How can I spot the early signs that a change is going off track?

Why can organisational change look successful on paper but struggle in practice?

Imagine an organisation introducing a new customer management process across sales, operations and customer service. The project team has delivered the system, employees have completed their training and the implementation milestones have been achieved. At the monthly steering committee meeting, the programme dashboard is green. From a project management perspective, there is good reason to believe the change is progressing as intended.

However, something different is happening in the organisation. Customer service employees have started maintaining their own spreadsheets because they cannot find all the information they need in the new system. Salespeople are contacting former colleagues to resolve problems that should now be handled through the new process. Operations managers are increasingly asked to make decisions that previously sat with individual teams. Customers are beginning to experience delays, although these have not yet become significant enough to affect the programme’s headline measures.

None of these observations necessarily means that the change is failing. The spreadsheets may be temporary arrangements while employees become familiar with the system. The additional conversations may reflect people learning how to work together differently. Some escalation may be appropriate while responsibilities are being clarified. Nevertheless, these developments deserve attention because they reveal how people are adapting to the change and where the new arrangements may not be working as expected.

Project reporting remains important. Leaders need to know whether activities are being completed, resources are available, costs are controlled and agreed milestones are being achieved. The difficulty arises when these measures become the primary evidence that organisational change is succeeding. They tell us a great deal about the delivery of a programme, but considerably less about how new working practices are developing.

This matters particularly in complex organisational change, where outcomes develop through interactions between people, processes, systems, expectations and local circumstances. A change can be delivered according to plan without producing the improvements originally intended. Equally, people may discover better ways of working that were never specified in the original design. Being on schedule and making organisational progress are not necessarily the same thing.

What should I pay attention to as change develops?

Research by Sharon Varney and Bernd Vogel identifies three domains in which emerging organisational change becomes visible: the patterning of events, changing patterns of relations and changing patterns of attention. These are not a diagnostic test or a list of predetermined warning signs. They are three practical places to look when you are trying to understand what is developing.

Events: What keeps happening?

An individual problem may not tell us very much. A customer handover might be delayed because someone is absent, information is incomplete or a particular case is unusually complicated. If similar delays begin appearing across several teams, however, there may be something worth investigating. Look for changes in frequency, timing and circumstances. Are exceptions becoming more common? Are problems being resolved more quickly? Are people developing new ways of handling situations that were previously difficult? Is an issue that appeared isolated now showing up elsewhere?

The aim is not to wait until every observation becomes a measurable trend. Sometimes an unusual event is important precisely because it differs from what everybody expects. Remain curious about what happened without deciding too quickly what it means.

Relationships: Who is working differently with whom?

Organisational change often alters relationships even when the formal structure remains unchanged. A new process may require departments to coordinate decisions they previously made independently. A new technology may make some employees more influential because they understand it better than others. Informal relationships may become essential to getting the work done.

These developments can be helpful. People may form new connections, share expertise more readily or find quicker ways to solve customer problems. They can also reveal unclear responsibilities, growing tension or excessive dependence on a few experienced colleagues. Asking who people now rely on, where decisions get stuck and which relationships have become more important can reveal how the organisation is actually functioning.

Attention: What is occupying people’s minds?

What people pay attention to also changes as an initiative develops. Early conversations may focus on learning a new system. Later, they may concentrate on whether it supports customers, how performance is being judged or whether managers are listening to concerns. Employees may begin discussing improvements rather than simply trying to follow instructions. Alternatively, they may become increasingly concerned with demonstrating compliance, protecting their own department or avoiding blame.

These conversations matter because people are continually interpreting what the change means for them and their work. Julia Balogun and Gerry Johnson’s research on organisational restructuring showed how change recipients’ sensemaking, including informal social interactions away from formal change activities, can contribute to both intended and unintended outcomes. A useful question is therefore not simply, “What are people saying about the change?” but, “How might these conversations be influencing what people do?”

What can workarounds and informal conversations tell me?

