Why Change Fails

For years, Mark Eddleston sold New Ways of Working. The course, the playbook, the "patterns found in progressive organisations". He facilitated hundreds of experiments and thousands of hours of training. When he finally asked what stuck for his clients, the answer was not much.

That answer broke something.

Decades of change programmes. Billions spent. Engagement numbers flat. The problem isn't implementation. It's a category error so pervasive that nobody in the room can see it. Not the consultants selling the work. Not the executives buying it. Not the practitioners delivering it in good faith.

Why Change Fails doesn't offer a better methodology. It explains why methodologies can't deliver what they promise.

The successes everyone cites are rare birds, and a proof of concept is not a proof of scale. The demand the industry assumes is largely imaginary. And the leader you're waiting on is held in place by a system that doesn't care how much inner work they've done.

Situations come in three kinds, and telling them apart decides everything that follows. Some are simple, where the rules settle it and a careful person can follow them. Some are complicated, where cause and effect still hold but it takes someone qualified to trace them. Some are complex, where they only line up looking back. The methods work on the first two. Nearly everything sold as change is sold as though the third doesn't exist.

You might still run the workshops. You'll just stop carrying the guilt when they don't stick.

Consultants, C-suites, bosses and boards. For anyone who recognised the wobble but couldn't name it. It assumes you've tried, and it doesn't hand you a new framework to try next.

Not a call to arms, but a calm laying down of weapons.