The launch communication is the least consequential part of communicating a change, and it receives most of the effort.
What actually determines whether people continue to believe a change is real is a pattern of small references over months, most of which take under a minute.
The cadence
Four kinds of communication, at different intervals, and the last two are the ones organizations skip.
The initial explanation. Once, delivered properly, with the reasoning rather than only the instruction. Necessary and insufficient.
The applied instance. Every few weeks, the reasoning applied out loud to a specific case that has just arisen. We are doing it this way on the Caldwell job because of the same thing we talked about in March. This is what teaches people how the rule operates rather than what it says.
The progress note. Monthly, brief, including when nothing has moved. Reporting only favourable months tells everybody how to interpret silence.
The question in the meeting. Weekly or fortnightly, one sentence: how is the new process holding up? Almost nothing else signals as reliably that the leader has not moved on.
Persistence is read as commitment
Organizations judge whether a change is permanent by how long the leader keeps mentioning it, and by nothing else.
Not by how forcefully it was announced, not by how much was invested, and not by what was said about its importance. By whether it is still being asked about in month seven.
This is a reasonable inference. People have watched initiatives before, and the reliable predictor of abandonment is the leader’s attention moving. They are reading the signal that has historically been accurate.
Which means the communication burden is heaviest at exactly the point the leader finds the subject least interesting, and there is no way around that. It is the cost of the thing.
Vary the case, hold the reasoning
Repeating the launch message verbatim stops carrying information after about the third delivery and becomes something people can predict and stop processing.
What should stay fixed is the reason. What should change is the situation it is applied to. The same principle invoked when approving something unusual, when declining something ordinary, when explaining a decision that went the other way, teaches a range of application that no repetition of the original statement can.
By the fifth or sixth instance people are no longer learning the rule. They are learning to predict your reasoning, which is the condition under which they start applying it correctly to cases you never addressed.
Say the difficult part out loud
The communication that does the most work in a change programme is the one acknowledging that it is currently worse.
At month three, when everybody is doing the new thing badly and slowly, a leader who says the numbers look fine has told the organization that leadership is not connected to the work. A leader who says this is slower than the old way right now, that is expected, and here is when it should turn has said something people can verify against their own experience.
Credibility in the second half of a change programme is built almost entirely on having described the difficult part accurately while it was happening.
It has to come from supervisors too
A message the leader has repeated eight times and no supervisor has ever repeated has been correctly identified as the leader’s preoccupation rather than the organization’s position.
Which makes the useful check not whether you have communicated enough, but whether anybody else is doing it. Have you heard a supervisor explain the reasoning to their own crew, in their own words, without prompting?
If not, they cannot, and the reason is usually that they were given the instruction rather than the reasoning. That is fixable in one conversation and it is the highest-leverage communication available in the whole programme.
Declare the end
Changes that succeed frequently go unmarked, and the omission costs something specific.
From the outside, a change that stopped being mentioned because it was finished looks identical to one that stopped being mentioned because it was abandoned. Both simply disappear from the leader’s speech.
Saying plainly that this is now how the organization operates, that it is finished, and what it produced, does two things. It converts a change into a practice, which is a real transition. And it adds an entry to the completed column, which is what the next initiative will be judged against.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD