Andy Demir | Transformation | Qalbur Perspective | 11–13 min read
Executive Summary
Most organisations know how to announce change. Far fewer know how to develop the capacity to adapt.
Individuals have a responsibility to keep learning and developing, particularly as their responsibilities increase. Leadership carries another responsibility: to understand where the organisation is becoming weaker, which capabilities will be needed next, and what senior leaders themselves may need to reconsider.
The difficulty is that organisations naturally protect what already works. Existing structures, authority, incentives and commercial priorities can quietly consume new ideas before they become meaningful. Adaptation therefore requires more than employee acceptance. It requires leaders willing to question the organisation they have helped to create.
In This Article
- Why the language of change may itself create resistance
- The organisation can resist its own strategy
- Why adaptation begins with leadership
- Development is both an individual and organisational responsibility
- When resistance is useful
- Questioning the maze
- The difficulty of self-cannibalisation
- From managing change to building adaptive capacity
- A Qalbur Adaptation Test
- What senior leaders should consider
- Questions for the boardroom
- What we are really asking people to do
Perhaps We Have Framed Change Poorly
We use the word change very easily in business. We launch change programmes, appoint change managers, create transformation offices, and then spend considerable energy trying to understand why people do not respond as we expected.
There is something slightly strange in this: senior management says that an organisation needs to change; the sentence normally refers to other people. Employees need to work differently. Functions need to cooperate differently. Managers need to behave differently. Teams need different skills. Processes need to become faster. Somewhere along the way, leadership can begin to stand outside the very change it is asking the organisation to make.
I do not think this is always deliberate. It is partly how organisations think. Strategy is discussed at one level and implementation happens at another, so change naturally begins to sound like something conceived in one part of the organisation and experienced in another.
Perhaps that is why I increasingly prefer the language of adaptation, development and growth when we are talking about people.
The distinction matters to me.
If I tell somebody that they need to change, there is an implied judgement about what they are today. Sometimes that judgement may be necessary, but often the situation is more nuanced. A person may have been very good at what the organisation needed five years ago. The market then moved, technology developed, customers became more demanding, or the organisation entered a different stage of maturity. Their capability did not suddenly become worthless. The environment moved around it.
Development describes that situation more honestly.
The same applies to leaders. Experience remains valuable, but experience gathered in one set of conditions does not automatically remain useful under another. In fact, experience can become dangerous when it stops undergirding evidence and starts becoming certainty.
So perhaps the first mistake in many change programmes is making the employee the object of change, rather than recognising that everyone is part of the same changing system.
That includes the people at the top of the organisation
The Organisation Can Fight What the Strategy Is Trying to Achieve
It is easy to talk about resistance as though it sits inside difficult individuals.
Sometimes it does. Some people do resist learning. Some become comfortable. Some protect status, authority or routines long after those routines have stopped serving the organisation. We should not pretend otherwise.
But I have always been more interested in what happens around the individual.
An organisation can say that it wants innovation and still reward predictability. It can say that it wants speed while requiring six levels of approval. It can talk about accountability while making every significant decision upwards. It can say that people should experiment and then make failure professionally expensive.
At that point I am not sure that “resistance to change” is an adequate diagnosis.
People learn organisations very quickly. They learn what senior management says, but, more importantly, they learn what the organisation actually rewards, tolerates, and punishes. If those two things contradict one another, behavio,ur will normally follow the system rather than the presentation slides.
This is where I see something close to organisational cannibalisation.
Normally, when we use the word cannibalisation in business, we mean a new product taking sales from an existing product. Yet something similar happens internally with ideas, capabilities and ways of working.
A new idea arrives and must immediately justify itself using the economics of existing capabilities; it competes for resources against activities already generating revenue. A different way of organising work encounters a management structure whose authority depends upon the old way. Something potentially valuable is gradually modified until it no longer poses a threat to anything important.
Eventually the organisation can say it poses a threat to the idea.
But the idea that finally reached implementation may bear little resemblance to what was finally implemented in the organisation.
