Accelerating Transformation: From Push to Pull

Twenty-two executives, from chemicals and specialty materials, pharma, medical devices, industrial manufacturing, automotive, appliances, education, analytical instruments and parts distribution. About half of them had been trained in ADKAR. It is a good model. It gave everybody a shared language and it moved management thinking a long way. It is just not the full picture, and rather than say that ourselves, we asked the room to build the model for us and score each letter for how hard it is to pull off in a real business.

ADKAR says five things have to be true before somebody changes. They have to see why it is needed, want it, know what to do, be able to do it, and get backed up afterwards. The room scored every letter. Those scores are where the session turned. Roy van Griensven took the second half, with a method he has now run seven times at LANXESS, thirty to forty people at a time.

The short version

• Getting people to see why change is needed is not the hard part. Asked how hard each step is on a scale of 1 to 10, the room put that at 2 and getting people to want it at 9.
• Resistance is about anticipated loss, not about change. The question people ask is not what's in it for me, but what do I have to lose.
• ADKAR explains one person changing. Push it across a whole company and you get a thousand separate cases to manage instead of one change.
• Trust is the input most often skipped, and no amount of communication substitutes for it.
• It is not how many people you convince, it is who. Somebody doing your job saying it helped them beats twenty town halls.
• Ask the people doing the job to work out the problem themselves and they land on the answer you would have handed them anyway, and then they ask you for it.
• Underneath the visible work sit three results: do people move, does the business get better at its job, does any of it turn into growth. Where you land on all three at once is what winning at work means.

Change management is the tip of the iceberg

Picture an iceberg. The bit above the water is everything you can see us doing, which is stakeholder maps and comms plans and incentives and KPIs and training and software rollouts and ADKAR itself. It is what gets a budget, it is what gets reported, and it is what most of us get judged on.

None of it is wrong, and that is the whole point of drawing it as a tip and not as a mistake. Every one of those tools does something real, and most of us have spent a career getting good at them. The picture just says that all of it together is the small part above the water, and a program built only out of that is being run off its smallest piece. That is why we did not ask the room whether they agreed with the model. We asked them what belongs under the line.

Three things came back, and every one of them is an outcome and not an activity, which is the whole move the model makes. Change management is work you do. The bottom half is results you either get or you do not, so the questions are whether people move, whether the business ends up better at its job than it was, and whether any of it turns into growth. And here is the awkward part, because you can finish every single job above the line and still get none of the three.

At the bottom is the phrase the three add up to: win at work. Notice that it is about the person doing the job and not about the program, because if you get all three you get promoted, and if you miss them you are looking for a new job, probably the same job somewhere else. That is a different deal than most of us were handed. Not run the change program well. Get the three results that made the change worth doing in the first place.

Then each one is drawn as a slider, not a box you tick. There is no line to cross. Every slider runs from a bottom end nobody would defend up to a top end hardly anyone reaches, and your company is sitting somewhere on all three at once. So it is where you land on all three together that counts. One score, not three separate reports. High on all three is what winning at work means. Anywhere else tells you how far off you are, and which of the three is keeping you there.

The room took the model apart itself

Half the room had been through ADKAR or Prosci training. So rather than explain it, the host asked them to fill it in and score each letter. Nobody argued with the model. It is a good account of what has to be true before one person changes. It just does not tell you why that so rarely happens across a few thousand people.

That came from someone trained in the method, not from a critic, and others hit the same wall on their own. Several now use it for one person or one team, and reach for Kotter or something like it above that. One admission landed harder. Almost nobody in the room had gone and read up on motivation or how people handle change until the last couple of years. The host called that our gap, not the field's.

Awareness is cheap. Desire is the unsolved letter.

So which letter is the hard one? The gap answers it. Most of what we build goes at the letter the room scored a 2, whether that is town halls or cascades or comms plans, and very little of it goes at the one they scored a 9. Someone put it better in the chat: getting people aware is easy, getting them to see it the same way is not. Someone else named the opposite problem, which is more common than silence: too many burning platforms at once, which buries the message instead of landing it.

One leader put the real test plainly: people change fast when they know they have to. If the world is moving and your job is on the line, you move. The hard part is making that feel real for a change the company wants and the person has not felt yet. On a CRM rollout, hardly anyone has felt it.

