Home / The Leadership Library / Crisis and Change / Leading Change
Leading Change
Sequencing, the early win and its trap, who must be persuaded first, and encoding a change so it does not revert.
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01
The Change Sequence Plan
One page: order, owners, checkpoints, and the conditions under which you stop. Written before the announcement, because the reversal criteria have to be set by somebody with no stake in the answer.
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02
Making It Stick
A change survives only once it is encoded into hiring, promotion, budget, and calendar. Until then it depends on the leader's continued attention, and that attention is a finite resource.
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03
Communicating Change Over Months
The launch reaches almost nobody. What carries a change is a cadence of small, unremarkable references sustained past the point where the leader has become bored of the subject.
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04
Who Must Be Persuaded First
A small number of people function as evidence for everybody else. Identifying them is a matter of who is watched rather than who holds a title, and the two overlap less than expected.
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05
The Early Win and Its Trap
An early result buys the credibility to attempt the difficult thing. It becomes a trap when the pursuit of demonstrable progress starts selecting which problems the organization works on.
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06
Sequencing
The same set of changes succeeds or fails depending on the order. Sequence determines who has to move before the evidence arrives, and that is the whole difficulty.