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Changing the Way Change Is Done in a Complex World
- Randall Rogers
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From Week 1 of Leading Through Complexity
Every cohort of Leading Through Complexity begins with the same sentence, and I repeat it several times on the first day: "The essence of this course is about changing the way that change is done."
That isn't a slogan. It's a confession. For most of my career I applied the change methods I'd been taught, the well-known linear, step-by-step models that every change practitioner learns.
Sometimes they worked. Often they didn't. And when they didn't, I was usually told it was a problem of execution: not enough communication, not enough sponsorship, not enough training.
It took me a long time to accept a harder truth. The methods weren't failing because we executed them poorly. They were failing because they were designed for a different kind of world.
Operating in the Fog
Many of the most widely used change models are decades old. They were created for organizations that were more stable and more predictable, where you could define a future state, plan your way to it and manage the transition.
That's not the world most of us work in now. Practitioners describe it with different words (VUCA, "permanent whitewater"), but the experience is the same. Conditions shift faster than plans can adapt, problems cross every boundary on the org chart, and cause and effect are visible only in hindsight.
I often say we're operating in the fog: we can only see about 20 feet ahead of us at any given moment. Past logics no longer apply. What we need instead is an approach that is emergent in nature, one that helps us discover the path as we go rather than pretending we can map it in advance.
When we apply ill-suited methods in this environment, there are consequences. I've come to call one of them organizational inflammation: change fatigue, cynicism and resistance that build up each time a technical, top-down fix is pushed onto a complex, living system. It's one reason so many large-scale transformations fall short of their goals.
The One Pathology That Trumps Them All
If I had to name a single villain, it would be this one:
"There is one pathology that trumps them all, and it's fragmentation."
Corporate fragmentation in all its forms does more harm to a company than all other pathologies combined. It shows up as silos, competing priorities, disconnected initiatives, and leaders who each see only their own part of the system. And here's the trap: most traditional change methods reinforce fragmentation. They break a problem into parts, assign the parts to experts and assume the whole will take care of itself.
Complex challenges don't work that way. You can't fix a fragmented system with a fragmented approach.
Change Boils Down to Participation
So what's the alternative? In Week 1, I describe three qualities of a complexity-informed approach to change: it is systemic, it is emergent and it is participatory.
The last of those is the one most organizations skip. And yet:
"At bottom, successful change boils down to agent participation or a lack of it."
By "agents" I mean the people (and the ideas and technologies) that make up and influence the system you're trying to change. When the people who live with a challenge are invited to make sense of it together, to see the patterns, to shape the experiments and to own what emerges, change moves faster, meets far less resistance and lasts. When they're treated as recipients of someone else's plan, the old patterns quietly return.
Why I Built This Course
This course came out of frustration. I got tired of failing to deliver fast, resistance-free, sustainable change using methods that didn't fit the problems in front of me. Over time I rebuilt my practice around complexity science and complexity leadership theory, and it changed everything about how I work.
I've also come to believe that the complexity leader role will become the change management leader role of the future, if not leadership in general. Organizations will increasingly need people who can hold ambiguity, convene the whole system and help it learn its way forward.
Week 1 sets up that journey. Over the following eleven weeks, we move from "Where are we?" to the tools, sequences and mindset that make complexity leadership practical, starting with the age of complexity itself.
Try This
Before you plan your next change initiative, ask three questions:
Is our approach systemic? Does it address the whole system, or just the part we control?
Is it emergent? Are we leaving room to learn and adapt, or have we locked in the answer?
Is it participatory? Are the people who live with this challenge helping solve it?
If the honest answer to any of these is "no," you may be about to treat a complex challenge with a method built for a simpler one.
Watch the Short
Watch on YouTube: The One Pathology That Trumps Them All
Subscribe to Echoes From the Edges for more: Echoes From the Edges on YouTube
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Keep Learning
Want a practical starting point? Download the free Hybrid OD e-book and see how diagnostic and dialogic methods combine to tackle complex change.
Ready to go deeper? Leading Through Complexity is our live 12-week program for OD, change and transformation leaders. The next cohort begins in 2027 and is limited to 50 participants. Join the waitlist.