It's time to challenge change management

Intro

'A profound tension [exists], how to develop leaders who can deliver performance and accountability, whilst simultaneously trying to accommodate a culture of adaptability, psychological safety and distributed decision-making'. That's Jason Spiller, editor of The HR Director, from the May 2026 issue which is dedicated to the theme of adaptability, and who commissioned me to write an article: https://www.thehrdirector.com/read-our-latest-issue/

But what caught my eye was on the opposite page (39), which is a survey that asked one question: Is your organisation rethinking traditional change management approaches to better address continuous, overlapping transformations and chronic disruptions?

Worryingly in the age of AI, only 22% said yes.

A personal note here: I do get very frustrated and excited in equal measure when I think about what we could all be doing for the productivity our respective economies around the world if we could flip that into '22% said no'.

What’s the issue?

1. The reality of your working life is that you don't have time to change the way you approach change.
2. In fact, you don't even have time to give change the attention it needs because you're head-down-bum-up playing whack-a-mole with the operational to-do list.
3. Your workload is permanently defined by 'but wait, there's more'. It's unsustainable and yet it's the norm. Which means you and yours are heading for burn-out, or are least sub-optimal operating as your mind and spirit are drained by a culture of 'task-care trumps self-care'.
4. The trouble with change management is that it only prepares your people for change when change is about to happen. And these days, that's just too little, too late. The constant recurring level of project inertia you learned long ago to accept as the norm is now not-so-slowly killing your organisation's ability to keep up.
5. Caught between a rock and a hard place, the answer for 78% of organisations is to change nothing about their approach to change. The question for you is, which side of that percentage are you on?

Consider this

1. AI - real deep-rooted, integral, business redefining AI, not a glorified search engine - isn't the future, it's the present, and if you're not already on board with that, you're not the future.

2. The unique thing about AI is that it isn't static change, it's dynamic. Understand that you're no longer buying the ability to change from a to b, but the ability to keep on changing until you've been through the whole alphabet and moved onto the numbers until you reach infinity.

3. You need to have not just a project & change management approach to change nowadays, you need - as Spiller states in his editorial - a culture of adaptability. The former is logical, structured, pre-planned and defined with a start-middle-end. The latter is the opposite of all those things. It couldn't be a more different approach, and you need both, right now.

4. Changing anything about your culture almost always takes a long time. So start now. Clearly most organisations aren't quick out of the blocks either, so you haven't been left behind yet.

5. A culture of adaptability will reduce burnout, increase implementation speed and get you where you need to be faster. Oh, and you'll all enjoy the ride a lot more too.

Try this

Ask your leadership team The HR Director survey question above. If you're one of the 78%, call me on the red telephone. If you're not, call me anyway and tell me your story so I can share it with those who want to flip from the dark side.