Jay Chopra often begins workshops by asking people to draw what organisational change looked like ten or twenty years ago.
You can probably guess what people usually draw. Point A and Point B with a line connecting them, and perhaps a few milestones along the way.
Then he asks people to draw what change looks like now.
The result is usually closer to “a ball of wool.”
“There’s no start and no beginning,” he says. “It’s like an amorphous blur.”
According to Chopra, Programme Director for IMI’s Change Leadership and a change leader who has spent more than 20 years working with leaders and executive teams around the world, change has changed.
“Change used to be an event,” says Chopra. “I now think it’s the context in which we operate.”
Once upon a time, something disrupted the organisation, people moved through a transition and a new normal emerged. Traditional change management models – which too many organisations are still reliant on – brought structure to uncertainty. Build the plan, communicate it and create momentum, and move people from the current state to the future state.
While there is nothing in inherently wrong with those disciplines, the problem is that the destination increasingly refuses to stay still.
“By the time you get to B, your plan has to change again because B has moved,” Chopra says.
AI and geopolitical instability are obvious sources of that movement, but the overall environment is shaped by new technologies, changing customer expectations, workforce pressures and business-model disruption that overlap rather than arrive politely one at a time.
For leaders, it’s no longer sufficient to become good at guiding people through individual episodes of change, and organisations overall need to become better at operating while change continues around them.
Change leadership requires something more.
The comfort of a plan
Linear change models remain attractive because they create a sense of control.
Chopra describes traditional change management as an attempt to bring “the certainty of process to the uncertainty of change”. Follow the sequence correctly and the organisation can feel as though it has imposed order on something inherently messy.
But in many ways this is unrealistic and problematic. Uncertainty cannot be engineered away.
Leaders are increasingly making decisions with incomplete information and competing interpretations. Waiting for perfect clarity may simply mean discovering that the problem has changed while the organisation was analysing it.
So, rather than constructing an increasingly elaborate plan for a future that cannot be predicted with confidence, Chopra argues that organisations need the capability to test, learn and adapt.
“What’s the simplest, smallest but most useful experiment we could run to learn our way to the future?” he asks.
Then look at the evidence, adjust and ask the same question again.
Culturally, this is a far more complex move than it appears.
Many leaders have built their careers on expertise and being able to supply answers. Experimentation asks them to say something different: here is what we know, here is what we don’t know, and here is what we are going to try next.
“The old model rewarded leaders for knowing,” says Chopra, whereas the emerging environment puts a greater premium on “the learner mindset.”
This also changes how organisations should respond when experiments fail.
If the first unsuccessful attempt is met with blame or a return to command-and-control behaviour, people learn very quickly that experimentation was never genuinely supported or encouraged.
How leaders respond to such early failures, Chopra argues, determines whether learning becomes part of the culture or disappears at the first sign of risk.
Resistance is usually telling you something
The same principles apply to so-called “resistance” to change.
Earlier in his career, Chopra admits he sometimes saw people who resisted new technology or organisational change as simply being awkward, but acknowledges his view has changed.
“I don’t think people are trying to be awkward,” he says. “There’s more underneath it.”
Too often people don’t understand why the change is happening. Or else leaders have communicated the what and the how but neglected the why. Or perhaps employees don’t trust the people leading it or the previous transformations have created scepticism or the organisation is asking people to accept another significant change when they are already stretched and overloaded.
Or perhaps it’s all of the above or most of the above or some of the above but its rarely none of the above, and this is why resistance is useful.
Yes, it’s tempting to treat reluctance as something communications needs to overcome, but a more capable organisation tries to understand what the reluctance is revealing. Trust is central to this.
But there’s a practical equation, according to Chopra, one built around credibility, reliability and interpersonal connection, moderated by self-interest.
Credibility concerns whether people believe what leaders say. Reliability concerns whether their actions match their words. Relationships matter because change is easier when sufficient social capital already exists. And perceived self-interest can undermine all three remarkably quickly.
None of these can be manufactured when the crisis arrives.
The same is true of psychological safety.
Chopra recalls a workshop where a leader confidently announced his team had psychological safety. Yet psychological safety doesn’t materialise just because it had been declared in a meeting or discussed during a one-day workshop, say Chopra.
Psychological safety exists when people feel able to take interpersonal risks: to raise a concern, challenge an assumption, admit uncertainty or say that something is not working without expecting repercussions.
And one warning, in particular, matters during times of change:
Do not interpret silence as agreement.
Leaders should actively “mine for the issues,” Chopra says, because silence can just as easily mean that people have concluded speaking up is pointless or unsafe.
