There’s a particular conversation I’ve had more times than I can count over the past two and a half decades. It happens when a leader is sitting with a transformation programme that isn’t delivering what it promised, and they’re trying to understand why.
We go through the usual territory. The governance. The plan. The technology choices. The implementation partner. And usually, somewhere in that conversation, we arrive at the real issue. Not a decision that was made badly, but an assumption that was never examined at all. A belief about how organisations work, how people respond to change, or what drives execution that was taken as given from the outset and built into every subsequent decision.
Those unexamined beliefs are, in my experience, responsible for more transformation failure than any other single factor. And the reason they’re so hard to address is precisely because they feel like common sense.
What the music industry taught me about inherited assumptions
When I was at EMI in the late 1990s, the industry operated on a set of beliefs that had held true for decades. Music was a physical product. Value was created through scarcity and distribution control. The relationship between artist, label and consumer was well understood and stable.
Napster didn’t just disrupt the business model. It exposed how completely those beliefs had become invisible. Nobody in a major label boardroom had sat down and consciously decided that digital distribution was impossible or undesirable. They simply hadn’t questioned assumptions that had always been true, right up until the moment they weren’t.
The organisations that navigated that period best weren’t necessarily the ones that moved fastest. They were the ones that got honest about which of their foundational beliefs were still valid and which ones were quietly leading them in the wrong direction.
I’ve watched exactly the same dynamic play out inside transformation programmes ever since.
The assumptions most commonly getting in the way
The beliefs that most consistently undermine transformation momentum tend to feel, when you examine them, entirely reasonable. That’s what makes them so persistent.
The first is the belief that resistance is a people problem. That when teams push back on change, the issue is with the people rather than with how the change is being led. This belief tends to produce responses that make things worse: more pressure, more communication, more governance. What it rarely produces is the honest examination of whether the resistance is telling you something important about how the change has been framed, communicated or designed.
Resistance, in the vast majority of cases I’ve encountered, is information. It signals uncertainty, insufficient clarity, a felt gap between what people are being asked to do and what they understand about why they’re being asked to do it. Treating it as obstruction rather than signal is one of the most expensive mistakes a leader can make.
The second is the belief that engagement is a communications activity. That if you send enough updates, run enough all-hands sessions and produce enough well-designed slide decks, people will feel informed and therefore committed. This belief is so widespread that most organisations have entire functions built around it.
The problem is that information and commitment are not the same thing. People can be comprehensively informed about a change and still feel no emotional investment in its success. Genuine engagement, the kind that translates into adoption and discretionary effort, comes from feeling involved, heard and connected to the purpose behind the change. That requires a fundamentally different leadership approach to producing a good communications plan.
The third is the belief that change fatigue is caused by the volume of change. Organisations responding to this belief typically try to reduce the number of initiatives running simultaneously, which is rarely possible given the pace of the environment most are operating in.
What actually drives change fatigue isn’t volume. It’s friction. The experience of working hard inside a system that makes everything harder than it needs to be. Unclear priorities, slow decisions, ambiguous accountability, processes that don’t support the new way of working. Remove the friction and organisations can absorb a remarkable amount of change without the energy collapse that fatigue produces. Leave it in place and even a modest number of initiatives will overwhelm people.
Why these beliefs persist
None of the beliefs I’ve described above are irrational. They’re generalisations from real experience. Resistance does sometimes reflect genuine people problems. Communication is genuinely necessary. Change genuinely is exhausting in many organisations.
The issue is that they’ve hardened into unexamined assumptions that shape how leaders diagnose problems and design responses, often invisibly. When the same approaches keep producing the same results, the natural response is to do more of them rather than to question whether the underlying belief is actually correct.
This is the pattern that McKinsey and others have been documenting for decades in their research on transformation failure rates. The majority of major initiatives continue to underperform not because leaders aren’t trying hard enough, but because they’re working within a set of assumptions that systematically lead them toward interventions that address the symptoms rather than the cause.
What changes when the assumptions change
The leaders and organisations I’ve watched navigate complex transformation most successfully share a particular characteristic. They’re willing to examine their own beliefs about how change works and test them against what’s actually happening, rather than defaulting to familiar responses when things don’t go as planned.
When a programme is losing momentum, they ask whether their diagnosis of the problem is correct before they prescribe a solution. When resistance appears, they get curious about what it’s telling them rather than immediately looking for ways to overcome it. When engagement is low, they examine whether their approach to building it is actually capable of producing the outcome they need.
That willingness to question foundational assumptions isn’t a sign of uncertainty or weak leadership. It’s the thing that separates the organisations that learn and adapt from the ones that keep applying the same thinking and hoping, eventually, for different results.
The assumptions you’re carrying into your next phase of transformation will shape every decision you make within it. It’s worth knowing which ones are serving you and which ones aren’t.
Because most organisations respond to underperformance by doing more of what isn’t working, rather than examining the underlying beliefs that shaped their approach in the first place. The majority of major initiatives underperform not because leaders aren’t trying hard enough, but because unexamined assumptions about resistance, engagement and change fatigue systematically lead toward interventions that address symptoms rather than causes.
Communication is the delivery of information. Engagement is emotional commitment to an outcome. People can be comprehensively informed about a change and still feel no investment in its success. Genuine engagement, the kind that produces adoption and discretionary effort, comes from feeling involved, heard and connected to the purpose behind the change. Treating communication volume as a measure of engagement is one of the most common and costly mistakes in transformation leadership.
Not the volume of change, but the friction created by how change is led. Unclear priorities, slow decisions, ambiguous accountability and processes that don’t support new ways of working make everything harder than it needs to be. Remove that friction and organisations can absorb a significant amount of change without the energy collapse that fatigue produces. Leave it in place and even a modest number of initiatives will overwhelm people.
By treating it as information rather than obstruction. Resistance almost always signals something worth understanding: uncertainty, insufficient clarity, a gap between what people are being asked to do and what they understand about why. The leaders who navigate resistance most effectively get curious about what it’s telling them before they decide how to respond to it.
