In my practice of supporting executive teams through change, I keep running into the same uncomfortable truth: the models most of us were trained on no longer fit the conditions we’re actually leading in. We were taught to plan change, sequence it, and communicate our way through it. That assumes a kind of stability that has largely evaporated.
In this episode, I sit down with Michael Bungay Stanier to dig into a claim that sounds dramatic until you’ve lived it: change management, as we’ve practiced it for decades, has stopped working. I spend my days with senior leaders on questions of change, leadership, and communication, and what I keep seeing is a widening gap between the frameworks organizations cling to and the messy reality on the ground.
So we get into what has actually shifted. There was a time when you could define the end state, build the roadmap, and march toward it. Today the work is rarely that tidy. More often you can’t fully name where you’re headed. You can only find your way there. That demands something different from leaders. Less certainty. More orientation. I describe it as being the compass rather than the map.
We also get into what helps, and the answer tends to surprise people. The fix isn’t a sharper framework. It’s better conditions. I talk about agency, belonging, and what I call certainty anchors: the stable points that let people stay steady while everything around them keeps shifting. And we get refreshingly practical about communication, because in a world drowning in messages, sending more of them solves nothing. Clarity comes from helping people make sense of what’s happening, not piling on more to read.
What you’ll learn
- Why traditional change models break down in today’s environment
- How to lead when you don’t have a clear end state
- What “being the compass” looks like in practice
- The role of agency, belonging, and certainty in enabling change
- How to shift from information overload to real sense-making
