Change management

Based on Wikipedia: Change management

The Psychology of Getting People to Do Things Differently

Here's a strange fact about organizational change: many of the models we use to help employees adapt to new software systems or corporate restructurings were originally developed to help people cope with death and dying.

That's not a metaphor. That's literally what happened.

In the 1980s and 1990s, consultants noticed something peculiar. When they watched employees react to layoffs, departmental closures, or major process overhauls, the emotional patterns looked remarkably similar to the stages of grief. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Eventually, acceptance. The frameworks built to help people through terminal diagnoses were repurposed to help them through quarterly reorganizations.

This tells us something important about what change management actually is. It's not primarily about project plans or implementation timelines. It's about navigating the deeply human experience of having your world rearranged without your permission.

What We're Actually Talking About

Change management is the discipline of helping people, teams, and entire organizations adapt when things shift. The "things" in question can vary enormously: new technology systems, corporate mergers, shifts in business strategy, regulatory changes, or the kind of wholesale restructuring that leaves everyone wondering if their job still exists.

There's a subtle but important distinction worth noting. "Organizational change management" typically refers to transforming an entire organization—rethinking structures, processes, and systems at a fundamental level. Plain "change management" often focuses more narrowly on how individual people and teams experience these transitions. The first is about architecture. The second is about the humans who have to live inside that architecture.

The field sits at an unusual intersection. It borrows from psychology, sociology, business strategy, information technology, and even grief counseling. It's taught in universities now, with dedicated research departments. This wasn't always the case. Change management emerged as a recognized discipline only in the last few decades, cobbled together from diverse sources by practitioners who realized that technical implementations kept failing for decidedly non-technical reasons.

Why Organizations Change (Often Reluctantly)

The drivers of organizational change read like a list of things that keep executives awake at night.

Technology evolves relentlessly. What seemed cutting-edge five years ago now feels antiquated. Companies that built their entire operations around certain tools suddenly find those tools obsolete, or worse, their competitors using something dramatically better.

Customers change their minds about what they want. Competitive pressure intensifies. Governments pass new regulations. Two companies merge and suddenly have two of everything—two accounting systems, two corporate cultures, two ways of doing every single task—and need to become one.

Sometimes the change is internal. A company conducts an honest review of its processes and discovers, perhaps uncomfortably, that the way things have "always been done" is actually terrible. Sometimes the change is thrust upon them by crisis. The 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait sent oil prices spiking and threw carefully crafted strategic plans into the garbage.

Organizations are surprisingly resistant to change, even when change is obviously necessary. This isn't because the people within them are stupid. It's because organizational structures, cultures, and routines develop a kind of institutional memory—what researchers call an "imprint"—that persists stubbornly even as the world outside transforms rapidly. The company's DNA, forged in past conditions, keeps expressing itself even when those conditions no longer exist.

A German-American Psychologist Starts Something

Kurt Lewin never set out to revolutionize how businesses handle change. He was a social psychologist interested in learning, group behavior, and social conflict. Born in Prussia in 1890, he fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and spent the rest of his career in the United States.

Lewin's journey toward change management began with something called "field theory," which he started developing in 1921 and continued refining for the next two decades. The core idea was that human behavior isn't just a product of personality or environment, but emerges from the dynamic interaction between a person and their psychological environment—their "life space," as Lewin called it.

He became the first psychologist to seriously study group dynamics. His definition of what makes a group is elegant and still used today: "It is not the similarity or dissimilarity of individuals that constitutes a group, but interdependence of fate." In other words, a group exists when what happens to one person affects the others.

Before he died in 1947, Lewin developed what became the foundational model of organizational change. It's deceptively simple, consisting of just three steps: Unfreeze, Change, Refreeze.

Unfreezing means destabilizing the status quo. You have to break down existing attitudes, behaviors, and habits before you can replace them with new ones. This is the stage where you convince people—and organizations—that the current way of doing things isn't working, that change is genuinely necessary, and that the discomfort of transition is worth enduring.

Change is the messy middle. People try new behaviors. Some work. Some don't. There's confusion and experimentation.

Refreezing is about making the new way of doing things stick. The changes become the new normal, locked into organizational culture and routine.

The model sounds almost too simple. But its power lies in its recognition that change isn't just about implementing new systems or processes—it's about unfreezing deeply embedded human patterns, and that's extraordinarily difficult.

The Consulting Industry Smells Opportunity

In the 1980s, something important happened. The big accounting and consulting firms—the ones that would eventually become the global giants we know today—realized that "change management" could be a product they sold.

This matters because when major consulting firms brand something as a service offering, they invest heavily in making it systematic, teachable, and scalable. They develop methodologies. They train armies of consultants. They write books and publish articles. They create an industry.

Robert Marshak, an organizational development scholar, credits these firms with taking the work of early change management pioneers and giving it commercial legitimacy. What had been academic research and scattered practitioner wisdom became a formal discipline with frameworks, certifications, and substantial billing rates.

In 1982, McKinsey consultant Julien Phillips published one of the first formal change management models in the journal Human Resource Management. Others followed. The rebranding of "reengineering" services as "change management" in the late 1980s helped cement the field's position in corporate consciousness.

General Electric Becomes a Laboratory

If you want to understand how change management evolved from academic theory to corporate practice, look at what happened at General Electric in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Jack Welch, GE's legendary and controversial CEO, had spent years restructuring and "de-layering" the company. Thousands of jobs disappeared. Layers of management vanished. But the work remained, now piled on fewer shoulders. The organization was, as one account put it, "shell-shocked and demoralized," tangled in what seemed like endless bureaucracy.

Welch gathered a team that included organizational theorists Dave Ulrich and Steve Kerr, and gave them a deceptively simple mandate: "get unnecessary work out of the system."

What they created became known as Work-Out. The concept was borrowed from Japanese quality circles that had gained popularity in the 1980s. Small teams would gather to challenge assumptions about "the way we've always done things." They'd develop recommendations for improving processes. Then—and this was crucial—they'd present these recommendations to a senior leader in something called a Town Meeting.

The magic was in what happened next. The senior leader couldn't take the recommendations "under advisement" or promise to "get back to them." They had to decide on the spot. Yes or no. And if they said yes, someone had to volunteer to own the implementation right there in the room.

This was change management as contact sport. No committees. No endless reviews. Decisions made publicly, with accountability assigned immediately.

By 1992, GE had evolved this into something called the Change Acceleration Process, or CAP. Teams of managers would take on major change projects while learning how to orchestrate entire change efforts. The idea was to make GE faster at adapting than its competitors.

Welch had learned something important from the 1990 oil price shock that followed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. All of GE's carefully developed strategic plans had become worthless overnight. As Welch reportedly told Steve Kerr: "It's not that we're surprised that bugs me, it's that we're surprised that we're surprised that bugs me."

The future, it turned out, couldn't be predicted. The only competitive advantage that mattered was the ability to react faster than everyone else.

The Burning Platform

On July 6, 1988, the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea exploded. It was the deadliest offshore oil disaster in history, killing 167 workers. One survivor later described how he had made the decision to jump from the platform into the burning sea below—a decision that seemed insane until you understood that staying meant certain death.

In 1993, organizational change consultant Daryl Conner seized on this image in his book Managing at the Speed of Change. The "burning platform" became a metaphor for the kind of crisis that makes change not just possible but inevitable. When the platform is on fire, nobody debates whether jumping is wise. They jump.

The implication for organizations was profound. Sometimes you need a burning platform—a crisis, real or manufactured—to overcome the natural human and organizational resistance to change. Without the fire, people will stand on the platform forever, even as it slowly sinks beneath them.

Conner went on to found Conner Partners in 1994, focusing specifically on the human side of technology adoption. The following year, the first "State of the Change Management Industry" report was published in Consultants News. Change management had officially become an industry with its own trade publication coverage.

Kotter's Eight Steps

In the mid-1990s, John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor, wrote what became arguably the most influential work in the field's history.

His 1995 Harvard Business Review article "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" became a sensation in business circles. The follow-up book, Leading Change, published in 1996, provided a systematic eight-step process for organizational transformation.

