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When lookouts on the Titanic spotted the iceberg, everyone jumped into action to turn the ship away. Yet their efforts weren’t enough.
Change management has been around for decades, and yet organizations continue to struggle to implement change fast enough, despite significant efforts from their members.
Let’s look at a few reasons why — and what can help your business change course more like a jet ski and less like an ill‑fated ocean liner.
1. Change Communication Is Designed in Isolation
Whoever is communicating change is not operating in a vacuum.
Across any organization, multiple other people are communicating changes — large and small — to the same audience. Employees are also receiving regular operational updates at the same time: who today’s shift leader is, planned maintenance, performance metrics or project updates.
When you try to communicate change in a larger company, you face intense competition for attention — and even more noise.
The response of many communicators is simply to resend their message. The result is even more noise and less impact.
2. Time to Impact
In most cases, when a change occurs, employees are not required to act immediately.
It may be hours, days, weeks or even months before they need to change their behavior. When that moment arrives, how will they find what they need to do?
The original notification is buried under 100 daily emails or lost in a generic newsfeed. The updated procedure sits five folders deep in a repository. The revised user manual suffers the same fate. An e‑learning module was created — but few people know it exists. (I covered these dynamics and more in this article.)
3. Fragmented Attention and the Curve of Forgetting
Many professionals rely on change management frameworks like ADKAR, which moves individuals through awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement.
But when you are dealing with dispersed teams and changes that sit outside of daily work (which describes most enterprise changes), you encounter powerful obstacles.
The change manager who ignores the challenges mentioned above believe they took all of the right actions.
The experience looks very different from the employee’s perspective — overloaded, constantly interrupted and forgetting half of what they learned within a day —and most of the change management effort is wasted.
4. The Change Is Part of a Larger Conversation
Every change is connected to a topic that has an owner, typically an internal service provider within the organization.
Change managers often want to engage the internal customers of this service, with whom there is an ongoing conversation.
The quality of their existing connection largely determines how much effort and time it will take to implement any change.
Unfortunately, the connection isn't great in most cases, mainly because internal communication systems are designed around leadership comms and ignore the operational communicators.
5. The Digital Experience Is Ignored
The digital resources employees rely on when it comes time to take action are rarely optimized for change.
Information on a certain topic is scattered across disconnected repositories. Announcements and trainings are forgotten. Normative documents are difficult to locate. Motivation erodes.
In contrast, when a shopkeeper takes a restroom break, a small sign on the door suffices — and everyone immediately understands. When they place new products at the store entrance, sales start flowing almost effortlessly. And we all recognize the impact of a big red sign shouting “SALE!”
Retailers have spent centuries learning how to design experiences that propagate change smoothly. Enterprises, for the most part, have not.
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One method is to group all digital resources related to a topic in one place and place the recent and relevant changes at the very beginning of the section. This small action helps employees quickly and naturally absorb recent changes when they need to perform a related task.
A Quick Story About Change Management — and How to Design Digital Interactions
For six years, I ran the platform behind the annual performance evaluations for a 10,000-employee bank. Like most systems, it broke once a year — down for a few hours. The first time it happened, I got an angry call from a VP, plus dozens more from employees.
The next year, when the system broke down, we took a different approach. We added a clear, visible message on the main topic page, top-left corner: system down, we’re fixing it, back in a few hours.
The result? Almost no calls.
By adjusting the digital experience employees have when they perform a task, by delivering the information they need, when they need, in the flow of their work, we were able to turn a bad and costly experience into an inconvenience. Like a shopkeeper leaving a sign on the door when they take a toilet break.
That’s what good digital interaction design does: it connects people and builds trust. And once that connection exists, change becomes easy.
We evolved the process over the years, but the transitions stayed smooth. Simple, clear, self-service first communication channels did most of the work for us.
What the Solution Looks Like
Nimble businesses design change efforts around how employees interact with information in their flow of work.
There are two ways to engineer a digital workplace that supports change management.
Option 1: Support a Few Major Changes at a Time
For the current key focus of your company, place a prominent banner on the homepage linking to a dedicated section that consolidates all related assets for that topic: recent changes, guidelines, best practices, links to the transactional app and for support.
The section should function as an advertisement for the change:
- Window displays signal what’s new.
- Promotions highlight what matters now.
- The entrance quickly tells visitors why they should care.
Retail stores always communicate the why — their value proposition. Similarly, each internal service must explain to employees why the topic matters and why each change is happening.
The approach is simple and effective. The drawback is it limits how many topics you can highlight at once.
Option 2: Build an Architecture That Natively Supports Change
Instead of a single store, build a shopping mall.
In malls, products and services constantly change, yet shoppers rarely complain about “change fatigue” or “information overload” — even though malls may contain over 100,000 products.
The reason is because everything is structured to help people quickly find what they need.
In our enterprise digital mall:
- Each "store” represents a topic.
- Each store is owned by an internal service provider/topic owner.
- The first interaction highlights what’s new and why.
Just as physical mall architecture optimizes movement between shops, digital architecture should optimize transitions between employee tasks.
The structure supports change adoption and the spread of better practices and continuous feedback between employees and topic owners.
Final Thought
If you want your organization to adopt change faster, you must focus on your employees with the same intensity that a shopping mall focuses on its visitors.
Experience isn’t just about employees — or customers.
It’s about the bottom line.
Editor's Note: For more ideas about successful change initiatives, read:
- The Antipatterns Blocking Your Future of Work Transformation — Ready for the future of work? First, dismantle the antipatterns holding your organization back — from top-down control to metrics that reward busy work.
- Why Culture Efforts Fail: The 4 Terrains Managers Must Navigate — Culture efforts don't stall for lack of good ideas or for lack of effort. They stall because the managers leading them don't understand the terrain.
- Communicating Change: Overcoming Resistance Through Empathy — A critical element of any change management initiative is communications. What kind of messaging can transform potential adversaries into allies?
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