Resistance is about what people stand to lose

So what are people holding on to? The line that turned the conversation came from the floor and it was blunt, which is that the question in someone's head is not what is in it for me, it is what do I stand to lose and what does this change mean for me. Standing, being good at your job, who you know, how much say you have. And we are wired to feel a loss about twice as hard as we feel a win of the same size.

Where the loss gets felt

• Sales-facing initiatives draw an immediate negative read (more CRM admin, accounts reassigned) before any upside registers. Several argued the counter is to make the personal gain concrete and early, and to accept that people weigh their own situation before the company's.
• A pharma leader described motivation falling week by week in a market where staff watch thousands of colleagues leave and are told AI will close the gap. A carrot does not survive that context.
• AI sharpens the imbalance. Transformation is launched from the boardroom to raise revenue or cut cost, and felt at the front line as fewer people doing more. One participant called it an unequal compact and questioned whether intrinsic desire is even available on those terms.
• National and functional culture change the starting point. One European leader noted that in his market a proposal draws forty reasons why it is impossible before anyone tests it.
• The person whose value was knowing the legacy system watches that value move into a database anyone can query. The fear is not irrational — the value really has moved.

Outcome one — getting people moving

How do you go from push to pull? That is the question on the slide, and the middle of the slider is drawn to look bad on purpose, because the middle is where most programs stop and call it a win. Compliance is not a win. People fill in the fields and file the reports because they have to, and few of us do our best work that way. Pockets of commitment is where most big companies sit: a few real leaders pulling, a wide middle that is not fighting you and not moving either, and a long tail that has watched this come and go before. Only the far end, everyone all in, is the job done.

Asked where they sat, the room bunched up at six and seven, and the honest ones added that it swings around by business unit and by month. Nobody claimed the top. The room's own answer for why comes down to control, because when you tell people what to do you take theirs away, and once that is gone so is the drive the whole change was counting on.

Outcome two — strengthening the organization and its people

How do you make the company and the people in it stronger? The slider puts the most common answer, buying the skill in from a consultancy, near the bottom, one step above training people and hoping. The point is not that outside help is wrong. It is that you are renting it, and when the job ends it walks out the door. The next step up is picking it up fast and keeping it in the building. The far end is coming up with something new that the rest of the industry then copies, and that is a different kind of win from having learned somebody else's.

The room put itself at six to seven. We can pick things up, just not fast. One person described a two-hundred-billion-dollar private company that spends a lot on consulting and says out loud that it is buying the expertise in order to learn it and keep it. Here is what gets in the way:

Asked how quickly their organizations absorb new capability and make it stick, on a range from train-and-hope through renting expertise to rapid assimilation and genuine innovation, the room put itself around 6 to 7. Able to absorb, but not fast. The named reasons:

1. 1

   Culture and tenure

   Where the boss is visibly behind it, the keen ones put their hand up and you can build on them. Where the boss is not, it never gets going. One person had run the numbers in their own company and found people who had been there under two years move much faster than the long-timers.

2. 2

   You cannot always look at the data

   European privacy law stops you handing an employer the results for one named person, so finding the people who adapt well across a global business is genuinely hard. The same test used in the US to pick people for a startup program cannot be used that way in Europe.

3. 3

   No permission to be a beginner

   Leaders rarely make it safe to get things wrong while you are learning, and harder still, to drop the habits that made you good in the first place. One person named the fear straight out: change means being a beginner again, level with someone half your age.

4. 4

   Everything at once

   One thing at a time beats everything at once. Ask what you need, by when, and where you need it first. Start with a small group out in front and let it build. Forty-seven things running at once buys you nothing but meetings.

Outcome three — converting the effort into new business

How do you turn the effort into new business? This is the only one of the three we did not ask the room to score, and the reason is the bind under it. Going back to the market to say you will miss the plan was described as close to normal among the companies in the room. But a commercial excellence team is not allowed to claim the number, so scoring yourself on it says almost nothing. The slider still earns its place. It shows what this one looks like when you have it, and it makes plain that the first two are worth little if they never get here.

So how do you show the work paid for itself? The bind got named straight out, and it is a real one. You get judged on revenue and EBITDA you are not allowed to claim, and the business units who have to own the wins are the same people who get to hand you the blame when the numbers miss. They also have a fair case, because they were following a central plan while sitting in forty-six transformation meetings a month.

