Captured during a 5-day trek in Tasmania’s southwestern wilderness known as the Western Arthurs, this photograph reflects a journey undertaken four years prior, just before devastating bushfires swept through Tasmania, altering its pristine landscapes. The region, notorious for persistent rain and limited sunshine, graced us with consecutive sunlit days, making it a standout global hiking experience, rivaling trails in the Italian Dolomites, the Himalayas, and the Canadian Rockies.
Embarking on a 5-day expedition in Tasmania’s southwest demands self-sufficiency—carrying all your food, drinking from rivers, and sleeping in a tent with no huts or running water. The solitude is profound, with few fellow hikers; most of the time, it’s just you and Mother Nature.
Childhood lessons painted Mother Nature as a battlefield for survival, where each tree competes fiercely for sunlight, nutrients, and dominance over the land. However, this narrative is challenged by Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia. Over two decades of study revealed that a forest’s essence lies not in individual tree struggles but in subterranean partnerships. Simard unveiled the symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, known as mycorrhizas—thread-like fungi merging with tree roots. They aid trees in extracting water and nutrients, receiving carbon-rich sugars produced through photosynthesis in return. (For more details, refer to the New York Times article.)
Mycorrhizas serve as the connective tissue of the forest, intertwining trees of different species through an extensive web. This transforms the forest into more than a mere collection of trees. In times of crisis, a tree at the brink of death may altruistically share a substantial portion of its carbon with neighboring trees. The forest thus emphasizes cooperation, negotiation, reciprocity, and selflessness alongside survival and competition.
Remarkably, this ecosystem mirrors the principles of effective change networks. A change network possesses the capacity to reach every individual in a company. Unlike being confined to a specific business unit or hierarchy level, a well-designed change network transcends organizational boundaries.
Let’s delve deeper into the characteristics of a robust and efficient change network…
1) Project-agnostic
In the dynamic landscape of change networks, a paradigm shift from the traditional project-specific model to a project-agnostic approach emerges as a strategic imperative. The conventional methodology, with its exclusive focus on single projects, often results in a staggering 69% of projects achieving initial objectives, while 15% are considered failures. This project-specific model, besides its high failure rate, also contributes to significant resource wastage. Identifying, training, and sustaining a robust change champion network for each project frequently overshoots the project’s lifecycle, hindering desired outcomes and accounting for the 70% failure rate in projects.
Contrastingly, a more efficient paradigm involves nurturing change champions with the ability to support multiple projects. This not only optimizes resource allocation but also aligns with the agile principle, as highlighted by the 56% of companies that exclusively use a single project management methodology.
These versatile change champions, akin to Starbucks’ “My Starbucks Idea” initiative, play a pivotal role in connecting the dots across projects, providing invaluable insights, and fostering a culture of collaboration. Starbucks’ successful implementation of change through customer-driven ideas, resulting in over 5 million monthly page visits, is a testament to the power of adaptable change networks.
Drawing a parallel to the natural world, where mycorrhizas take time to strengthen and fortify the forest, change champions undergo a transformative journey with each project involvement. Their sustained engagement refines their change management skills and delivery expertise, enhancing their proficiency with every endeavor.
The diverse and creative approaches observed in change champions, ranging from themed outfits to innovative reminders, reflect the adaptability crucial for effective end-user engagement. This adaptability serves as the cornerstone of a thriving change champion network, where experimentation and varied strategies contribute to its vibrancy and success. Similar to the ever-evolving forest ecosystem, change networks flourish when nurtured with creativity and adaptability.
2) Cuts across layers
In the realm of change networks, adopting a project-agnostic approach emerges as a strategic shift from the traditional project-specific model. The conventional method involves forming change networks tailored exclusively to a single project, with champions disbanded at the project’s conclusion.
However, this model poses inherent challenges, leading to significant resource wastage. The effort to identify, train, and sustain a robust change champion network for each project often exceeds the project’s lifespan, impeding desired outcomes.
To address this, the change champion network needs to cut across not only different parts of the business but also different layers of the organization. A lot of change champion networks are designed at the mid-layer of the organization, typically involving middle managers. While middle managers can influence the outcome of the change more than frontline staff members, relying solely on this layer may not be sufficient.
Here’s why:
Detail Feedback: Middle managers are often not the ‘end users’ of systems or processes, making it challenging for them to provide detailed feedback on the suitability of the change, sentiments of end users, or necessary adjustments in the change solution.
Signal Loss: Depending on the organization, there may be 1-3 layers between middle managers and end users, resulting in potential ‘signal loss’ where thoughts, emotions, and feedback from the lowest layers of the organization may not be effectively communicated.
Limited Testing Input: Middle managers are usually not directly involved in system or process testing, limiting their ability to provide detailed input to shape the change. Their contributions often focus on higher-level strategies for engaging impacted teams.
To build a strong, vibrant, and extensive change champion network, engagement needs to extend to different layers of the organization, not just the middle layers but also the lower layers. While top layers may be engaged through various committees, middle and lower layers require dedicated change champions.
Similar to the mycorrhizas connecting different trees in a forest, the change champion network, when stronger and more extensive, becomes more capable of influencing and driving change both vertically and horizontally across the company. This inclusivity ensures that smaller business groups are not neglected or deprioritized, contributing to the overall success and adaptability of the change network.
3) Routine interfaces
In the intricate ecosystem of a forest, mycorrhizas play a vital role by providing essential sustenance, and supplying critical nitrogen, water, and other nutrients to plants. In the organizational landscape, change champions serve a similar crucial function. Armed with comprehensive knowledge and a deep understanding of the change, along with the latest updates on its impacts, they possess the ability to interpret messages in a way that resonates with those directly affected, using a language that is tailored to each team’s unique history, priorities, and culture.
Unlike program-level communication, which may be too generalized, the interaction with change champions is a dynamic, two-way process. They engage with impacted employees, actively assessing and understanding where individuals stand in their change journey. This engagement leads to a clear comprehension of the specific communication, learning, or leadership support needs of impacted teams. High-performing change champions delve beyond the surface, understanding the motivations and demotivators of the teams they serve. This wealth of insights becomes a powerful set of messages that can be fed back to the central project mothership.
