You Don’t Need 99% of Change Management Models
The Change Signal with Pim de Morree
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Pim de Morree on why 80% of employees must vote yes before change begins, how to throw away 99% of change models, and what happens after you eliminate all the bosses.
In this inaugural episode, I sit down with Pim de Morree, co-founder of Corporate Rebels and someone who moves brilliantly between change theory and transformation practice. Pim shares a radically different approach to organizational transformation—one that starts with having employees vote on whether they even want the change to happen. (Spoiler: They need 80% buy-in or they walk away.)
We dive into why most change efforts fail, and Pim offers a provocative alternative: strip away the complex models and focus on what actually drives people at work. He shares how his company buys organizations and transforms them into self-managing entities, not through top-down mandates but through carefully designed experiments that give people agency to shape their own future.
There's a fascinating tension we explore between having a proven transformation playbook (they've done over 100 successful changes) and still creating space for each organization to find its own path. Pim's insight that you can "throw out 99% of change models" if you just focus on building change around people is both liberating and challenging.
For anyone wrestling with transformation in their organization, this conversation offers practical wisdom about moving more slowly toward success rather than hurrying toward failure. We talk about why the "valley of despair" is inevitable, and more importantly, how to get through it.
