Why executing change is no longer enough
Imagine a leadership team doing just about everything we expect good leaders to lead organizational change.
They have a clear strategy. They’ve established priorities, communicated expectations, and put measures in place to track progress. Their people understand where the organization is headed, and the team meets regularly to review execution.
By most conventional measures, they’re doing a good job.
Yet something isn’t quite working.
Customer expectations are shifting. New competitors are approaching the market differently. Technology is changing what people can do and how they work. Employees closer to customers and operations are noticing things that haven’t yet made their way into executive discussions.
The leadership team responds by doing more of what has worked before. They communicate more frequently, reinforce priorities, and push for greater alignment.
And sometimes, that makes the problem worse.
Because the organization may not be struggling to execute its strategy.
It may be executing a strategy built on assumptions that are becoming less accurate.
An organization can be perfectly aligned around an outdated picture of reality.
That is one of the reasons I believe we need to rethink how we approach organizational change.
Change has changed. But many of our assumptions about how organizations should respond to it haven’t changed nearly enough.
The approaches that made us successful weren’t wrong
For much of modern organizational history, information was harder to access, expertise was more concentrated, and coordinating work across large organizations required substantial structure.
That environment shaped how organizations operated.
Information moved up through the hierarchy. Leaders gathered insights, developed a broader picture, made decisions, and communicated direction. Managers translated those decisions into plans, and teams executed.
This approach created tremendous progress.
It enabled organizations to scale, coordinate complex activities, maintain quality, and deliver results that would have been impossible without clear structures and accountability.
And much of it remains essential.
The problem is not that these approaches were wrong.
They were developed for a different reality.
One of the most difficult aspects of organizational change is that success reinforces the assumptions behind it.
When a particular way of operating produces results, organizations build around it. They develop processes, measures, incentives, and leadership practices that make them increasingly effective at doing what they already know how to do.
Over time, those practices become more than methods. They become part of how the organization understands itself and its environment.
This is closely related to a distinction organizational scholar James March explored decades ago: the tension between exploiting what we already know and exploring new possibilities.
Organizations need both. But the benefits of improving existing capabilities are often more immediate and measurable than the uncertain returns from questioning established assumptions.
The result is a subtle trap.
An organization can become increasingly effective at doing what made it successful while becoming less capable of recognizing when those same approaches are losing their relevance.
And because the organization is still performing reasonably well, the problem may remain invisible until the consequences become difficult to ignore.
What has changed?
People haven’t fundamentally changed. We still seek clarity, belonging, competence, and some sense of control over our circumstances.
But the environment in which organizations operate has changed significantly and that impacts organizational change.
Consider three developments.
Expertise is more distributed.
The people with the most relevant information about an emerging challenge may not be the people with the most senior titles.
They may be employees interacting directly with customers, teams experimenting with new technologies, partners seeing changes across an industry, or people working at the boundaries between functions.
Leaders still need to exercise judgment and set direction. But they can no longer assume that the most accurate understanding of what is happening will naturally emerge through traditional reporting channels.
Information moves faster.
Changes in customer behavior, technology, competitive offerings, and market expectations can become visible long before they appear in quarterly results or annual planning discussions.
Organizations have access to more information than ever. Yet access alone doesn’t guarantee understanding.
In fact, more information can make it harder to distinguish meaningful signals from noise.
Challenges are more interconnected.
A decision about technology may affect customer relationships, operating models, talent requirements, economics, and competitive positioning simultaneously.
What appears to be a problem within one function may actually reflect changes across the entire organization or its broader environment.
No single leader or department has a complete view of those relationships.
These conditions don’t eliminate the need for hierarchy, strategy, or decisive leadership.
They challenge a more fundamental assumption: that the organization can reliably understand a changing environment by collecting information at the top, deciding what needs to happen, and pushing direction back down.
That brings us to a distinction I believe deserves much more attention.
Being good at implementing change is not the same as being capable of changing
When it comes to organizational change, most organizations have developed some capacity to manage it.