What sets high-performing change champions apart is not just their ability to communicate and collect feedback; they proactively sense-check and virtually “walk the floor” to feel the pulse of the employees. Often, change champions are directly impacted by themselves, fostering a natural empathy that enables them to connect with others undergoing change. In this dynamic, there is a delicate balance between self-interest and selflessness, as change champions strive not only to navigate their own challenges but also to extend support and assistance to those in need. This nuanced approach mirrors the harmony found in natural ecosystems, where organisms cooperate for mutual benefit.
4) Cross-network collaboration
Within the expansive framework of an extensive change network, diverse sub-teams of change champions naturally emerge, often organized by business units or grade levels. While connecting with peers within the same level might be straightforward, establishing collaboration across hierarchies, especially with those perceived as ‘managers,’ can pose challenges.
To overcome these challenges, intentional routines must be established to facilitate frequent sharing and collaboration among different change champion teams. In the natural world, trees emit chemical alarm signals to warn nearby trees of potential danger. Similarly, within a business context, a team from one business unit may sense a looming risk for change failure based on their experiences, which they can share with other teams yet to undergo the change.
Conversely, successful experiments in one part of the business should be readily proliferated in other areas of the organization. For instance, in a large insurance company, a change champion network recognized the need for frontline staff working virtually to have a platform for immediate queries and responses. The solution was a chat channel implemented under Microsoft Teams, approved by IT. In this channel, frontline staff could freely pose questions about system usage, shortcuts, and outages, and addressing customer concerns.
Initially, the channel had few questions, but as prompt and helpful responses were provided, engagement grew. Today, it stands as one of the most active Teams chat channels in the company, showcasing the effectiveness of cross-network collaboration. This success story has inspired similar initiatives in other businesses, emphasizing the ripple effect of successful collaboration practices within change networks.
5) Nurturing the network
Sustaining a change champion network is an ongoing endeavor that demands continuous nurturing, engagement, support, and leadership. Similar to any community, these networks thrive when provided with the right conditions and resources. Several key activities contribute to the nurturing of a dynamic and effective change champion network:
Onboarding and Expectation Setting: New members need comprehensive onboarding sessions where they receive information about the network’s objectives, core principles, expected time commitments, and other essential details.
Change Capability Sessions: Continuous learning is crucial for change champions. Sessions covering various topics, such as impact assessment, change communication, feedback provision during testing, and engagement with impacted stakeholder groups, help enhance their skills.
Leader Support: The involvement of senior leaders in certain sessions can provide valuable support and visibility to the network’s efforts, emphasizing the importance of their work in the broader organizational context.
Cross-Business Unit Networking: Structured agendas for cross-business unit change champion networking sessions create opportunities for sharing ideas and best practices, fostering a collaborative environment.
Routine Forums: Establishing routine forums for discussing project-specific topics allows members to stay informed and aligned with ongoing initiatives.
Formal Acknowledgments and Prizes: Recognizing key milestones and achievements through formal acknowledgments and prizes not only celebrates success but also motivates members to actively contribute.
Data Access: Providing change champions with access to change data, including impact assessments, readiness metrics, and change roadmaps, empowers them with valuable insights into upcoming changes and their stakeholder implications.
Regular Membership Reviews: Like any dynamic network, regular reviews of membership are essential. Some members may not meet expectations, and their roles might need to be filled by others. Expecting turnover and proactively managing it ensures a continuous influx of fresh perspectives and contributions.
Change champions, armed with comprehensive data on change impact, play a pivotal role in facilitating a clear understanding of impending changes and their ramifications for stakeholders. Regular reinforcement, support, and occasional challenges contribute to the resilience and effectiveness of the change champion network.
6) Supporting multiple initiatives
In the dynamic landscape of organizational change, it’s common for each business unit to undergo multiple initiatives simultaneously. Change champions play a pivotal role in navigating this complex terrain, supporting various initiatives and connecting the dots to form a coherent narrative for the impacted audience. Here’s why having change champions who can support multiple initiatives is crucial:
Holistic Understanding: Change champions, acting as the linchpin between different initiatives, provide a holistic understanding of the changes unfolding within a business unit. This comprehensive view enables them to craft a cohesive story that resonates with the audience, fostering better comprehension and buy-in.
Connecting the Dots: A key function of change champions is to connect disparate initiatives into a unified narrative. By highlighting interdependencies and common goals, they contribute to a more seamless and integrated change experience for stakeholders.
Predicting Crunch Periods: Change champions need to anticipate and understand the crunch periods for their business unit. By supporting multiple initiatives, they become adept at forecasting when the organization might face heightened challenges and risks that could impact daily operations.
Strategic Risk Management: With insights into multiple initiatives, change champions become strategic risk managers. They can identify potential points of friction, overlaps, or resource constraints and proactively address them, mitigating risks that could hinder the success of the initiatives.
Example of a single view of change from The Change Compass
Example of Change Outcome: The Change Compass
In analogy to mycorrhizal networks that span diverse ecosystems, organizations face the challenge of not only developing robust change champion networks internally but also fostering connections with external networks. Just as mycorrhizal networks link various landscapes, change champion networks can extend their impact beyond organizational boundaries.
Research indicates that when change champion networks from different companies link up, a wealth of learning and collaboration unfolds. This interconnectedness leads to a blossoming of reciprocity, negotiation, and even selflessness. Organizations stand to gain immensely by facilitating the exchange of insights and experiences among diverse change champion networks, creating a thriving ecosystem of change management knowledge and practices.
Elevate your change management strategy! Book a weekly demo with us and explore how our solutions can empower your change champion network.
Organisations invest significantly in change management tools, yet many find themselves asking, months after go-live, why nothing seems different. The data is being entered. The dashboards are populated. But decisions are still made the same way, change fatigue is still invisible until it’s too late, and the PMO is still reacting rather than anticipating. This is not a technology problem. It is a capability problem, and it is far more common than most implementation teams acknowledge.