I think this is one reason transformation is so difficult. Organisations are designed to preserve themselves. They need to be. Customers depend on continuity, employees depend on salaries, investors expect performance and operations cannot be reinvented every Monday morning.
The same mechanisms that produce stability can, however, become very efficient at rejecting something unfamiliar.
Research into organisational adaptability helps clarify this distinction. Uhl-Bien and Arena, for example, clarify that adaptability extends beyond leading an individual change programme. The issue is whether an organisation has the capacity to adjust as conditions continue moving. That is a different problem from successfully implementing one initiative.
The difference matters because an organisation can complete a transformation project and remain fundamentally poor at adapting.
Leaders Cannot Stand Outside the Adaptation They Expect From Others
There is a familiar phrase in leadership: lead by example.
I agree with it, but I think we sometimes use it too casually.
The issue is not simply that employees should see the leader behaving well so that they copy the behaviour. Organisations are more complicated than that. People are watching something deeper: whether the rules apply upwards as well as downwards.
If employees are told that they must develop new capabilities, what is senior management learning?
If middle managers are told to delegate more, what authority has the executive team genuinely released?
If the organisation wants more challenge and openness, how does a senior leader react when their own judgement is questioned?
If experimentation is important, what happens to somebody whose well-reasoned experiment does not work?
These things tell people far more about change than a communication campaign ever will.
This is also where leadership becomes uncomfortable, because the capabilities that need to change are not always obvious weaknesses.
Sometimes they are strengths.
A leader may have progressed because they were decisive, closely involved and technically knowledgeable. The organisation then grows, and suddenly those same behaviours can create dependency. Decisions accumulate at the top. Managers wait rather than act. Expertise that once accelerated the company begins to slow it down because too much still requires one person's judgement.
The difficult part is accepting that there may have been nothing wrong with the original behaviour.
It simply belonged to a different organisational moment.
That is an important distinction because leaders understandably defend behaviours that have served them well. Organisations have usually rewarded those behaviours too. Promotion itself can become evidence that the leadership model was correct.
Then the environment asks for something different.
This is where I think leaders earn the right to ask others to adapt: not by having all the answers, but by demonstrating that seniority does not exempt anyone from examining whether yesterday's methods remain suitable.
There is research that complicates the usual heroic version of this argument. Higgs and Rowland found that highly leader-centric approaches could actually undermine change, while facilitative and engaging behaviours were associated with better implementation. Oreg and Berson's wider review also shows that leadership and organisational change have a far more complex relationship than simply having a strong leader at the front.
That seems right to me.
A leader can model adaptation, but cannot perform adaptation on behalf of everybody else.
People Have Responsibilities Too
There is a danger of taking this argument too far and making the organisation responsible for every person's development.
I do not believe that either.
People have responsibilities for their own professional growth. At some point in a career, particularly at senior level, nobody should need to be persuaded that their knowledge requires renewal.
Markets do not preserve jobs because someone worked hard to become competent ten years ago.
Technology does not wait because a manager is uncomfortable learning something unfamiliar.
Customers do not reduce their expectations because an organisation has not yet had time to reskill its people.
There is an economic reality here that leadership discussions sometimes avoid because it sounds unsympathetic. Capabilities have value partly because organisations need them. As those needs change, the relative value of some capabilities also changes.
Individuals therefore have to remain professionally curious.
But there is another side to the responsibility.
Senior leaders often see what is coming earlier.
They are involved in strategy. They speak with customers. They approve investment. They see changes in margins, competitiveness and market behaviour. They participate in technology decisions and recruitment discussions. They have access to information that someone several levels below them may not possess.
That information advantage creates an obligation.
If leadership can see that a capability will become important in three years, it is unreasonable to wait three years and then complain that the organisation does not possess it.
This is why I see upskilling as much more than an HR discussion.
It is part of strategy execution.
If strategy requires a capability that the organisation does not possess, then the capability gap is already a strategic issue whether or not it has yet appeared on a risk register.