They launch transformation initiatives, establish executive sponsorship, create implementation plans, communicate the rationale, and measure progress.
Those disciplines matter.
When an organization has identified a necessary change, whether implementing a new technology, integrating an acquisition, or redesigning an operating process, disciplined execution can make the difference between success and failure.
But those approaches largely address one question:
How do we move from where we are today to a future state we’ve identified?
What happens when the future state itself is uncertain?
What happens when the assumptions behind the plan begin changing during implementation?
What happens when the people closest to the work recognize an emerging opportunity or problem that leadership hasn’t anticipated?
These situations require another organizational capability and approach to organizational change.
Not just the ability to implement a change, but the ability to continually recognize what is changing, reconsider existing assumptions, and adapt accordingly.
Management scholar David Teece describes related capabilities in terms of sensing opportunities and threats, seizing them, and reconfiguring organizational resources.
The important point is that adaptation cannot depend entirely on an occasional strategic review or a major transformation initiative.
It needs to become part of how the organization operates.
Consider how Amazon has approached decision-making.
In his 2016 shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos distinguished between consequential decisions that are difficult to reverse and decisions that can be changed relatively easily.
His argument was that organizations shouldn’t apply the same lengthy decision process to both.
For reversible decisions, excessive analysis and escalation can make an organization unnecessarily slow.
The underlying lesson extends well beyond Amazon.
An organization needs to distinguish between decisions requiring centralized judgment and coordination and those that can be made closer to the action, where relevant information is often more immediate.
That doesn’t mean pushing every decision downward.
It means designing decision-making around the nature of the decision rather than automatically around the hierarchy.
And that is only one part of becoming more adaptable.
Alignment matters. But what are we aligning around?
In my work with CEOs and leadership teams, alignment comes up constantly.
And for good reason.
Organizations cannot make meaningful progress when people are working toward conflicting priorities, operating from different assumptions, or pursuing disconnected agendas.
But I’ve increasingly come to believe that we sometimes ask the alignment question too early.
We ask whether people understand the strategy.
Whether they support the direction.
Whether their activities and measures reinforce organizational priorities.
Those are important questions.
But there is another one that needs to come first.
Does our strategy reflect enough of the reality that people throughout the organization are seeing?
Think about what happens when a leadership team develops a strategy using the information available to it, communicates that strategy effectively, and builds strong alignment around execution.
Meanwhile, employees closest to customers are noticing changes in expectations. Operational teams are identifying constraints that don’t fit existing assumptions. People experimenting with new technologies are discovering possibilities that could fundamentally alter how work gets done.
Those observations may never meaningfully influence strategic decisions.
The organization can become more aligned and more efficient while its understanding of reality becomes increasingly incomplete.
This isn’t an argument for crowdsourcing strategy or making every decision by consensus.
Leadership still requires making choices, establishing priorities, allocating resources, and accepting accountability.
But the quality of those decisions depends on the quality of the understanding that informs them.
And that understanding increasingly needs to draw on knowledge distributed throughout the organization and beyond it.
The challenge is to create shared understanding that makes aligned action more effective.
Shared understanding doesn’t mean everyone agrees.
It means the organization has ways to bring relevant perspectives into view, challenge assumptions, understand competing interpretations, and act with enough common context to make good decisions.
Sometimes that process reinforces the existing strategy.
Sometimes it reveals the need to change direction.
Both outcomes are valuable.
Building an organization that can keep changing
This is where the conversation needs to move beyond typical approaches to organizational change and just encouraging people to be more adaptable.
Telling employees to embrace change, think differently, or challenge assumptions accomplishes little if the organization’s operating practices make those behaviors difficult.
A leadership team may say it wants people to speak up while rewarding those who consistently deliver against the established plan.
It may encourage experimentation while requiring multiple layers of approval for small decisions.
It may emphasize learning while treating deviations from forecasts primarily as performance failures.
People quickly understand what the organization actually values.