Research from Prosci’s longitudinal benchmarking studies consistently shows that projects with excellent change management are six times more likely to meet their objectives than those with poor or no change management. Yet the same research reveals that capability gaps, not tool shortages, are the primary reason benefits go unrealised. Buying a platform is the easy part. Building the human systems around it – the habits, the conversations, the governance rhythms – is where organisations tend to stall.
This article is for change leaders and PMO heads who have implemented, or are implementing, a change data tool and want to understand what genuine value realisation actually requires. It maps the journey from basic data collection through to mature, embedded change intelligence – and it is honest about why so many organisations plateau at stage one.
Value realisation in the context of a change management tool is not simply the act of using the tool. It is the degree to which the organisation’s decision-making, planning, and risk management are genuinely improved because change data is now informing them. This is a meaningful distinction. An organisation can have complete data entry compliance and still make exactly the same poorly-timed, poorly-sequenced change decisions it made before the tool existed. Compliance is not value.
Genuine value realisation looks like this: a senior leader reviews change load data before approving a new initiative’s go-live date and decides to defer by six weeks because the data shows three other significant changes landing in the same business unit at the same time. A PMO uses change saturation trends to have a credible, evidence-based conversation with the executive team about sequencing. A business unit manager notices that their team has been in continuous high-change load for four months and makes resourcing decisions accordingly. These are not data entry outcomes. They are decision-making outcomes, and they require capability that goes well beyond knowing how to log a change in a system.
Gartner’s research on technology value realisation notes that organisations typically capture only 30 to 40 per cent of the expected value from technology investments, with the primary gap being adoption depth rather than feature availability. The same principle applies here. The question is not whether your tool has the right features. It is whether your people have the capability and the habit of using those features to change how decisions are made.
Why benefits are often unrealised after implementation
The most common reason change tool benefits go unrealised is not resistance, poor data quality, or insufficient training – though all of those contribute. The deeper reason is that organisations treat tool implementation as a project with an end date, rather than as the beginning of a capability-building journey. Once the system is live and people know how to log changes, the implementation team moves on. No one owns the question of whether the data is actually being used to make better decisions.
A second common failure pattern is the absence of senior sponsorship for the behavioural change required. Implementing a change data tool asks leaders to do something genuinely difficult: make their change load visible, accept that sequencing decisions may not go their way, and participate in a discipline that feels like overhead before it starts feeling like an advantage. Without a senior champion who models this behaviour and holds others accountable for it, the tool rapidly becomes a compliance exercise managed by a small team that no one senior engages with.
McKinsey research on transformation success identifies leadership commitment as the single most consistent differentiator between transformations that sustain their gains and those that revert. This holds equally true for the more modest but still significant transformation required to embed data-driven change governance. If the executive team is not seen consulting change load data in their own planning forums, the message to the rest of the organisation is that this is an administrative system, not a strategic one.
There is also a coaching gap that is rarely discussed. Change data tools surface information that most organisations have never had before – aggregate change load, saturation risk, sequencing conflicts. Making sense of that information and translating it into action requires analytical capability and organisational confidence that take time to build. Without deliberate coaching of PMO staff, change managers, and business stakeholders on how to interpret and act on change data, the dashboards become wallpaper: visible, but not seen.
The stages of the change value journey
The journey from tool implementation to embedded change intelligence is not linear, but it does follow a recognisable sequence of maturity stages. Understanding where your organisation sits on this journey is the first step toward accelerating progress.
In the earliest stage, the focus is almost entirely on data collection. The organisation is establishing what changes are in flight, who owns them, and what populations they affect. This is foundational and necessary, but it delivers almost no direct business value on its own. It is the equivalent of a hospital installing patient record software and counting it as an improvement in patient outcomes before any clinician has changed how they practice.
The second stage emerges when the data is sufficiently reliable for reporting. Change load dashboards start to be reviewed in governance forums. The PMO can show the executive team what the aggregate picture looks like across the portfolio. This stage produces genuine value, particularly in organisations that previously had no visibility of the overall change burden on their workforce. However, reporting is passive. Stakeholders see the data but do not yet routinely use it to change decisions.
The third stage is where organisations begin using change data to inform planning. A proposed initiative is assessed not just on its own merits but on its cumulative impact alongside what else is already scheduled. The PMO uses saturation data to negotiate sequencing with project sponsors. This requires stakeholders to accept that their change data is subject to collective oversight, which is a behavioural shift that takes sustained coaching and governance support to achieve.
The fourth and most mature stage is embedded change intelligence. At this stage, change data is a standing input to strategic planning, resource allocation, and business unit operating rhythms. Leaders consult it as naturally as they consult financial forecasts. The organisation has built genuine capability – not just in the PMO but across business stakeholders and the senior leadership team – to use change data as a management tool, not just a monitoring tool.
Engaging business stakeholders in data-driven decisions
Business stakeholders – the heads of business units, functional leaders, and operational managers whose teams absorb the impact of change – are frequently the most underserved audience in a change tool implementation. They are asked to provide data, and occasionally shown reports, but rarely coached on how to use change data to manage their own operational risk. This is a missed opportunity, because business stakeholders are the ones who feel the consequences of poor change sequencing most acutely.
Effective engagement of business stakeholders starts with reframing the value proposition. The tool is not asking them to do more administrative work for the PMO. It is giving them a new capability: the ability to see what their team is being asked to absorb, to flag when that load is becoming unmanageable, and to make that case with data rather than anecdote. That is a genuinely useful thing for a business leader to have, but they will not perceive it that way unless someone spends time with them helping them understand what the data means for their specific situation.
Research published in the Harvard Business Review on behavioural change in data-rich environments confirms that simply providing people with data does not change behaviour. What changes behaviour is combining data access with clear guidance on what to look for, coaching on what actions the data should prompt, and accountability mechanisms that make using the data the expected norm rather than the exceptional practice. This is exactly the model that needs to be applied to business stakeholder engagement in a change tool implementation.
