Earlier this week I wrote on LinkedIn about a message from a former colleague. She had just come out of two difficult sessions about a new tool rollout, frustrated not by the tool itself but by how the decision about it was being made. It prompted me to write about what I used to do differently when leading process change in large organisations.
This piece goes further. Because “communicate the why” has become standard advice in change management, and it is correct, as far as it goes. The problem is that most organisations stop too soon.
They communicate the organisational why. The strategic rationale. The case for change at the enterprise level. And then they wonder why certain teams remain resistant, disengaged, or quietly working around the new process the moment nobody is watching.
Here is what I have come to believe: the why has to be plural.
Every impacted group needs their own why
A single organisational narrative is not sufficient for the people who have to change how they work on a Tuesday morning. They need to understand what this means for them, their team, their workflow, and their goals. Not as a communications exercise, but as a genuine act of acknowledgement.
That does not mean every change needs to be equally good for everyone. That is rarely possible in a complex organisation, and pretending otherwise destroys credibility faster than almost anything else. Some teams will carry more of the cost than others. Some will absorb new steps, new tools, or new friction in service of a benefit that accrues somewhere else in the enterprise. That can be the right call. But it requires honesty, not messaging.
What every impacted group deserves is an honest account of what this change means for them and why it is still the right direction. A clear why that is legible from where they sit, not just from the centre.
And here is the signal worth paying attention to: if you cannot construct that honest account for a particular team, that is important information. It is worth pausing on. Because if a change that benefits the overall organisation cannot be explained as good, or at least honest, for every part of it, that gap is rarely a communications problem. It is usually a structural one.
Resistance is a diagnostic signal, not a problem to manage
In my experience leading operating model and process change across large organisations, the most revealing moments were not when change went smoothly. They were when it did not.
At a global professional services firm, we were rolling out new project and time entry processes to improve revenue visibility. Consultants were regularly reusing old project codes rather than setting up new ones. On the surface this looked like non-compliance: people taking shortcuts, resisting the new process.
When we investigated, we found the project setup process involved more than twice as many steps as were actually necessary. Years of incremental additions, each reasonable in isolation, had created a system that nobody would willingly use if they had any alternative. The consultants had found their alternative.
The resistance was not the problem. It was pointing directly at the problem.
This is the reframe I would encourage: when a team cannot find their why, or actively works around a change rather than through it, the right first question is not “how do we get them on board?” It is “what are they telling us?”
Sometimes the answer is that the process itself is broken. Sometimes the answer is more structural, and more difficult.
When a team genuinely has no good why, check the incentives
There is a harder version of this problem that does not get discussed enough. Sometimes a change that is genuinely good for the overall organisation produces no clear benefit for a specific team. In fact, it may make their working lives more difficult, more costly, or more complex.
This is not necessarily a reason to abandon the change. But it is almost always a signal that something in the operating model deserves attention.
At the same professional services firm, a new global client group was established with a remit to grow multinational relationships. To do this effectively, they sometimes needed local teams to deliver work at reduced margin, or at no margin, in one market in order to secure something larger globally. That was entirely rational from the enterprise perspective, and it was exactly what the global client managers were being incentivised to do.
The local teams, however, were measured and rewarded on local line of business profitability. They had no incentive to absorb the cost of a global strategy they did not control. The result was friction, resistance, and a growing gap between what the global strategy required and what the operating model actually supported.
A similar dynamic played out at a large payments organisation, where product managers were incentivised to launch features as quickly as possible while risk teams were incentivised to ensure thorough assessment before any launch. Both incentive structures were defensible in isolation. Together, they created structural tension that expressed itself as product managers finding ways to route around the risk process entirely.
What made this worse was that the risk process had itself become unwieldy over time. Other functions, lacking their own controls, had found ways to piggyback on risk assessments to get their own sign-offs completed. The process had grown far beyond its original purpose, and the people trying to circumvent it were not being obstructive. They were responding rationally to a system that had quietly expanded its demands without expanding its value.
In both cases, the resistance was legible once you understood the incentives. The people involved were not being obstructive. They were behaving rationally within the system they were operating in.
What this means in practice
A change that is genuinely good for the enterprise should be explainable as good, or at least honest, for every part of it. Where that explanation cannot be constructed, there are usually two possibilities.
The first is that the change itself needs refinement. The collective good has not been sufficiently thought through at the level of individual teams and functions.
The second is that the operating model has a structural problem that predates the change. The transformation has simply made it visible.
Either way, the inability to construct an honest why for every impacted group is not a communications challenge. It is a diagnostic finding. And it deserves to be treated as one.