The responsibility therefore sits on both sides.
The individual has to remain willing to learn. The organisation has to clarify its direction of development. Leadership has to create enough space, investment and opportunity for people to become competent before the new capability becomes urgent.
None of this guarantees that everyone will make the transition.
Some will not.
Leadership still has to make difficult decisions.
But there is an important difference between giving people a serious opportunity to develop and announcing, after the strategic decision has already been made, that everybody must suddenly become something else.
We Should Be Careful Before Calling Something Resistance
One of the most useful lessons in organisational life is that disagreement does not always mean somebody has failed to understand.
Sometimes they understand extremely well.
People closer to customers, production, projects or technology often see consequences that are less visible from the executive floor. They may express their concerns poorly. They may mix valid objections with personal anxiety. They may even be partly motivated by self-interest.
That does not automatically make the underlying concern wrong.
This is why I am cautious when I hear statements such as, “They are resistant to change.”
Which part are they resisting? Why? What do they know? What might leadership have missed? And, equally important, what might they be protecting?
Research on reactions to organisational change has increasingly moved away from treating response as simply positive or negative. People can support one aspect of a change and oppose another. They can intellectually understand the need while emotionally disliking the consequences. They can accept the strategy and still believe the implementation is poor.
That is much closer to real organisational behaviour.
A salesperson can agree that margins must improve while believing a proposed pricing approach will damage an important customer relationship. An engineer can support modernisation while objecting to a process that introduces technical risk. A finance executive can support growth while still challenging the assumptions behind the investment case.
These disagreements are not always obstacles.
Sometimes they are part of the organisation's thinking.
The challenge for leadership is to know when the organisation is protecting legitimate knowledge and when it is protecting position, comfort or authority.
That is rarely obvious from the first meeting.
Malhotra's Maze Still Raises a Useful Question
I first approached Deepak Malhotra's I Moved Your Cheese through the familiar discussion about dealing with change. But I think the more interesting idea in the book sits slightly elsewhere.
Malhotra asks us to question the maze.
That is more interesting to me than simply becoming better at finding the cheese.
The metaphor becomes useful in organisations because we spend a great deal of time learning how to operate within structures and very little time asking whether those structures still make sense.
Approval processes acquire legitimacy because they exist.
Reporting lines begin to look inevitable.
Job descriptions become boundaries.
Budget cycles become natural laws.
A particular definition of risk becomes embedded so deeply that nobody remembers the event or decision that originally produced it.
Eventually the organisation starts confusing what is familiar with what is necessary.
I do not take Malhotra's argument to mean that every constraint is artificial. Executives work with very real constraints. Capital is finite. Regulations matter. Customers have choices. Engineering has physical limits. Businesses need governance and people need accountability.
But there is an executive discipline in separating the constraint we genuinely have to live with from the one we have constructed ourselves.
That distinction becomes especially important during transformation.
Sometimes we tell people to adapt to a system when the system itself is what needs examining.
We ask teams to make decisions faster but leave authority untouched.
We introduce new technology but retain the old process around it.
We hire different capabilities and then evaluate those people using criteria designed for the previous organisation.
We ask the mouse to run faster.
Perhaps the maze should move.
The Hardest Thing to Cannibalise May Be the Reason We Succeeded
Companies understand that sometimes a new product has to compete with an existing one.
Leaders find this uncomfortable because the economics are visible. The old product has revenue, margins, customers, forecasts and history. The new product has assumptions.
The safe decision usually has numbers behind it.
The future normally has fewer.
What interests me is how often the same problem occurs with organisational capability.
The structure that created control in one stage of the business can become bureaucratic in another. The founder who once made every important decision because nobody else could may eventually become the reason nobody else learns to make one. A successful sales model can become a limitation when customer buying behaviour changes. Technical knowledge can become so authoritative that different ways of thinking struggle to enter the conversation.
Success does something peculiar to organisations.
Failure encourages questions.
Success often closes them.