If we want organizations that can continually adapt, we need to examine the conditions under which people work, make decisions, and learn.
I would start with four questions.
1. What are we not seeing?
Every leadership team operates with an incomplete picture.
The question is whether the organization has reliable ways to discover what is missing.
Where are customers behaving differently from what our strategy assumes? What are employees noticing that hasn’t appeared in our reports? What are partners and people outside our industry seeing that we may be overlooking?
Leaders need to create opportunities for information to challenge their understanding, not merely confirm it.
2. What assumptions are we no longer questioning?
Successful organizations develop strong convictions about what creates value, how customers behave, and what their capabilities allow them to accomplish.
Some of those convictions remain valid for years.
Others gradually become constraints.
A useful strategic conversation shouldn’t focus only on whether we’re achieving our goals. It should also examine the assumptions on which those goals and plans depend.
What would have to be true for our current strategy to be wrong?
What evidence would cause us to reconsider a major commitment?
And are we genuinely open to that evidence?
3. Where are decisions being made?
Moving every decision to the top may create consistency, but it can also slow responses and separate decisions from relevant knowledge.
Decentralizing everything creates different problems. Teams can optimize for their own priorities while undermining the broader organization.
The answer isn’t choosing between centralized and decentralized leadership.
It’s being deliberate about which decisions require enterprise-wide coordination, which involve significant risk, and which can be made closer to customers and operations.
Clear direction and appropriate decision rights allow people to act without requiring constant permission.
4. How quickly do we learn when reality contradicts our expectations?
Many organizations review performance regularly.
Fewer are equally disciplined about reviewing what performance reveals about their assumptions.
When an initiative underperforms, do we immediately focus on getting execution back on track?
Or do we also ask whether the original assumptions were accurate?
When an experiment produces an unexpected result, does that insight influence broader decisions?
When people identify a changing customer need, how quickly can the organization respond?
Learning needs to be connected to decisions and action. Otherwise, it becomes another activity rather than an organizational capability.
These questions aren’t a substitute for strategy or execution.
They are ways to strengthen both.
The leadership challenge has become more demanding
None of this suggests that leaders should step aside and let organizations somehow adapt on their own.
Quite the opposite.
In an environment with more distributed expertise, faster information flows, and greater interdependence, leadership becomes more demanding.
Leaders must provide direction without assuming they possess the clearest picture of everything happening around them.
They must create alignment while remaining open to evidence that challenges the assumptions behind that alignment.
They must empower people to act while maintaining accountability and coordination.
And they must help their organizations learn without allowing constant reconsideration to become an excuse for indecision.
This requires a different relationship with certainty.
The leader’s responsibility isn’t to have every answer. It is to ensure the organization can access the knowledge it needs, make sound decisions, and update those decisions as circumstances evolve.
Sometimes that will mean making a decisive strategic choice.
Sometimes it will mean questioning a deeply held assumption.
And sometimes it will mean recognizing that the people you’re trying to get aligned may already see parts of reality you’re missing.
That last possibility is worth considering.
Because when leaders treat alignment primarily as getting others to understand their picture of the world, they may overlook the opportunity to improve that picture.
A different question for leaders
Think again about that leadership team from the beginning.
They have a clear strategy. They’re communicating effectively. Their people understand the priorities. They’re measuring execution and holding teams accountable.
All of that matters.
But what if the organization is getting better at executing its plans while becoming less capable of recognizing when those plans need to change?
What if its greatest strength, the ability to organize people and resources around a chosen direction, is also making it harder to question whether that direction remains appropriate?
The challenge for leaders isn’t to abandon the practices that created past success.
It’s to recognize that those practices, on their own, may no longer be sufficient.
We still need organizations that can make decisions, establish direction, and execute with discipline.
We also need organizations that can recognize emerging realities, challenge their own assumptions, and continually adapt.
The question is no longer only whether our organizations can execute the changes we decide to make.
It’s whether they can recognize when what we believe, what we do, and even where we’re headed needs to change.
That is a different approach to organizational change.