What made Kotter's work so influential wasn't necessarily its originality—he was synthesizing decades of thinking by others—but its clarity and practicality. He gave executives a checklist they could actually use. Create urgency. Build a coalition. Form a vision. Communicate the vision. Remove obstacles. Create quick wins. Build on the change. Anchor the change in culture.

The framework acknowledged something important: change efforts fail far more often than they succeed. Kotter's research suggested that roughly 70 percent of major change initiatives don't achieve their goals. Understanding why they fail—usually by skipping steps or moving too quickly through early stages—was essential to making them succeed.

Who Moved My Cheese?

In 1998, a strange little book became one of the best-selling business titles of all time. Who Moved My Cheese?, written by Spencer Johnson, tells the story of two mice named Sniff and Scurry, and two tiny people named Hem and Haw, who live in a maze and spend their days looking for cheese.

One day, the cheese disappears. The mice adapt quickly, scurrying off to find new cheese. The tiny people react very differently. Hem denies that the cheese is gone. He rages against the unfairness. He refuses to leave the empty cheese station, convinced that someone will bring the cheese back.

Haw eventually overcomes his fear and ventures into the maze, ultimately finding new cheese and writing messages on the walls for Hem to follow.

The book is an allegory, almost embarrassingly simple, about adapting to change. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for almost five years. It spent over 200 weeks on Publishers Weekly's hardcover nonfiction list. Companies bought it in bulk to distribute to employees facing layoffs, mergers, or restructurings.

The book's success revealed something about change management as a field. Sometimes the most powerful frameworks aren't frameworks at all—they're stories simple enough that anyone can understand them and personal enough that everyone can see themselves in them.

The Neutral Zone

William Bridges, writing in his 1991 book Managing Transitions, introduced a concept that resonated deeply with people experiencing organizational change. He called it the "neutral zone."

Bridges distinguished between change—which is situational and external—and transition—which is psychological and internal. Change happens when something is implemented. Transition happens when people actually process that change internally and adapt their sense of identity and behavior.

His model had three phases. First, letting go of the past. This is harder than it sounds. People's identities are often wrapped up in how things used to be. Letting go means mourning.

Second, the neutral zone. This is the uncomfortable space between the old way and the new way. The past is gone, but the new hasn't fully arrived. People feel confused, anxious, and uncertain. Productivity often drops. Creativity, paradoxically, often rises, because the old constraints are gone but new ones haven't formed yet.

Third, the new beginning. People embrace the new identity, find their footing, and develop energy for the changed situation.

The neutral zone concept was powerful because it normalized the discomfort of transition. That feeling of being lost and uncertain wasn't a failure—it was an expected, even necessary, phase of the journey.

Systems Thinking and the Learning Organization

In 1990, Peter Senge published The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. The Harvard Business Review would later call it one of the seminal management books of the previous 75 years. The Journal of Business Strategy named Senge "Strategist of the Century."

Senge's approach was different from the step-by-step change models. He focused on creating organizations that could continuously learn and adapt, rather than organizations that needed periodic change interventions.

The "fifth discipline" was systems thinking—understanding organizations as complex, interconnected systems where actions in one area create ripple effects throughout. The other four disciplines were personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning.

Senge identified four fundamental challenges in initiating change:

First, there must be a compelling case for change. People need to understand not just what is changing but why it needs to change.

Second, there must be time to change. This sounds obvious, but organizations routinely expect people to transform their work while simultaneously maintaining their existing workload.

Third, there must be help during the change process. People need support, resources, and guidance.

Fourth—and this is the tricky one—as you remove perceived barriers to change, new barriers often emerge. Problems you hadn't noticed suddenly become critical. The landscape keeps shifting.

How People Adopt Innovation

Everett Rogers wasn't primarily a business thinker. He was a communication theorist who studied how new ideas and technologies spread through social systems. His 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations became one of the most cited works in social science.

Rogers' insight was that change must be understood in context—specifically, the context of time, communication channels, and the impact on everyone affected. This seems obvious now, but it was a fundamental shift from thinking about change as something that simply happened to thinking about change as something that spread through networks of human relationships.