• The standard is contribution, not causation. Demonstrate that you might have contributed; let the P&L holders own the result.
• Look for leading indicators of whether people are moving. Not adoption scores and feedback surveys.
• The best evidence you get is not on a dashboard: a respected executive who has fought you for years telling the CEO, without being asked, that this one is different.
• Converting the skeptics with power and followership matters more than recruiting the people who sign up for everything.

The room got there on its own, in its own words

The most useful thing about this session is that we did not argue any of this. We asked questions and scored letters, and the answers came back carrying the argument. A supply-chain and transformation lead in appliances put the whole thesis in the form of a question, halfway through a conversation about motivation:

That is the distinction the whole model turns on. Adoption is something you push: we have decided this is right, now please use it. Adaptation is people becoming better able to respond, for reasons they understand and hold themselves. One is a mandate. The other is a set of conditions. And the room kept describing the second one without being led to it.

The same idea, from six different rooms

• A pricing leader in medical technology on why change feels like a threat: the third fear is that if we change, we become a beginner again, level with the twenty-five-year-old who has two years of experience. Loss of standing, not dislike of change.
• A data and AI executive in healthcare on what makes messaging land: the goal stays, but the approach is shaped by the people who have to make the change happen.
• A transformation director in pharma on the condition nobody sets up: whether leaders create an environment where people are allowed to make mistakes while building something new — and allowed to unlearn what made them successful.
• A commercial and growth leader in chemicals on why cohorts work or fail: it depends on whether people are allowed to have a failure and learn from it, or whether it is bolted onto the day job.
• A supply-chain transformation lead on what the Reflect stage really is: a first step of participative co-creation. And on guard rails: they give orientation and still leave room for co-design.
• A commercial excellence lead at a global electrical company on the most common own goal: we bring too many burning platforms at once and overwhelm the message.

None of those people work together. Several had never met. They arrived at the same shape from six different industries, which is worth more than any framework we could have presented — because it is not a claim about how change works, it is a set of practitioners describing what they have watched happen.

AIRAS — the answer put to the room

Roy van Griensven's method, co-designed with the Consortium and run at LANXESS through seven rounds. It was offered as one worked answer to the gap the room had described, not as the general solution.

1. 1

   Align — improve or transform?

   This is the fork, and the one most people get wrong. A stack of improvement projects, however well you run them, was never going to close the gap between where they were and where they had to be. If the honest answer is improve, then ADKAR and a systems rollout are probably right. If the answer is transform, everything after it has to change. Agreeing on that also meant stopping most of what was already running and cutting the outside consulting spend by about eighty percent to buy room to reset.

2. 2

   Inspire — honor the past, then show the shift

   For decades customers queued at the door and the constraint was capacity, so the discipline was picking customers and optimizing the asset. Today one or two walk past. The job is now to go out and hunt, which most people in the company had never had to do. The phase shows how other companies facing the same shift responded — examples, no instruction, no judgment.

3. 3

   Reflect — ask the people who will be changed

   Roy reckons more than nine in ten people have never once been asked what they think should change, and that is why this step makes everyone uncomfortable and why the board has to say yes to it before you start. It has guard rails, which he calls guided discovery: enough of a steer to point people at the things that matter for a company in this spot, without writing the answer for them.

4. 4

   Apply — ninety days on the real job

   Groups of thirty to forty, in a room where it is safe to say what you think, each picking the one thing that would let them do their job better. Then ninety days of weekly coaching from someone who has done that job for decades, with tools and playbooks turning up when people ask for them, not because someone sent them. Most groups ask for another ninety days. At the end they present to a senior committee that turns up to listen.

5. 5

   Scale — which was never designed

   The S was not in the original model. It showed up on its own. It spread because people told someone doing the same job that it had helped them, until the problem was keeping up with the demand instead of creating it.

The inversion

So how do you get people to ask you for the thing you were going to make them do anyway? Every group starts from a problem. No idea what the customer needs, no technical help, no time. And every group ends up in the same place: we need a proper way of doing this, a process, a tool. They land on CRM by themselves. Nobody rolled CRM out to them.

They end up exactly where head office or a consultancy would have put them, and that is the bit people miss. The answer did not change. Only who got there did. A tool the users asked for does not need an adoption program, and the trust you bank in round one makes the next few changes far cheaper, including in the parts of the business that were most against it. On AI, the same company now has salespeople asking to stop running pilots and just scale it.