When something works, we repeat it. Repetition creates confidence. Confidence becomes method. Method becomes part of the organisation's identity.
Then asking whether that method is still appropriate begins to sound almost disrespectful.
This is probably why genuine self-cannibalisation is so rare. We are not merely asking an organisation to stop doing something. We may be asking it to question something that helped create its status, reputation and commercial success.
The same is true individually.
It is easier to correct an obvious weakness than to accept that one of your strengths has become less useful.
For a senior leader, that can be particularly difficult because organisations reinforce executive identity. People seek your judgement because it has historically been valuable. You receive authority partly because your previous decisions worked.
Then one day the organisation may need less of what made you successful and more of something you have not yet developed.
That is adaptation at its most personal.
An Adaptive Organisation Still Needs Stability
There is another problem with the way we talk about change.
We can overdo it.
Organisations now ask people to be permanently agile, resilient, innovative, flexible and ready to transform. After enough programmes, those words stop generating energy and begin producing fatigue.
Employees are not irrational for becoming sceptical.
If every initiative is described as urgent, people eventually learn that urgency is temporary.
If priorities change continually, teams stop investing emotionally in priorities.
If reorganisations occur too frequently, organisational memory weakens because people spend more time rebuilding relationships and understanding structures than developing capability.
Change has a cost, even when it is strategically correct.
Senior leaders need to recognise that adaptability is not the same as permanent instability.
Some things should remain dependable.
People should know what the organisation stands for. Customers should be able to rely on commitments. Governance should protect the company. Technical standards should not fluctuate according to management fashion. Ethical boundaries should not be reinvented every quarter.
The judgement lies in knowing what belongs to continuity and what has become inertia.
That is one of the more difficult executive distinctions because both can look similar from inside the organisation.
The established process may represent accumulated wisdom.
Or it may simply represent accumulated history.
The long-serving employee may be protecting institutional knowledge.
Or protecting territory.
The new manager may be challenging an outdated assumption.
Or failing to understand why the assumption existed.
Good leadership has to stay with those ambiguities long enough to tell the difference.
A Qalbur Adaptation Test
Before starting another major change programme, I would test the situation through four questions. They are less a methodology than a way of preventing leadership from moving too quickly towards implementation.
1. Reality
What has actually changed?
This sounds obvious, but organisations are easily influenced by fashionable language. Technology may have changed. Customer expectations may have shifted. A competitor may have altered the economics. Regulation may have moved. Equally, leadership may simply have become enthusiastic about something new.
Those are not the same circumstances.
The starting point should therefore be evidence. What has genuinely changed outside the organisation to warrant a different response?
2. Assumptions
Which of our existing assumptions were formed under the previous conditions?
Every organisation carries assumptions that are no longer discussed because they have become embedded in how the business works. Customers behave this way. Decisions must be approved at this level. This activity belongs in this function. This type of person makes a good manager.
Some may still be correct.
Others may simply be old.
Adaptation begins when we can tell the difference.
3. Capability
What do we actually need to become better at?
This is where many change discussions become vague. Saying that the organisation needs to become more digital, innovative or agile tells employees very little.
Capability has to become concrete.
What must somebody be able to understand, decide, build, sell, analyse, negotiate or lead that they cannot reliably do today?
Once that question is answered, development becomes much more serious.
4. Leadership
What does this require senior leadership to reconsider?
I would be suspicious of any transformation in which every behavioural change is required somewhere below the executive team.
If the organisation genuinely needs to adapt, there will normally be implications for how leaders make decisions, allocate resources, manage risk, develop people, use authority or evaluate performance.
If nothing changes at the top, we should at least ask why.
What Senior Leaders Should Consider
Before announcing another programme, it may be worth examining what the organisation is actually being asked to adapt to and whether leadership has created the conditions for that adaptation.
Look beyond the word change. Define what people genuinely need to be able to do differently. That discussion will usually be more useful than simply describing the future state.
Examine what the organisation protects. Budgets, authority, incentives, performance measures and reporting structures reveal far more about the organisation's priorities than its transformation language.