His most lasting contribution was the adopter categories, which describe how different people respond to innovation:

Innovators are the first to try something new. They're risk-takers, often on the fringes of their social systems, willing to experiment with ideas that might fail spectacularly.

Early Adopters are opinion leaders who watch the innovators, wait for initial proof that something works, then adopt it and influence others. They're respected within their communities.

The Early Majority is more deliberate. They adopt after seeing substantial evidence of success, often following the lead of early adopters they trust.

The Late Majority is skeptical. They adopt only after most of their peers have already done so, often because social or economic pressure makes continued resistance untenable.

Laggards are the last to adopt, if they ever do. They're suspicious of change, often isolated from social networks, and focused on tradition.

This framework transformed how change managers think about rollouts. You don't try to convince everyone at once. You identify your innovators and early adopters, support their success, and let their influence spread naturally through the organization.

The Rise of Human-Centered Approaches

Traditional change management was often top-down. Leaders decided what would change, consultants designed the change process, and everyone else was expected to get with the program. Communication flowed in one direction. Resistance was a problem to be overcome.

In recent years, a different philosophy has gained ground. Human-centered design, borrowed from product development and design thinking, suggests that the people affected by change should be involved in designing it.

This approach emphasizes three core capabilities:

Co-creation and stakeholder engagement means bringing diverse groups into problem-framing and solution development from the beginning—not just announcing predetermined plans and asking for feedback.

Continuous learning and adaptation treats change as an iterative process. You try something, gather feedback, adjust, try again. The final destination might look different from where you thought you were going.

Human experience focus shifts attention from processes, technologies, and systems to the actual behaviors, emotions, and meaning that individuals experience. It's not enough for the new system to work technically. It has to work emotionally too.

Proponents argue that involvement creates buy-in. When people help design the change, they feel ownership of it. Resistance decreases. Adoption accelerates.

Lean Change and the Agile Influence

Large-scale change programs kept failing at alarming rates. Despite decades of research, sophisticated frameworks, and substantial consulting fees, most organizational transformations still didn't achieve their intended results.

Starting around 2009, practitioners began asking whether the problem was the programs themselves. Traditional change management was designed for a pre-digital world—methodical, plan-driven, sequential. But the business environment had become turbulent, unpredictable, and fast-moving.

Jason Little developed what he called Lean Change Management, drawing inspiration from three sources: Lean Startup methodology (with its emphasis on experimentation and validated learning), Agile software development (with its iterative approach and embrace of change), and Design Thinking (with its focus on human needs and creative problem-solving).

The philosophy represented a significant shift:

Instead of creating false urgency to force change, focus on building genuine shared purpose.

Instead of broadcasting change communications at people, enable meaningful dialogue with them.

Instead of executing rigid plans, run experiments and learn from what happens.

Instead of blaming people for "resisting," try to understand why they're responding as they are.

Instead of seeking buy-in for changes decided elsewhere, involve people in co-creating the change from the start.

This wasn't just a new methodology. It was a different mental model—one that saw change as something to navigate adaptively rather than execute perfectly.

Why This Matters for Developer Experience

There's a reason this exploration of change management connects to developer productivity and experience. Every tool adoption, every process change, every new methodology introduced to a development team is a change management challenge.

When organizations try to improve developer experience—perhaps by introducing new tooling, streamlining workflows, or removing friction from daily work—they're engaging in change management whether they call it that or not.

The lessons from decades of change management research apply directly. You can't just implement new tools and expect adoption. You need to understand how people respond to change, work with early adopters, address legitimate concerns rather than dismissing them as resistance, and create conditions where new ways of working can actually take root.

The organizations that adapt fastest to new technologies and ways of working develop competitive advantages. Those that can't change, or change too slowly, get left behind. This was true when Jack Welch was racing to make General Electric more agile in the 1990s. It's even more true now, when the pace of technological change has accelerated dramatically.

Understanding change management isn't just about managing organizational transitions. It's about understanding what makes humans tick—why we cling to familiar patterns even when they no longer serve us, how we can overcome our natural resistance to the unfamiliar, and what it takes to help people genuinely embrace new ways of working.

The platforms are always burning, one way or another. The question is whether we'll learn to jump.