Change done to people, not with them – and what it costs

Some of the most important things I learn about organizational life come from conversations with friends.

A friend called me last week, right after a difficult meeting at work. She'd been carrying this story for a while, I think, and needed somewhere to put it down.

Her organization had been going through significant changes. By the time anyone thought to bring in a change consultant, a lot was already underway – restructuring, new roles, a 30 percent reduction in staff. The workload hadn't changed to match.

People had been told what was happening and expected to adapt. No training. No process to help them make sense of what these changes meant for their work or for them as people. They were handed a new reality and asked to carry it.

By the time the consultant arrived, the signs were visible. People were unhappy. Absences were increasing. Burnout was deepening. Some had quietly started looking for other jobs.

In the consultant's very first session, someone asked a question.

When in a change process, they wanted to know, is it appropriate to raise concerns? To flag something that doesn't seem right? To point out where things might be heading in unintended directions?

The consultant's answer: it's not your job to ask those questions. It's your job to follow the directions.

My friend went quiet after she told me that.

This approach to change doesn't work. At least, not without serious consequences.

One of the beliefs at the heart of the Genuine Contact Way is that change can't be managed – that energy spent trying to manage change is wasted energy, and that the productive path is working with change rather than against it. What my friend described was an organization that had tried to manage change by controlling it. And the people inside it were paying the cost.

Two lenses help explain why.

Every organization operates from a worldview, whether it names it or not.

The Genuine Contact Way works with four worldviews:

• Mechanistic worldview. The world is a machine – most useful when environments are simple, stable, and predictable. In this view, people have assigned functions. They execute them. They don't question the design.
• Systemic worldview. The world is an ecosystem. Drawing on complexity theory, cybernetics, and new science, this worldview recognizes that causes and effects are rarely simple and that every intervention spreads in ways that aren't always visible in advance.
• Metaphysical worldview. The world is energy and consciousness. This worldview holds that there are dimensions of human experience – energy, intuition, spirit – that go beyond what can be measured.
• Holistic worldview. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This worldview encompasses the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual dimensions of organizational life, and includes all three of the other worldviews within it.

That consultant's answer – it's not your job to ask questions, it's your job to follow the directions – comes straight from the mechanistic worldview. If you believe an organization is a machine, it makes complete sense. Each part executes its function. No one questions the design.

But most organizations aren't machines. And the work that actually matters most – navigating complexity, building something new in a changing situation, working through difficulty together – isn't machine work.

We're living and working in a knowledge age. We're asking people to show up fully, to collaborate, to think and lead. We're teaching young people that teamwork and cooperative problem-solving are the skills the workplace needs – and they arrive expecting to use them. When they encounter the instruction to follow directions without asking questions, it's not just frustrating. It's disorienting. The worldview they brought to work doesn't match the one they found there – and that gap has real consequences.

There's another way to understand my friend's story, and it comes from organizational health.

In the Genuine Contact Way, a healthy organization develops across six cultural dimensions: a culture of leadership, a culture of development, a culture of wellbeing, a culture of service, a strategy-focused culture, and a culture of accountability. These aren't separate programs to add on. They're dimensions of a living whole. When one or more fall out of balance, the symptoms look exactly like what my friend was describing – disengagement, burnout, rising absences, people leaving.

What was missing?

People weren't trusted with the full picture of what was happening. They weren't invited to contribute what they knew – and they knew things. They understood the workflows. They could see where the gaps would open after a 30 percent reduction in staff. They had insight into how the changes would affect the team's capacity to serve. That knowledge stayed locked inside them, because no one asked for it.

Participation – early and often – isn't a courtesy or a communication strategy. It's how change becomes something people move into rather than resist. When the people who'll implement a change help shape that change, two things happen. The change gets better, because their perspective is in it. And those people become invested in making it work – because some of it is theirs.

Starting with genuine participation isn't slower than announcing change and issuing directions. It's significantly faster than managing the burnout, resistance, and turnover that follow when people feel like variables in someone else's plan rather than whole people with something to offer.

A holistic approach to change also asks, from the very beginning: what are the intended consequences of what we're proposing? And what might the unintended ones be – the positive surprises worth planning for, and the risks worth addressing early? These questions need many perspectives to answer well. No single viewpoint – however experienced or well-intentioned – can see the whole picture. That's not a weakness in any individual leader. It's simply the nature of working with a living, complex organization.