Impact's Global Lead of Transformation and Leadership, Duncan Lydon, shares three ways your organisation can stop struggling with change.
Why do organisations struggle with change when humans are so good at it?
Change is the one constant in our lives. It is the arc that carries us from childhood into adulthood, across careers, through relationships, and into versions of ourselves we could not have imagined twenty years earlier. We learn, stumble, adapt, thrive, and transform - not because change is easy, but because change is human.
Yet inside organisations, this natural ability can seem to evaporate. Highly capable, resilient people begin to resist, stall, or disengage. Initiatives slow down. Projects drift. The energy that once fuelled progress suddenly becomes hard to access. Even with decades of evidence that humans are wired to evolve, up to 70% of organisational change efforts still fail.
Why does change feel so different at the organisational level? The answer goes to the root of how we experience change, and how ready organisations are to grapple with its emotional reality.
Here are three reasons why organisations struggle with change management, and how leaders can start doing it better.
1. Losing grip on the emotional core of change
Before Christmas, I listened to a politician announce twenty thousand job cuts across the health sector. Not a single part of that message was addressed to the people who might be at risk of losing their jobs. Think about their questions: Is this the moment everything changes for us? Will I be able to keep working? How do I explain this to my family over the holidays?
Now the change might have been begun for good reasons, reasons that would resonate with anyone who is passionate about service in healthcare, but somewhere along the way of implementing and communicating this change the grip on its emotional weight slipped. A moment for proactive empathy became a moment for reactive fear. And when the emotional core of a change is ignored, people don’t lean into a change. They brace against it.
Change fails so often in organisations because they give people good reasons to resist change. Almost everyone will have a story of change done badly, and these experiences of negative change linger. Organisations that fail on change fail to acknowledge that it’s powerfully emotive: change is fundamentally personal, and it’s emotions that drive the behaviours that create or stop change.
2. Falling down in the messy middle
Technical change is often easy to map as systems, milestones, timelines risks.
But real change happens in the lived layer of the organisation: the behaviours, habits, and patterns people fall back on when things get difficult.
This is the messy middle. The space between:
- What the change plan says people will do
- What people actually choose to do or not do
It is unpredictable and deeply human space, where emotions shape behaviour, and behaviour creates the culture of actions that shape change. This is where organisations often stall. Leaders get stuck pulling levers that have no visible effect on forward progress because the cultural handbrake has quietly been applied.
Impact’s experience over 45 years shows that culture shifts only through behaviour:
- What people choose to prioritise
- How they show up together
- The decisions they make under pressure
Our approach to experiential learning enables people to see this in real time. When teams work on real organisational challenges and then step back to reflect, they begin to notice the cultural patterns shaping their decisions. Small behavioural nudges can then become lasting habits that cement the change.
3. Leaders acting without space to notice
Modern leaders move at pace: meeting to meeting, decision to decision, expectation to expectation. The pressure is constant. What they lack isn’t information - it’s space to think through their focus.
Yet reflection is not a luxury. It is a leadership competency: Key to learning, key to vision, key to the decision making that creates lasting change.
Without reflection, leaders:
- Aren’t tuned in their own emotions
- React rather than decide
- Struggle to sense how their teams are doing
- Can’t steer the organisational culture
With reflection, leaders slow down enough to see clearly: What is really happening? What is needed next? Where is the culture shifting - or stuck?
Impact’s role, as a trusted partner in change, is often to give leaders this structured space. Not time away from work necessarily, but reflection embedded in work - in the flow of change itself. The result is leaders able to reconnect people with the big picture – where is the organisation going, and why that destination matters and is worth getting excited about.
The biggest risk of constant change? Missing the opportunity within it
Handled well, the emotional content of change becomes a catalyst. It shows leaders what people care about, what energises them, and what will help them move towards the future.
Handled badly, those same emotions become the biggest barrier to progress. The work of change begins with recognising that emotion isn’t a distraction – it’s always been the heart of the process.
When organisations stay connected to their human centre, they stay connected to their purpose. They stay adaptive. They stay alive to possibility. People will keep evolving. The opportunity is learning to evolve with them.
If you want to create cultural momentum for your next change initiative, Impact would love to talk.