Practically, this means running regular working sessions with key business leaders – not to show them dashboards, but to work through a specific decision together using the data. What does the change load for their business unit look like over the next quarter? Are there conflict points they should be aware of? What would they want to escalate or negotiate? When leaders have experienced using change data to make a real decision, the abstract value of the tool becomes concrete, and their engagement typically increases substantially.
Building PMO and leadership change capability
The PMO is often the primary steward of a change data tool, and its capability to interpret and present change data credibly has a direct bearing on how seriously senior leaders engage with the information. A PMO that can only report what the data shows – without offering analytical insight, identifying risk patterns, or recommending sequencing options – will eventually find its change data reports treated as informational rather than actionable. The capability gap here is analytical and advisory, not technical.
Building PMO capability in this area requires deliberate investment in three areas. First, analytical literacy: the ability to look at change load and saturation data and identify what it means for the business, not just what it says about individual projects. Second, stakeholder influence skills: the ability to take an uncomfortable finding – say, that the organisation is planning to deliver seven significant changes to a single business unit in one quarter – and present it in a way that generates a productive conversation rather than defensiveness. Third, governance integration: the knowledge of how to embed change data review into existing planning and decision-making forums rather than creating a parallel governance track that adds overhead without producing change.
For senior leaders, the capability requirement is different but equally important. Leaders need to understand what questions to ask of change data, not how to produce it. A chief operating officer who asks “what is the change load across our customer-facing operations over the next six months, and are there any quarters where we should be deferring new initiatives?” is using change intelligence effectively. Getting leaders to ask those questions habitually requires them to see that the questions get useful answers – which circles back to data quality, PMO analytical capability, and the governance structures that make change data review a standing expectation.
Measuring progress along the value journey
One of the practical challenges in capability-building programmes is that progress is hard to see in the short term. Unlike a technology go-live, which has a binary completion point, building organisational capability is incremental and the signals of progress are behavioural rather than systemic. This makes it easy for momentum to dissipate without anyone noticing until the change tool has quietly reverted to a data entry exercise.
Measuring progress along the change value journey requires a set of leading indicators that track behaviour, not just system activity. Useful measures include the frequency with which change data is referenced in executive planning discussions, the number of sequencing or staging decisions that were demonstrably influenced by change load data, the proportion of business stakeholders who actively review their unit’s change profile prior to major planning cycles, and the quality of PMO analysis as assessed by senior stakeholder feedback.
These are not metrics that come out of the change management tool itself. They require deliberate observation, conversation, and periodic review of whether the intended decision-making behaviours are actually occurring. Organisations that treat capability maturity as something to be actively monitored – rather than assumed – tend to progress through the value journey stages significantly faster than those that do not. A quarterly maturity assessment, conducted honestly with senior stakeholders and PMO leadership, can surface stagnation points before they become entrenched and redirect coaching effort where it is most needed.
How The Change Compass accelerates value realisation
The Change Compass is designed with the value journey in mind, not just the data collection problem. The platform provides real-time visibility of change volume, velocity, and saturation across business units, which creates the foundation for stages two and three of the value journey – reporting and planning – much faster than organisations typically achieve with manual methods or generic project management tools.
Beyond the platform itself, the Change Compass approach includes deliberate support for the capability-building work that determines whether the technology’s potential is actually captured. This includes coaching frameworks for engaging business stakeholders, templates for integrating change data into governance forums, and guidance on how to structure the PMO’s analytical and advisory role. The goal is not a well-populated system. The goal is an organisation where change data informs the decisions that matter – resourcing, sequencing, risk management, and strategic planning – and where that capability is distributed broadly enough that it does not depend on one or two individuals to sustain it.
For organisations that are further along the journey and looking to reach stage four, the platform’s trend analysis and forecasting features provide the inputs for the kind of strategic change intelligence that senior leaders find genuinely compelling. When a chief executive can see not just today’s change load but the projected trajectory over the next twelve months, the conversation about change capacity shifts from reactive to proactive, and the PMO moves from reporting function to strategic adviser.
Frequently asked questions
What is change value realisation?
Change value realisation is the degree to which an organisation actually captures the intended benefits of its change management investment – tools, processes, and capability – in the form of improved business decisions and outcomes. It is distinct from adoption or compliance. An organisation can have high system usage and still fail to realise value if the data being collected is not influencing how sequencing, resourcing, and planning decisions are made.
How long does it take to move from data collection to embedded change intelligence?
Most organisations take between 18 months and three years to move from initial data collection to genuinely embedded change intelligence, depending on the pace of capability investment, the strength of senior sponsorship, and the organisation’s existing change maturity. Organisations that invest deliberately in stakeholder coaching, governance integration, and PMO analytical capability tend to progress significantly faster than those that treat tool implementation as the end goal.
What role should the PMO play in building change capability?
The PMO’s role in change capability building is both analytical and advisory. It should move beyond producing change data reports and develop the capacity to interpret that data, identify risk patterns, and facilitate planning conversations with business stakeholders and senior leaders. The PMO is also typically responsible for embedding change data review into governance rhythms, which is the structural mechanism that makes capability-building sustainable over time.
How do you engage senior leaders in change data?
The most effective way to engage senior leaders is to use change data in the context of a real decision they care about. Rather than presenting a dashboard in isolation, work through a specific planning question – such as the change load on a key business unit during a critical operational period – and show how the data changes the recommendation. Leaders who experience change data as something that gives them better answers to questions they already have tend to seek it out; leaders who only see it as a reporting obligation do not.
A 2025 Gartner report found that fewer than 25% of organisations have moved beyond basic reporting when it comes to their change management data. Most change teams still rely on spreadsheets, survey snapshots, and anecdotal updates to communicate progress. Yet the same organisations invest heavily in analytics for marketing, finance, and operations. The gap is striking, and it is costing organisations real money in failed adoption, duplicated effort, and invisible change saturation.
Building a genuine change analytics capability is not about buying a dashboard tool and hoping people use it. It is about developing the people, processes, and data foundations that allow your change function to move from reactive reporting to predictive insight. This guide walks through a practical, stage-by-stage approach to building that capability, drawn from patterns observed across enterprise change teams in financial services, government, and large-scale technology transformations.
