Most change programs over-manage people and under-design everything else
They rely on comms plans, training rollouts, and town halls to get adoption...and when people don't change, the conclusion is usually resistance or culture, but the problem is not always the people, but more what's around them.
After years of applying behavioral science and systems thinking to organizational behavior change, I keep coming back to three things that separate change efforts that work from ones that don't... these aren't separate buckets, they are layers of the same problem:
A) Enable people, don't manage them
That means understanding what's actually driving behavior in the organization, not from gut feel or stakeholder assumptions, but through evidence-based methods...
-What do people need to be able to do the thing you're asking them to do? -What's making it hard? -What's making the old way easier?
You diagnose this the same way you'd diagnose any behavioral challenge: with models, with data, with the people themselves.
B) Manage the process, not the people
Change needs structure, but that structure should be built around the behaviors you're trying to enable, not around project milestones. When your process is aligned to behavioral barriers and the forces that influence them, you stay on track, but when it's not, you end up delivering outputs that look good on a Gantt chart but change nothing.
Good process also gives you something most change programs lack, which is the ability to stop, evaluate whether the interventions are working, and course correct before it's too late.
C) Design the system, not just the intervention
Change doesn't happen in isolation, because people work inside systems with feedback loops, incentives, norms, reporting lines, and physical environments that all shape what they do.
If you design an intervention without understanding the system it sits in, you're solving for one piece while everything else is gonna push back. That means you need to map the relationships, find the levers, and design for the system as a whole. (not easy, as you cant always see it nor know how it will change once you intervene)
However, when these three things come together, you start moving the things that actually matter.... the autonomy, wellbeing, psychological safety, how leadership shows up, how teams collaborate, how decisions get made and so on...
That's when the organization and the people both benefit... and that should be the measure of any change work worth doing!
What do you think?