Why Organizational Change Fails (a story)

A friend called me last week. She was frustrated. She had just come out of a meeting at work.

Her organization had been going through big changes. By the time leadership brought in a consultant to help, a lot was already underway – changes to team structure, roles, and staffing. The team had been reduced by around 30 percent. The workload had not.

Employees had been told what the changes were and expected to keep going. No training. Nothing to help people make sense of what the changes meant for their work, or for them. The people implementing the change were simply handed the new reality and asked to carry it.

By the time the consultant arrived, it was visible. People were unhappy. Absenteeism was rising. Burnout was deepening. Some had quietly started looking for other jobs.

And in the consultant’s very first session, someone asked a question.

When in a change process, they wanted to know, is it appropriate to raise concerns? To flag something that hadn’t been fully thought through? To point out where things might be heading in directions that hadn’t been intended?

The consultant’s answer: it is not your job to ask those questions. It is your job to follow the directions.

My friend fell quiet after she told me that. I did too.

This kind of change management rarely works.

The symptoms she described – the absenteeism, the burnout, the people quietly leaving – are predictable consequences of a particular way of seeing organizations. And they are signs of an organization whose health has moved out of balance. Two lenses help explain why.

Every organization operates from a worldview, whether it names it or not.

The Genuine Contact Way works with four worldviews:

• Mechanistic worldview. The world is a machine – effective when environments are simple, stable, and predictable. Each person has a defined function. They execute it. They do not question the design.
• Systemic worldview. The world is an ecosystem. Drawing on complexity theory, cybernetics, and new science, it recognizes that causes and effects are rarely simple and that interventions spread in ways that aren’t always visible in advance.
• Metaphysical worldview. The world is energy and consciousness. This worldview acknowledges dimensions of human experience – energy, intuition, spirit – that go beyond what can be measured or explained.
• Holistic worldview. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This worldview encompasses the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual dimensions of an organization, and includes the three worldviews above within it.

The answer my friend’s colleague received – it is not your job to ask questions, it is your job to follow the directions – is a mechanistic answer. It makes complete sense if you believe an organization is a machine and each person’s role is simply to execute their assigned function.

But most organizations are not machines. And most of the work that matters most – navigating complexity, solving problems together, implementing something new in a complex, changing situation – is not machine work.

We are living and working in a knowledge age. We are asking people to be fully present and engaged. We are teaching young people that teamwork, cooperation, and collaborative problem-solving are essential for the workplace – and they arrive expecting those skills to be welcomed. When they encounter the instruction to follow directions without asking questions, it is not just frustrating. It is genuinely disorienting. The worldview they brought to work does not match the one they found there – and that gap has real consequences.

The other way to understand this story is through organizational health.

In the Genuine Contact Way, a healthy organization develops across six cultural dimensions: a culture of leadership, a culture of development, a culture of wellbeing, a culture of service, a strategy-focused culture, and a culture of accountability. These are not separate programs to be added on. They are aspects of a whole system. When one or more fall out of balance with the others, the symptoms appear exactly as they did in my friend’s organization – disengagement, burnout, rising absenteeism, people leaving.

What was missing in the story she shared?

People were not trusted with the full picture of what was happening. They were not given space to contribute what they knew. And they knew things – things no outside consultant could have known. They understood their workflows. They could see where the gaps would emerge after a 30 percent staff reduction. They had insight into how the changes would affect not just their own roles, but the team’s capacity as a whole. That knowledge stayed locked inside them, because no one asked for it.

Participation – early and often – is central to how the Genuine Contact Way approaches change. Not participation as a courtesy gesture. Not as a communication strategy or a formality. As a genuine source of wisdom that makes the change itself stronger. When the people who will implement a change are brought into the planning of that change, two things happen. The change gets better, because their knowledge and perspective are incorporated. And those people become invested in it – because it is, in part, theirs.

Creating that join-in from the beginning is not slower than announcing a change and issuing directions. It is significantly faster than managing the resistance, burnout, and turnover that follow when people are treated as variables in a machine rather than as whole people with something to offer.

A holistic approach to change asks, from the beginning: what are the intended consequences of what we are proposing? And what might the unintended ones be – both the positive surprises worth planning for, and the risks worth addressing early? These questions require many perspectives to answer well. A leader making decisions without the input of the people affected will miss things – not because of any failure of capability or care, but because no single perspective can see everything.

The question someone asked in that first consultant session – when is it appropriate to raise concerns about change? – deserved a very different answer than the one they received.

From a holistic, participatory perspective: the right time for employees to ask questions about change is before the change ever happens.

That is not idealism. That is how change works when it works well. People are engaged from the start. Their input shapes what is proposed. Concerns are raised early, when they can still be addressed. Unintended consequences are identified and planned for. And when change begins to move, it moves with people rather than against them.

The organization my friend described was doing the opposite. And it was paying the cost.

What has your experience been? Have you worked in an organization where change was done to people rather than with them – and what did that cost?

Photo by TienDat Nguyen on Unsplash