Why most change teams stall at the reporting stage
There is a critical difference between reporting and analytics, and most change functions confuse the two. Reporting tells you what happened: how many people attended the training, how many communications were sent, what the survey scores were. Analytics tells you what it means: which teams are at risk of adoption failure, where change saturation is building to dangerous levels, and which initiatives are competing for the same audience at the same time.
The reason most teams stall is structural, not technical. They lack three things simultaneously:
A data model that connects change activities to business outcomes rather than tracking them in isolation
An analytical mindset in the team, where practitioners ask “what does this pattern mean?” rather than “what number do the stakeholders want to see?”
A governance structure that makes data collection systematic rather than project-by-project
Until all three are in place, even sophisticated tools produce shallow outputs. A heat map without a data model behind it is just a coloured spreadsheet. A survey without an analytical framework is just a snapshot that tells you nothing about trajectory.
The four stages of change analytics maturity
Based on work across dozens of enterprise change functions, a clear maturity progression emerges. Understanding where your organisation sits on this continuum is the first step toward building capability intentionally rather than haphazardly.
Stage 1: Ad hoc reporting
At this stage, each project or initiative tracks its own metrics in its own way. There is no consistency in what gets measured, how it is collected, or how it is reported. Change managers produce PowerPoint slides with status updates, traffic-light ratings, and anecdotal commentary. The data is retrospective and rarely influences decisions.
You know you are here if your change reporting could be summarised as “things are on track” or “things are at risk” with little quantitative evidence behind either statement.
Stage 2: Standardised measurement
The team has agreed on a common set of metrics and a consistent approach to collecting them. This might include standardised impact assessments, consistent survey instruments, or a shared taxonomy for categorising change types. Data is still largely backward-looking, but it is now comparable across initiatives.
The hallmark of this stage is the ability to answer: “How does initiative A compare to initiative B in terms of employee impact?” If you cannot answer that question with data, you are still in Stage 1.
Stage 3: Integrated analytics
At this stage, change data is connected to other enterprise data sources. You can overlay change impact data with HR data (attrition, engagement scores, absenteeism), project data (timelines, milestones, budget), and operational data (productivity metrics, error rates, customer satisfaction). This is where the real analytical power begins.
A 2023 McKinsey analysis of organisational performance found that companies integrating people analytics with operational data were 2.5 times more likely to outperform peers on financial metrics. The same principle applies to change analytics: integration is what turns reporting into insight.
Stage 4: Predictive and prescriptive capability
The most mature change functions use their data not just to explain what happened, but to predict what will happen. They can model the likely impact of adding a new initiative to an already saturated portfolio. They can identify which business units are approaching adoption fatigue before it manifests in survey scores. They can quantify the productivity cost of overlapping go-lives and present scenario-based alternatives to the portfolio steering committee.
Reaching Stage 4 typically requires 18 to 24 months of sustained investment in data infrastructure, team capability, and stakeholder education. But even partial progress from Stage 1 to Stage 2 delivers measurable improvements in decision quality.
Building the foundation: your change data model
Before investing in tools or training, you need a data model that defines what you will measure, how entities relate to each other, and what questions the data should answer. A robust change data model typically includes five core entities:
Initiatives: the programmes, projects, and BAU changes flowing through the organisation, with attributes for type, size, timing, and strategic alignment
Impacts: the specific changes each initiative imposes on people, categorised by type (process, technology, role, policy, behaviour), intensity, and timing
Audiences: the teams, business units, roles, and locations affected by each impact, with enough granularity to identify overlap and accumulation
Interventions: the change activities delivered (training, communications, coaching, support), linked to specific impacts and audiences
Outcomes: adoption metrics, readiness scores, business performance indicators, and qualitative feedback that track whether the change is landing
The relationships between these entities are what make the model powerful. When you can trace a line from a strategic initiative through its individual impacts to the specific teams affected, and then through the interventions delivered to the adoption outcomes achieved, you have a data model capable of supporting real analytics.
Most organisations attempt to build this model in spreadsheets, which works at small scale but collapses under the weight of a real enterprise portfolio. A Prosci study on organisational change capability identified that teams using purpose-built change management platforms were significantly more likely to sustain their analytics capability over time compared to those relying on generic tools.
Developing analytical skills in your change team
A data model without people who can interpret it is useless. And here is the uncomfortable truth: most change practitioners were not trained in data analysis. Their backgrounds are in communications, psychology, HR, or project management. Asking them to suddenly think in terms of correlation, trend analysis, and statistical significance is unrealistic without deliberate investment.
The good news is that you do not need data scientists. You need practitioners who develop what might be called “analytical fluency”: the ability to look at change data and ask the right questions, spot meaningful patterns, and translate findings into stakeholder language.
Practical steps to build this fluency include:
Data storytelling workshops: Teach the team to construct narratives from data rather than presenting raw numbers. A chart showing change saturation by business unit is data. A narrative explaining why the operations team is at risk of adoption failure because three major initiatives overlap in Q3, and what to do about it, is insight.
Paired analysis sessions: Pair a change practitioner with someone from the data or business intelligence team for regular analysis sessions. The change practitioner brings domain knowledge; the analyst brings technical skill. Over time, both learn from each other.
Hypothesis-driven reviews: Replace status update meetings with hypothesis-driven discussions. Instead of “here is what happened this month,” start with “we hypothesised that the new process rollout would see higher adoption in teams with dedicated change champions. Here is what the data shows.”
Benchmark libraries: Build an internal library of benchmarks from past initiatives. How long does adoption typically take for a technology change versus a process change? What survey scores at the three-month mark predict successful adoption at twelve months? These benchmarks become the foundation for predictive capability.
A 2024 HR Grapevine analysis on people analytics maturity found that the biggest barrier to analytics adoption was not technology but the gap between available data and the ability of HR and change professionals to use it meaningfully. Investing in skill development pays off faster than investing in tools.
Embedding change analytics into governance and decision-making
The final, and often most difficult, step is making sure that change analytics actually influences decisions. Too many organisations build the capability, produce the reports, and then watch as steering committees ignore the data and make politically driven decisions anyway.
