Why change fails before it starts
The announcement goes out. The deck is polished. The rationale is airtight. And within seventy-two hours, the most influential people in the organization have already decided whether this will work — not based on the logic, but based on what they've been through before. Change doesn't fail in execution. It fails in the first conversation your managers have in the hallway after the all-hands.
What we've learned, after years of entering organizations at their most fractured, is that the human response to organizational change is not irrational. It is deeply, almost mathematically rational — given what people have experienced, what they've been promised before, and what they've learned to believe about how power moves in their organization. The strategy doesn't account for that. It never does.
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