on time and under budget. But in one significant way that really mattered, the adoption had not occurred. Millions would be spent to maintain two systems, until later another RFP, more millions on another system and its integration.

Getting stuck in the same change cycles can really slow you down!

I used to find this incredibly frustrating - I now see it as entirely expected. This leader did not have his say in creating the future target state. His vision of the future, what he needed and why were not taken into account. When I started coaching individuals, I expected the work to feel different from the corporate work. It turned out to be the same work in a smaller room. The person who wants to leave a job she has outgrown, the person who wants to write in the mornings, the person who wants to stop disappearing into his phone at night, every one of them is running a change project with a missing sponsor and an unconsulted stakeholder, and both of those roles are the same person.

So the questions I ask now, whether the client is a Fortune 100 company or one tired person on a video call, are versions of the same questions. What does the other side actually look like, in detail, on an ordinary day? When have you pulled off something like this before, because you almost certainly have? What is the resistance protecting, because it is always protecting something? What would make this worth doing even without an accolade? And what can we do this week, today, to make this successful?

None of this is complicated. Most of it is not even new. But there is a difference between knowing something and building your life on it, the same way there is a difference between an ERP announcement and a fully adopted ERP without a forever-shadow system running in parallel. I am building this business because after two decades of watching change succeed and fail at every scale, from ten-thousand-person transformations to one person deciding to walk after dinner, I have come to believe the mechanics are learnable, and that most of what we are told about self-improvement ignores the mechanics entirely in favor of inspiration, which is the vibe-ification of change. It feels important and it achieves nothing.

I'm big on results.

What I plan to do here is tell you a true story about change, sometimes from the corporate world, sometimes from coaching, sometimes from my own stubborn life, and pull out what it actually shows about how people move. If you are the sort of person who is outwardly doing fine and privately circling something, some change you have not started and maybe have not even said out loud, I am writing this for you specifically.

The director eventually purchased a new procurement system, by the way, the one he wanted all along. Many millions and years later, his resistance belied his desire to see the system he envisioned brought into the world. He was allowed to stick to his guns, waiting out the politics until he could enact his own change upon the enterprise. Then, of course, the change was much easier. He had also learned first hand just HOW it important it is to ensure everyone with a voting stake is bought-in, fully agreeing on the What, When, Who, Why and How of the change.

That is the whole field, really. Everything else is stagecraft.