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If your change strategy is mostly emails and town halls, you don't have one.
I have a theory that you can predict whether an organizational transformation will succeed by looking at one thing: the project plan. Specifically, where "change management" shows up. If it's a single line item somewhere around week three — right between "communications" and "training" — the transformation is going to stall. I've been right about this more times than I'd like.
The pattern is always the same. Leadership decides on a change. Could be a new system, a reorg, a process overhaul. Somebody builds a project plan. Somewhere in the middle of it, someone remembers that people are involved and adds a change management workstream. That workstream turns into a communications timeline: announcement email on Monday, FAQ on Wednesday, town hall next week, follow-up email the week after. Done. Change managed.
Except it isn't. Because communications tell people what's happening. Change management is about making sure they can actually do it. And those are wildly different things.
Here's what I mean. You send the announcement email. Great. Now the person on the floor in third shift has questions: Does this change my daily checklist? Who reviews my work now — my old supervisor or the new one? What happens to the workaround I've been using for two years because the official process doesn't actually work? If I mess this up during the transition, does that hit my performance review?
No FAQ covers this. No town hall addresses it. These are specific, personal, operational questions that can only be answered by someone who understands the actual work. Usually that's the front-line manager. And in most transformations I've been part of, the front-line manager finds out about the change at the same time as their team. Sometimes after.
That's the gap. Not information. Readiness.
Equip the managers first. Before the announcement email goes out, the people who are going to absorb the questions and the frustration need to understand the change well enough to explain it in their own words. Not read a script. Explain it. If they can't, you're not ready to announce.
Map impact at the task level, not the org chart level. "Operations will be affected" is not an impact assessment. "The packaging line at Plant B will switch from a three-step to a five-step quality check, adding approximately four minutes per unit, and the operators will need to learn a new scanning tool" — that's an impact assessment. And that's what your change plan should be built from.
Measure adoption, not awareness. I cannot stress this enough. Everyone tracks whether the email was opened. Almost nobody tracks whether the behavior actually changed. If your metrics are send rates and attendance numbers, you're measuring communications, not change. And you'll declare success right up until the moment you realize nobody's actually doing the new thing.
Change management isn't hard because it's complex. It's hard because it requires patience and detail and follow-through in an environment that rewards speed and announcements. But the organizations that get it right — really right — are the ones that treat it as the strategy, not the workstream.
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