“The best teams build trust and psychological safety beforehand,” says Chopra. “When that’s built beforehand, that’s where change is easier.”
Change has an energy cost
There is another reason organisations struggle with continuous transformation, according to Chopra.
“We massively underestimate the energetic cost of change,” he says.
Despite the consumption of attention, cognitive capacity and emotional energy, organisations typically respond to change fatigue by adding more initiatives and workshops and communications and meetings and priorities.
The work multiplies while very little disappears.
Chopra often uses an exercise with leadership teams called an “energy balance sheet.”
This involves identifying what is draining the team’s energy on one side, and then on the other identifying what restores or creates it.
Typically, the drains are familiar: unnecessary meetings, competing priorities, ambiguity, red tape, low-value work, etc. But once visible, the question becomes what can actually be removed.
“There’s no way we can meet the demands of the modern business world and at the same time do the low-value work,” says Chopra.
This means change leadership becomes, in many ways, an exercise in subtraction.
While organisations frequently talk about resilience as though people simply need to become better at carrying more, Chopra’s argument is more structural. If change is permanent, leaders have to reduce the avoidable demands consuming the capacity people need to respond to it.
His wider model of change fitness contains five elements: energy, focus, trust, purpose and progress.
Do people have enough capacity to absorb what is being asked of them? Are priorities sufficiently clear? Do people trust one another and those leading the change? Do they understand why it matters? Can they see evidence that their effort is producing movement?
If this sounds less like a change management plan and more like a change in organisational conditions, that is precisely the point.
Culture follows behaviour
Chopra is sceptical of treating culture as something abstract. “Culture is behaviour at scale,” he says.
If an organisation wants greater curiosity, leaders need to demonstrate curiosity. If it wants experimentation, leaders need to talk openly about experiments that did not work. If it wants candour, leaders need to invite challenge and then show people that challenge is genuinely welcome.
And so on, but Chopra’s recommendation to leaders is go first.
“People pick up really quickly on incongruency,” he says. “Leadership is not about perfection, but it is about direction.”
Behavioural consistency is crucial during transformation. An organisation cannot credibly tell people to experiment while senior leaders punish failed experiments. It cannot ask for openness while difficult information is supressed nor can it promote empowerment while every significant decision still travels upwards.
Culture evolves through the repeated behaviours people see being rewarded, tolerated and modelled.
This also helps explain why another large transformation programme or set of values rarely fixes the underlying problem.
Chopra argues for a small number of behaviours, practised consistently and embedded into everyday work, rather than a catalogue of aspirations nobody can remember.
Sometimes the answer is to stop
When asked what a senior leader should do when the organisation plainly needs to change but people are already overwhelmed, Chopra’s response runs against the instinct to mobilise more activity.
He recommends that leaders instead ask, “What can we stop?”
Then become “brutally clear about three things: where are we going? Why does it matter? And what’s the next behaviour we need from people to move the culture to where it needs to go?”
No, that’s not the next twenty behaviours. Just the next one.
“Complexity is the enemy,” he says. “One of the most powerful things leaders can do is simplify.”
And sometimes, he adds, the organisation may need to slow down.
Speed is frequently treated as evidence of seriousness, e.g. faster decisions, faster implementation, faster transformation, etc. But speed only helps when the direction is sound.
“If you go faster in the wrong direction,” Chopra says, “you’re going to end up in a whole lot of trouble.”
Business, in his view, has become crowded with noise and short of space. Leaders can become so focused on responding that they lose the capacity to ask whether the response still makes sense.
That may be the deeper implication of continuous change.
If change were still an occasional event, organisations could prepare when it arrived and recover when it passed. But that world has largely disappeared.
The capability now required is closer to fitness than project management: enough energy to keep moving, enough focus to know what matters, enough trust for difficult information to travel, enough purpose to sustain effort, and enough confidence to experiment when nobody can know the answer in advance.
Chopra remains optimistic because he believes people are extraordinarily adaptable.
However, adaptability is not automatic. Old habits, overloaded systems and leadership behaviours can constrain it. Chopra’s prescription is therefore less about asking people to embrace more change and more about creating an environment in which they have the capacity, confidence and permission to respond to it.
“If you empower people and truly trust them to do it,” he says, “you’ll be surprised what they come up with.”
Change is no longer waiting politely for organisations to be ready.
It’s about whether the organisation has built the conditions to keep adapting when there is no longer a finish line.
Jay Chopra is Programme Director for IMI’s Change Leadership: Leading in an Age of Continuous Disruption