Embedding analytics into governance requires three structural changes:
First, change data must be a standing agenda item in portfolio governance meetings. Not an optional appendix, not an “if we have time” discussion, but a required input to every major decision about initiative timing, sequencing, and resourcing. When the portfolio steering committee debates whether to bring forward a new initiative, the change analytics view of current saturation, team capacity, and cumulative impact should be presented alongside the financial business case.
Second, define trigger thresholds that mandate action. Establish clear thresholds: if change saturation in a business unit exceeds a defined level, new initiatives targeting that unit require additional justification and mitigation plans. If adoption metrics fall below a target at a defined milestone, the initiative enters a remediation process. These triggers take analytics out of the advisory space and into the operational space.
Third, report outcomes, not just activities. Senior leaders quickly tune out reports about how many training sessions were delivered or how many communications were sent. They engage when you show them the relationship between change interventions and business outcomes: the correlation between structured change support and faster time-to-competency, or the measurable productivity impact of overlapping go-lives on frontline teams.
According to Gartner’s 2026 change management trends report, organisations that embed data-driven decision-making into their change governance frameworks see 40% higher success rates in complex transformation programmes compared to those relying on qualitative assessment alone.
How digital change tools accelerate analytics capability
Building a change analytics capability does not require starting from scratch. Purpose-built digital change management platforms like The Change Compass provide the data model, collection mechanisms, and visualisation layers that would take months to build manually. They standardise how impacts are assessed, connect initiatives to affected audiences, and generate portfolio-level views that make saturation and overlap immediately visible. For teams moving from Stage 1 to Stage 2, a dedicated platform can compress the journey from years to months by removing the infrastructure burden and letting the team focus on developing their analytical skills.
Where to start this week
If you are reading this and recognising your organisation in Stage 1, here is a practical starting point. Do not try to build everything at once. Pick one initiative currently in flight and apply a structured approach: map its impacts by audience, measure adoption using consistent criteria, and present the findings as a narrative to your steering committee. Use that single case to demonstrate the difference between reporting and analytics. Once stakeholders see what is possible, the conversation about investing in broader capability becomes much easier.
The organisations that build genuine change analytics capability do not do it by accident. They invest deliberately in data models, in their people’s analytical skills, and in governance structures that make data a required input to decisions. The payoff is a change function that can see around corners, anticipate problems before they escalate, and demonstrate its value in the language that senior leaders actually care about: business outcomes.
Frequently asked questions
What is change analytics capability?
Change analytics capability is an organisation’s ability to systematically collect, analyse, and act on data related to change initiatives. It goes beyond basic reporting to include trend analysis, predictive modelling, and data-driven decision-making about how change is planned, sequenced, and delivered across the enterprise.
How long does it take to build change analytics capability?
Moving from ad hoc reporting to standardised measurement typically takes three to six months with focused effort. Reaching integrated analytics, where change data connects to HR and operational data, usually requires 12 to 18 months. Full predictive capability can take two years or more, depending on data infrastructure and team skill levels.
Do I need a data scientist on my change team?
Not necessarily. What you need is analytical fluency: the ability to interpret data patterns, construct hypotheses, and translate findings into actionable recommendations. Pairing change practitioners with existing business intelligence or data teams is often more effective than hiring dedicated data scientists into the change function.
What tools do I need for change analytics?
The most important tool is a consistent data model, not software. That said, purpose-built change management platforms significantly reduce the effort required to collect, structure, and visualise change data. Generic tools like spreadsheets work at small scale but become unmanageable for enterprise portfolios with dozens of concurrent initiatives.
How do I convince senior leaders to invest in change analytics?
Start with a single compelling example. Take one initiative where you can show the relationship between change data and a business outcome, such as how structured adoption support reduced time-to-competency by a measurable amount, or how overlapping go-lives correlated with a spike in customer complaints. One concrete case study is more persuasive than any slide deck about the theoretical value of analytics.
At the time of the article Space X ‘Resilience’ (name of the shuttle) successfully took off into space with 4 astronauts. The astronauts wore super sleek white costumes that were tapered to the body and minimalist in design. They look quite different than the bulky spacesuits that we are all accustomed to in our heads from the 60s. What stood out for me was that this was a diverse team of astronauts. There was 1 female, 1 black, and 1 Asian. This was definitely not the all-white Caucasian males we are used to seeing in the past. It made me ponder about diversity and the change journey that companies are driving.
We all know the drill with most change journeys. It ‘must’ start at the top. It needs to be driven by senior managers. Then the rest of the managers need to support it and convince their people about the change journey. So what is wrong with this? Well, we also know that things often don’t go according to plan. Employees may ‘resist’ the change. They would then be labeled as ‘resistors’. The change manager on the project will then need to devise a plan to deal with these resistors to ensure the change goes smoothly despite them.
Diversity in Change Design
Anticipating Challenges: The crux of this transformative approach lies in its foresight to identify potential challenges before they materialize. Incorporating diversity early in the change design process constructs a dynamic framework that embraces myriad perspectives, experiences, and insights.
Practical Infusion of Diversity: Effectively infusing diversity into change strategies demands a conscious effort across dimensions. Assembling a diverse team of stakeholders from the project’s initiation ensures representation from various facets of the organization.
Shaping Resilience and Innovation: The primary objective is to cultivate resilience and innovation through intentionally incorporating diverse perspectives. Research consistently highlights the adaptability of diverse teams in facing challenges, tapping into a reservoir of creativity born from collaboration among individuals with varied backgrounds.
Beyond Tokenism: Infusing diversity transcends token gestures; it’s about creating an environment where diverse voices are not only heard but also valued and integrated into decision-making processes.
Early Stakeholder Engagement: Adopting an agile mindset, organizations should proactively assemble a diverse stakeholder group at the project’s inception, ensuring early engagement and integrating a broad spectrum of perspectives.
Anticipating Resistance and Brainstorming Solutions: Diversity in stakeholder engagement empowers organizations to interact early, identify potential push-backs, and collaboratively brainstorm solutions. This proactive strategy addresses resistance at its roots, mitigating risks during the implementation phase.
