Leaders: This is How You Turn Relentless Change into Competitive Advantage

This article covers:

• Why breaking large programmes into sprints beats “eating the elephant” whole
• The integration that separates success from expensive failure
• How to build organisational muscle through the practice you’re already getting

As a decision-making leader, you already know change has become relentless. Research from Gartner, published in Harvard Business Review, found that in 2022 the average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes per year, up from just two in 2016. That data is three years old now. If anything, the pace of change and the need for change programmes have accelerated since.

The same research found that employee willingness to support change collapsed from 74% to 43% over the same period. Your people are exhausted, and exhausted people don’t change well. They comply minimally, revert to old habits when pressure eases, and quietly disengage from programmes they’ve seen fail before.

You can’t slow down, though. Geopolitical shifts, technological disruption, regulatory change, and AI adoption are the forces driving change today, and they aren’t waiting for you to catch your breath. If you’re hoping things will settle before you build change capability, you’ll be waiting forever.

The first two articles in this series explored what leaders get wrong about their role in change and why they become the blockers they claim to fight. Here, we turn to the practical question: how do you build the capability to make change work, repeatedly?

Readiness must be real, not assumed

First, I’d like to share a real example of an all-too-typical approach. A big FMCG client had completed diagnostics and won an RFP. We started design work. Then the C-suite understood, for the first time, what change actually meant for them. They weren’t ready.

We told them what they didn’t want to hear. That’s why we won the business in the first place.

Readiness cannot be performed. The organisations that succeed are honest about where they’re starting from. Those who pretend discover the gap later, at greater cost, with less goodwill remaining. If you’re not willing to make the change you’re asking of others, wait until you are.

Stop eating the elephant in one sitting

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. The problem is, most organisations try to swallow it whole, then wonder why they’re choking.

Big-bang programmes have become toxic. They’re too large, too slow, and too disconnected from visible results. By the time benefits arrive, the organisation has moved on. Leaders have changed. Priorities have shifted. The connection between effort and outcome has been lost.

With 10 or more changes landing on your organisation each year, chunking becomes essential. Break large programmes into smaller sprints with visible benefits. Oliver Wight’s Method to Meaning™ approach delivers working prototypes in five weeks, not six-month planning cycles that lose momentum before producing results. People see results. They see leaders using the new approach themselves. Enthusiasm builds because progress is tangible, not theoretical.

Chunking also addresses the collapsed employee willingness. People are more likely to engage in a focused sprint than to commit to another 18-month programme. When they see one sprint succeed, they’re more willing to trust the next.

Integration separates success from failure

The sweet spot sits at the intersection of four elements: people, process, behaviour, and systems. Miss any one, and the whole thing weakens.

Why do ERP implementations still fail after decades of practice? Because organisations focus on process and system while neglecting people and behaviour. The technology works. The workflows are documented. But nobody changes how they make decisions, so users quietly revert to spreadsheets.

Oliver Wight’s Proven Path addresses this directly: why we’re changing, commitment, what specifically changes, the behaviours required, the knowledge people need, the stories that make it real, and the systems that support it. Skip steps, and you create conditions for failure.

Consider data quality, too. Organisations work hard to achieve accuracy before going live, then watch it erode because nobody maintains ownership afterwards. Five years later, accuracy has returned to its original level. The project succeeded; the capability was never built.

Sustaining change requires more than a good project team

How do you sustain change? Go-live is the start of your project, not the end. Yet we design initiatives to cut budgets, cut support, and cut attention the moment we go live. Surely it must work now; it’s been well designed. Actually, it won’t, because the people doing the work every day haven’t made it theirs yet.

Think of motorsport. The car is not at its best at the start of the season, and will evolve and improve throughout the campaign. It’s the best version at the end, after dozens of races of iterative improvement. Every mechanic understands that car intimately because they’ve worked on it continuously, not because they built it once and walked away.

The secret to sustaining change is not a good project team. It’s a good run-forever team: the people who own quality and improvement after the project ends. When everyday teams refuse to let standards slip and look for small improvements each time, that’s when change becomes permanent.

Build organisational muscle through practice

Knowledge is increasingly free. You can find frameworks and methodologies with a simple search. What you can’t find is the coaching experience that helps people apply knowledge in your specific context. You can’t download the ability to make change happen.

Ten changes a year sounds exhausting. Reframe it: 10 opportunities to practice. Organisations that approach change as capability-building rather than burden-bearing develop muscles their competitors lack.

Companies send people to raft-building exercises where they collaborate, fail, and laugh when the boss falls in the lake. Six months later, they’re still laughing about it. But the behavioural change? That disappeared because they weren’t given vehicles to practice on.

With 10 changes a year, you have 10 vehicles to practice against. After a year of deliberate practice, you should be excellent, not because you found a magic methodology, but because you’ve learned through repetition what works in your culture, with your people.

This series has explored the what, why, and how of leadership-driven change. The question remains: is your leadership the reason business change keeps failing?

If you’re willing to go there, set out the change. If you’re not willing, wait until you are. Because launching without genuine commitment wastes the goodwill of everyone you’re asking to follow.

This article is based on the Oliver Wight panel discussion “Is your leadership the reason business change keeps failing?” Watch the video here.