FROM MICHAEL BUNGAY STANIER · EVERY WEDNESDAY
Change got faster.
Change management
stood still.
Change Signal is the new change tools, insights, and practical guidance that you need today. One new truth or one counterintuitive move, every Wednesday. Cut through the blather, the BS, and the noise. Get the stuff that works.
No one gets a quiet year.
In 2016 the average employee went through two planned changes a year. By 2022 it was ten. Can we just call that “all the time”? Every number below comes from an organisation that sells change management. Make of that what you will.*
01
Transformation fails almost every time.
Twelve percent of transformations hit their original ambition. We’ve normalised a strike rate we’d fire anyone else for.
02
Leaders aren’t ready or able to lead change.
Eight percent of executives can actually do it. Willing, mostly. Equipped, rarely.
03
Employees aren’t willing to support change.
Thirty-eight percent, down from seventy-four. Not because they’re difficult. Because they’ve been paying attention.
04
The model you’re using blinds you.
Pick up a hammer and everything starts to look like a nail.
Change keeps changing. The playbook hasn’t since before email.
*Gartner, Bain, DDI
The best leaders obsess about three things.
Fewer than one in twenty people rate their experience of change a nine or ten. The ones who do obsess about three things.
Obsession 01
Claimed Agency
Empowerment is BS. Saying “we’re doing change with you” is just a disingenuous way of doing change to you. Agency isn’t given. It’s claimed — change done through me, not to me.
Obsession 02
Real Capacity
You’re pouring water into a full glass. All you’re getting is a wet carpet. Change needs room to change.
Obsession 03
The Work/Change Möbius Strip
There used to be business as usual and the occasional change project. Church and state. Now there’s no seam, and the work does the work.
It's a catalyst, not a newsletter.
Every Wednesday, one short lesson: a new truth about change, a counterintuitive move, or both. Fifty-seven of them, each built to tip the odds a little more in your favour. Everyone starts at the beginning.
01
A new truth
A fundamental reset on what’s been peddled as “common sense”. There is no One Model, by the way. Beware anyone selling you one.
02
A counterintuitive move
Something you can use before lunch, not a framework you’ll file and forget.
03
Three minutes, occasionally five, no filler
A fast read. Provocative, willing to be contradictory, striving to be occasionally funny. If it stops being useful, tell me, then unsubscribe.
Nine illusions of change management
Every model runs on at least three of these. Most run on at least six.
- 01. Everything can change.
- 02. Anyone wants this.
- 03. Change can be planned.
- 04. There's a change hub.
- 05. You have any control.
- 06. The change team won't struggle .
- 07. This is a campaign.
- 08. People are machines.
- 09. You should be implementing.
86 episodes (and counting).
Zero blather.
Every week, someone from the trenches of change work. I’ve found the very best. Conversations are the atomic unit of change, and I ask the awkward questions so you don’t have to.
I'm Michael Bungay Stanier.
I wrote The Coaching Habit — more than a million copies, twenty languages, the best-selling book on coaching this century.
Before that I founded a training company that taught coaching skills to more than half a million people. Rhodes Scholar. Canada’s first Coach of the Year. Thinkers50 Coaching Legend. Australian by birth, Toronto by choice.
Thirty years in and around change work — innovation, mergers, culture, digital, restructures — with the usual stories and scars of the good, the bad and the baffling.
Once a week.
Short, sharp, relentlessly blunt.
What your change management course should have taught you.
Fifty-seven ways to tip the odds in your favour. One a week.