Ideation and Creativity: Inspired by Ideo’s principles, the ideation stage prioritizes quantity over the quality of ideas. Encouraging creativity without premature judgment recognizes that innovation often emerges from seemingly unconventional ideas.
Involvement at Every Level: Moving beyond the traditional top-down approach, organizations should envision change being driven from top-down, bottom-up, middle-out, and across every layer of the organizational hierarchy.
Challenges and Solutions: In the landscape of change, integrating diversity can encounter hurdles. A common challenge surfaces in the form of resistance, where employees perceive diversity initiatives as superficial. To overcome this, fostering open communication is vital. Actively involving employees in the change process not only allows them to voice concerns but also instills a sense of ownership and alignment with the change goals.
Another challenge lies in aligning diverse perspectives cohesively, which may lead to ambiguity or conflicting goals. This calls for robust communication channels and cross-functional collaboration. Encouraging a dialogue that integrates different viewpoints ensures a unified vision that accommodates the richness of diverse perspectives.
Measurable Outcomes: Embracing diversity in change design yields measurable outcomes. Teams reflecting diverse backgrounds consistently showcase heightened innovation and problem-solving capabilities. This innovation often translates into quantifiable improvements in product development, process efficiency, and overall organizational performance.
Measurable outcomes extend to employee engagement and satisfaction. Organizations fostering diversity experience higher levels of employee morale and commitment quantified through employee surveys, retention rates, and increased productivity. These metrics form a compelling narrative for the strategic value of diversity in driving successful change.
As we conclude this exploration into the transformative power of diversity in organizational change, it’s clear that diversity is more than a checkbox—it’s a dynamic force shaping the future of successful change management. The ‘Resilience’ shuttle journey serves as a metaphor for the resilience and innovation that embracing diversity brings to organizational journeys.
In essence, diversity propels change beyond resistance, transforming it into a collaborative, inclusive, and innovative process. The ‘Resilience’ shuttle journey serves as a metaphor for successful organizational change. Embracing diversity in change design is not merely a philosophical stance but a practical imperative. By incorporating diverse perspectives early on, organizations proactively navigate challenges, foster innovation, and drive transformative change from all directions.
As you embark on your change journey, remember that diversity is not just a strategy—it’s the cornerstone of lasting, impactful transformation.
Embark on a Diverse Journey with The Change Compass! Discover how our platform empowers you to embrace diversity in your change initiatives. Book your weekly demo now.
One of the most persistent habits in organisational change is the instinct to classify changes as either positive or negative. Communications teams label restructures as “exciting opportunities for growth.” Employees describe the same restructure as deeply unsettling. Programme sponsors call a new technology platform “a significant step forward.” The people who have to migrate their workflows to it while meeting their existing performance targets describe it as an unreasonable additional burden. Both descriptions are accurate. The question is whether the positive/negative classification is useful – and whether it actually helps organisations manage change more effectively.
The short answer is that it rarely does, and in many cases it actively harms the change management effort. The reasons for this are not merely about semantics. They go to the heart of how employees experience change and what drives their decision to engage with it or resist it. The video below explores this question in depth.
Understanding why the positive/negative framing is problematic – and what more useful framings look like – is a practical capability question for anyone involved in designing or leading organisational change.
Why the positive/negative binary breaks down
The fundamental problem with classifying change as positive or negative is that the classification is not a property of the change itself. It is a property of the relationship between the change and the individual or group experiencing it. A reduction in manual data entry may be unambiguously positive for the employees who found that work tedious and time-consuming. For the employees who took genuine pride in the accuracy and rigour of that work – who built their professional identity partly around it – the same change may represent a genuine loss. Neither reaction is irrational. Both reflect the reality that change disrupts existing arrangements, and the disruption is experienced as positive or negative depending on what the individual had invested in those arrangements and what they stand to gain or lose.
This stakeholder-relative nature of positive and negative change is well established in the research literature. Research published in Harvard Business Review on why people resist change found that resistance is rarely about the logical merits of the change. It is almost always about what the individual believes they will lose – status, certainty, relationships, competence, autonomy – as a result of the change. These perceived losses are real to the people experiencing them, regardless of whether the change is objectively beneficial to the organisation or even to that person in the longer term.
The implication is that a change classified as “positive” by the organisation may be experienced as highly negative by a significant proportion of its workforce – and that labelling it positive does not make their experience any less real or their concerns any less legitimate. It simply signals to those employees that their reaction has been anticipated, dismissed, and overridden before the change has even been communicated.
The problem with forced positivity in change communications
When organisations classify their changes as positive and then communicate them through that lens – the relentlessly optimistic town hall, the change that is always “an exciting opportunity,” the restructure framed as a strategic evolution – they create a specific and damaging dynamic. Employees who have genuine concerns, who can see costs and risks that the positive framing ignores, quickly learn that expressing those concerns is not welcome. The message received is not that the change is positive. It is that concerns about the change are not to be raised.
This perception does not make resistance disappear. It drives it underground, where it is harder to detect, harder to address, and more likely to surface at critical implementation moments as passive non-compliance rather than as honest engagement with the change process. Organisations that communicate change through forced positivity often find, six months after implementation, that adoption is lower than expected and that the reasons – now visible in exit interviews, attrition data, and the eventual candour of managers who were themselves sceptical – were entirely predictable from the concerns that were never aired.
Prosci’s research on change communication consistently finds that the most credible change communications acknowledge both the opportunity and the cost – that employees respond significantly better to change leaders who are honest about what is difficult than to those who present an unrealistically positive picture. The credibility of the change leader is the carrier signal for the message. A leader who glosses over genuine difficulties loses credibility, and a message carried by a low-credibility source is a message that does not land.
Every change has both gains and losses
A more productive framing is not positive versus negative but rather gains versus losses – and the recognition that every organisational change involves both, for different people at different points in the change journey. The gains and losses are real, they coexist, and the change management task is to understand both rather than to privilege one.