Look at leadership first and last. Ask what executives will personally have to learn, stop doing, delegate or reconsider. Employees notice very quickly when transformation means sacrifice below but continuity above.
Treat capability development as part of strategy. If a future strategy depends upon skills that are not being developed today, the implementation problem has already started.
Listen carefully to resistance before trying to remove it. Some of it will be fear, inertia or vested interest. Some of it may be information that has not yet travelled upwards.
Decide what should remain stable. Good transformation does not disturb everything. It protects what continues to create value while changing what no longer does.
Questions for the Boardroom
- What are we asking the organisation to do differently that we, as senior leaders, have not yet demonstrated ourselves?
- Which part of today's organisation would be most difficult for us to give up precisely because it has been successful?
- Which capabilities will our strategy depend upon in three years, and where are those capabilities being developed today?
- What are employees resisting that we may have too quickly assumed they simply do not understand?
- Which organisational constraint do we continue to treat as inevitable, even though we created it ourselves?
What We Are Really Asking People to Do
The more I think about organisational change, the less interested I become in whether people are naturally resistant to it.
Of course we resist some changes. Sometimes for poor reasons and sometimes for very good ones. Leaders do exactly the same.
What matters more is what we are actually asking of people.
Very often we are asking them to loosen their attachment to something that once gave them competence, confidence, status or security. We are asking an experienced manager to become a learner again. We are asking a successful function to reconsider methods that produced good results. We are asking an organisation to invest in capabilities whose commercial value may not yet be visible. Occasionally we are asking people to help build something that could make part of their existing expertise less important.
Those are substantial requests.
They deserve more from leadership than a change communication plan.
People should accept responsibility for their own growth. I believe that strongly. But leadership has to accept the corresponding responsibility to see ahead, to explain where capability is becoming insufficient, to create genuine opportunities for development and, when necessary, to alter the organisation around the people rather than assuming the people are always the problem.
There is also something else.
Senior leaders are custodians of more than the organisation that exists today. They are temporarily responsible for the organisation that other people will inherit.
That responsibility sometimes means protecting what works.
At other times it means having the judgement to interfere with success before success becomes dependency.
Perhaps this is where Malhotra's maze leaves us with the more useful question. It is easy to tell people that the cheese has moved and that they need to become better at finding it.
Leadership becomes more interesting when we are prepared to ask who built the maze, why we still need it, and whether we ourselves are willing to move any of its walls.
References
- Carmeli, A. & Sheaffer, Z. (2008). “How Learning Leadership and Organisational Learning from Failures Enhance Perceived Organisational Capacity to Adapt to the Task Environment.” Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, 44(4), 468–489.
- Douglas, S. (2026). “Designing learning for employee adaptability.” Development and Learning in Organisations.
- Higgs, M. & Rowland, D. (2011). “What Does It Take for Organisations to Change Successfully? A Study of the Behaviours of Successful Change Leaders.” Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, 47(3).
- Malhotra, D. (2011). I Moved Your Cheese: For Those Who Refuse to Live as Mice in Someone Else's Maze. First edition. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
- Oreg, S. & Berson, Y. (2019). “Leaders' Impact on Organisational Change: Bridging Theoretical and Methodological Chasms.” Academy of Management Annals.
- Uhl-Bien, M. & Arena, M. (2018). “Leadership for organizational adaptability: A theoretical synthesis and integratiorganisational The Leadership Quarterly, 29(1), 89–104.
- “Reactions towards organisational change: a systematic literature review.” (2022). Cuorganisationalgy.
- “Responses to Organizational Change: Evolution of the Concept, Established FindiOrganisationale Directions.” (2026). Annual Review of Organisational Psychology and Organisational Behaviour.
About the Author
Andy Demir is an international commercial and business leader with more than two decades of experience across complex B2B and industrial markets. He writes about executive leadership, strategy, organisational transformation, commercial performance, international business and the changing world of work, combining research with lessons drawn from operating across industries, markets and cultures.
