Change Management as One-Way Communication

Change management. The term sounds neutral. Professional. Like a process. Like something you can do well or poorly, like project management or quality assurance. That’s how it’s treated, too. Stakeholder analysis, communication plan, training, quick wins. All neatly listed. All doable. All in one direction.

The direction is always the same: top to bottom. From decision to execution. From those who decided to those who are supposed to go along. Change management doesn’t mean: we’re changing together. It means: we’ve decided, and now we’ll explain it to you until you stop objecting.

In these discussions, I always wait for a single sentence. A sentence that asks: what if the resistance is justified? What if the employees who push back see something the decision-makers don’t?

The sentence never came.

Instead, resistance gets classified. Fear of change. Lack of understanding. Insufficient communication. Status quo bias. All deficits of the employees. Never of the decision.

I’ve been in transformation projects where the employees said from the start: this won’t work. Not out of fear. Not out of ignorance. But because they knew the process that the consultants only knew from PowerPoints. They knew where the weak spots were. They knew which dependencies existed in the system that appeared in no diagram. They were right. In more than half the cases I’ve seen, they were right.

But their objections were coded as resistance. Not as information. As something to be overcome. Not as something to be heard.

The standard recommendation is “change champions.” People from the workforce who carry the change forward and convince their colleagues. That sounds like participation. It’s recruitment. You find the ones who are already on board and give them a label. The ones who are against it get bypassed. Not convinced. Bypassed.

The language reveals everything. Create acceptance. Reduce resistance. Bring stakeholders along. Every one of these phrases assumes the direction is fixed and only the speed is negotiable. Not a single phrase allows for the possibility that the direction might be wrong.

What would real change management look like? It would start with a question, not a presentation. Not: this is how it’s going to work. But: what would happen if we did this? And take the answers seriously. Including the uncomfortable ones. Including the ones that jeopardize the timeline. Including the ones that mean you have to redesign or stop the project.

I experienced it exactly once. A CEO stopped his automation project after three months because the employees on the production floor showed him that the processes being automated worked differently than what the documentation said. He listened. It cost him six months and a fair amount of money. In the end, he set up a different project that worked, because it was based on reality instead of the plan.

That’s not in any change management textbook. Because listening isn’t a process step. Because the possibility of being wrong isn’t built into any framework. Because “we were wrong” isn’t a quick win.

Change management, as commonly practiced, is a technique of enforcement disguised as communication. The question is never whether change should happen. Only how to get people to accept it.