For any given change, there are gains that the organisation expects to realise – efficiency improvements, risk reduction, competitive advantage, better customer outcomes, reduced cost. These are the business case for the change, and they are real. There are also costs that the organisation is asking its employees to absorb – the effort of learning new skills, the disruption to established routines, the uncertainty about how roles will evolve, the period of reduced productivity during the learning curve, and in some cases the genuine loss of elements of their role that they found meaningful. These costs are also real, and they do not disappear because the business case for the change is compelling.
The change management task is to help the organisation navigate the transition between the current state – where the gains have not yet been realised and the costs are being actively experienced – and the future state where the gains are real and the costs have been absorbed. This navigation is not accomplished by labelling the destination as positive. It is accomplished by acknowledging the costs of the journey, providing adequate support for the people undertaking it, and maintaining an honest account of both the opportunity and the challenge involved.
The role of loss in change resistance
Loss is the primary psychological driver of change resistance, and it is systematically underweighted in how most organisations plan and communicate change. The reason is partly structural – the business case for a change is built by the people who stand to gain from it, and it is naturally weighted toward the gains. The people who will experience the costs are frequently not present in the room where the change is designed, and their perspective is introduced into the process late, if at all.
Research in behavioural economics has established that losses loom larger than equivalent gains in human psychology – a finding that has direct implications for change management. Research on the neuroscience of trust published in Harvard Business Review found that people who feel their concerns and losses are genuinely understood are significantly more likely to engage constructively with change than those who feel their perspective has been dismissed. The practical implication is that acknowledging loss – naming it explicitly, validating it, and demonstrating that the organisation has thought about how to support the people experiencing it – is not a sign of weakness in a change programme. It is one of the most effective tools available for building the employee trust that drives genuine adoption.
This does not mean that every change must be communicated as a loss. It means that the losses that accompany a change need to be acknowledged and addressed as part of the change management approach, rather than being suppressed in favour of an exclusively positive narrative. Employees who feel that their change leader understands what they are giving up – and has thought seriously about how to support them through it – are substantially more likely to engage with the change than those who feel their experience has been minimised.
More useful frameworks than positive or negative
If the positive/negative binary is not useful, what is? Several more productive framings have emerged from both research and practice. The first is the transition curve – the recognition that the psychological journey through change follows a predictable arc, and that at any point on that arc, the experience may be positive, negative, or mixed depending on where the individual is in their adaptation process. Positioning the change as having a difficult middle and a positive destination – rather than as simply positive – is more honest and more useful.
The second is the stakeholder-specific framing – the deliberate effort to understand and communicate the impact of the change on different roles and employee groups specifically, rather than communicating at the level of the organisation in general. A change that is genuinely positive for one group may have significant costs for another, and treating both with the same message is a failure of communication design. Effective change communication segments its audience by impact profile and tailors its message accordingly.
The third is the portfolio framing – the recognition that the experience of any individual change is profoundly shaped by the context in which it arrives. Platforms like The Change Compass help change leaders understand the cumulative change load on specific employee groups across the portfolio, which is critical context for understanding whether a given change is arriving in conditions that support positive engagement or conditions of depletion and fatigue. The same change that would land as a genuine positive in isolation may land as an additional burden in a context where employees have been absorbing multiple concurrent changes for months.
What this means for change impact assessment
The positive/negative question has practical implications for how change impact assessments are designed and used. Many impact assessment frameworks include a field for rating whether the impact is positive or negative – an instinct that seems reasonable but frequently produces misleading data. When impact ratings are filtered through the assessor’s assumption that a change is organisationally positive, genuinely negative impacts get underrated, and the resulting assessment understates the support that employees will need.
More useful assessment frameworks focus on the degree of change rather than its valence – how much does this impact require employees to shift from their current way of working? – and on the capability gap it creates – what do employees need to learn, unlearn, or develop to perform effectively after the change? These dimensions produce actionable data for change planning regardless of whether the change is experienced as positive or negative.
McKinsey’s research on transformation success factors consistently finds that the quality of the impact assessment – the degree to which it accurately captures the real implications for employees rather than the programme team’s assumptions – is a significant predictor of change outcomes. Assessments that are filtered through an organisational assumption that a change is positive systematically understate impact depth, producing change plans that are under-resourced and under-supported for the actual adaptive challenge the employees face.
Frequently asked questions
Should organisational change be classified as positive or negative?
The positive/negative classification is rarely useful because it is not a property of the change itself but of the relationship between the change and the individual or group experiencing it. The same change may be experienced as positive by one employee group and deeply negative by another. A more productive approach is to assess the gains and losses associated with the change for different stakeholder groups, and to design the change management approach to acknowledge both rather than suppressing the negative in favour of an exclusively positive narrative.
Why is forced positivity harmful in change management?
Forced positivity in change communication signals to employees that their genuine concerns are not welcome. This does not eliminate resistance – it drives it underground, where it is harder to detect and address and is more likely to surface as passive non-compliance at critical implementation moments. Employees who feel their losses and concerns have been dismissed rather than acknowledged are significantly less likely to engage constructively with a change than those who feel heard. Change leaders who acknowledge the genuine difficulties of a change without losing confidence in its direction are consistently more effective than those who maintain an unrealistically positive front.
What is a more useful framing than positive or negative change?
More useful framings include the degree of change required (how much does this require employees to shift from their current way of working?), the capability gap it creates (what do employees need to learn or develop?), and the stakeholder-specific impact (what does this change mean for this particular role or team?). These framings produce actionable data for change planning regardless of whether the change is experienced positively or negatively, and they are less likely to produce the communication problems associated with the positive/negative binary.
How does psychological loss relate to change resistance?
Loss is the primary driver of change resistance. When people anticipate losing something they value – status, certainty, relationships, competence, established routines – they experience this as a real threat regardless of the objective merits of the change. Research in behavioural economics has established that losses feel more significant than equivalent gains, which means that change programmes that focus only on what employees will gain consistently underestimate the resistance they will encounter. Acknowledging what employees are being asked to give up, and demonstrating genuine support for them through the loss, is one of the most effective available responses to resistance.
