What leaders should diagnose before launching change

Change can succeed or fail in the six weeks before it is announced, not in the six months after. What leaders understand — and what they choose to see — in that window shapes almost everything that follows.

The most expensive programmes we see are rarely the ones with weak plans. They are the ones with confident plans built on an unexamined picture of the organisation. They begin from a place that is not as advanced as the reality actually is — as a result plans fall short.

Too small a gap has been diligently planned. But why?

The picture at the top is always partial

I always hear “We don’t want any surprises” from senior managers but unfortunately information improves as it travels upward in tidiness and deteriorates in accuracy. By the time a situation reaches the executive, it has been summarised by people with an interest in how it lands. This is not dishonesty; it is ordinary self-protection, and it is extremely common.

So the starting position for any change is that the leadership team knows a version. The proper diagnosis is to establish how far that version is from what people are actually experiencing.

Six things worth understanding first

Trust in the people leading it. People do not evaluate change on its merits. They evaluate it on their history with whoever is proposing it. If the last three initiatives were announced and abandoned, the plan is starting from a deficit that no communications strategy will cover. Keep your heads down guys — this will end up being as successful as the last one!

Where is resistance likely to come from, and what it is protecting. Resistance is vital information as it can indicate that someone is defending something reasonable — competence, workload, relationships, a sense of professional identity, or a genuine operational fact the plan has missed. Mapping it beforehand can turn opposition into a vital design input rather than an unexpected obstacle to be managed. It was always there — you just didn’t look.

Whether the leadership team is truly aligned. Not whether they have signed off. Whether, when asked separately, they describe the same problem and the same destination. Visible divergence at the top gets amplified and is the fastest way to give the organisation permission to wait and see. There is little energy in waiting and seeing.

How much capacity genuinely exists. Most change lands on people with full weeks. If the plan does not say what stops, it is not a plan. It is an addition, and it will be absorbed by whoever is most conscientious until they leave. I find that change activity rarely trumps an operational priority.

How people expect to be involved. Organisations have a track record on consultation, and people remember it. Where involvement has previously been decorative, further consultation is read as theatre and creates cynicism rather than commitment. Here we go — another ‘pantomime’ workshop to involve us.

Which behaviours actually need to change. This is the one most often skipped. Structures and systems are visible and comparatively easy to alter. The change usually depends on a specific group of people doing something differently on an ordinary Tuesday — and if nobody has named what that is, the programme is not addressing a vital underlying issue. I think that most structures can succeed if they are full of people demonstrating the right behaviours.

Look, we have analysed enough — let’s go on with it!

There is a fear that diagnosis delays delivery. In practice a focused piece of work takes a few weeks with conversations across levels and functions, a look at the existing data the organisation already holds and largely ignores, some observation of how decisions actually get made, and a session with the leadership team on what has been found.

That is a fraction of the time typically lost to a programme dealing with the delays and re-work that a lack of thorough diagnosis can facilitate.

What good diagnosis produces

It can produce a shared and perhaps slightly uncomfortable picture. It surfaces the two or three issues that everyone knows about and nobody has said in the same room. It can reduce the scope of the change while increasing the likelihood of it happening. It also changes the sequence. Frequently the finding is that a particular relationship, or a particular ambiguity about who decides what, has to be resolved before anything else can move.

One thing to remember

The point of diagnosis is not to be thorough. It is to make sure the organisation is solving the problem it actually has, rather than the one that was easiest to describe in the meeting where the programme was agreed.

“I think that most structures can succeed if they are full of people demonstrating the right behaviours.”