Workarounds are easy to misinterpret. When employees continue using an old spreadsheet, contact someone outside the agreed process or introduce an additional approval step, managers may conclude that people are resisting the change. Sometimes resistance is part of the explanation, but there are other possibilities. The new process may not provide essential information, responsibilities may be unclear or employees may have found a way of meeting customer needs that the formal design overlooked.

Return to the customer management example. A manager discovers that several employees are keeping parallel records. The immediate response might be to remind them that the new system is mandatory and instruct them to stop. A more informative response is to ask someone to demonstrate a recent customer case. What information did they need? Where did they find it? What did the spreadsheet allow them to do? What would happen if they stopped using it?

The manager may discover that the spreadsheet records a customer commitment made by sales that is not visible to operations. Removing it without addressing that gap could make the customer experience worse. This does not mean that every workaround should be accepted. Some create risks involving security, quality, compliance or inconsistent service. Others consume unnecessary effort or make important information difficult to share. The point is to understand why a practice has developed before deciding how to respond.

Informal conversations provide similar clues. Employees may discuss difficulties with colleagues long before they raise them through formal channels. They may also share useful ideas and develop new practices without considering them significant enough to report. Questions grounded in recent experience are more revealing than a general enquiry about whether people support the change:

• Can you walk me through the last case that was difficult to complete?
• What takes more effort now than it did before?
• Where have you found a different way of getting something done?
• What has become easier or more effective?
• Who do you turn to when the new arrangements do not work as expected?

Where are the bright spots, and what can I learn from them?

Monitoring change should not become an exercise in searching for everything that is going wrong. Leaders also need to notice where something is working unexpectedly well. In Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath call these examples bright spots. Their practical advice is to find existing success, understand what people are doing differently and consider how more of that success might be created.

Suppose most teams are experiencing difficulties with customer handovers, but one team consistently completes them more quickly and with fewer errors. A conventional review might concentrate on improving the other teams. Looking for bright spots prompts another question: what is happening in the successful team that is not happening elsewhere?

A conversation reveals that sales and operations colleagues in that team have developed a short discussion before transferring a case. They clarify outstanding commitments, identify missing information and agree who will handle any exceptions. The practice was not part of the original design. It emerged because the people involved recognised a recurring difficulty and found a way to address it.

The useful next step is not to order every team to copy the discussion. The leader first needs to explore what makes it effective. Is the conversation itself responsible for the improvement? Does the team have stronger relationships, clearer responsibilities, more experience, fewer customers or different working conditions? A practice that works in one setting may depend on conditions that are absent elsewhere.

This is where the bright-spots idea connects helpfully with complexity-informed practice. Cynefin describes the value of small, observable probes in complex situations: try a manageable intervention, pay attention to the patterns that emerge, amplify beneficial developments and dampen harmful ones. Another team might therefore test a similar handover conversation and observe what happens, rather than treating the first team’s practice as a universal solution.

How can I make sense of the early signals I notice?

Recognising something unusual is only the beginning. The more difficult task is deciding what it means and whether anything needs to change. I use three recurring questions: Notice, Explore and Respond.  It is informed by complexity approaches to sensing and intervention and closely parallels Glenda Eoyang and Royce Holladay’s iterative Adaptive Action questions: What? So what? Now what?

Notice begins with what you have actually observed. “Employees are maintaining parallel spreadsheets” describes something happening. “Employees are resisting the new system” is one possible interpretation. Gather observations from different parts of the organisation because an improvement for one department may create additional work for another, and a manager’s experience may differ from that of the employees handling customer cases.

Explore means investigating the circumstances before settling on a diagnosis. If decisions are increasingly escalated, the explanation might be unclear authority, lack of confidence, conflicting priorities or a genuine increase in complexity. Several influences may be interacting, and some may become apparent only as the situation develops. Exploration should be proportionate. A minor inconvenience does not require an extensive investigation, while an unusual event with potentially serious consequences may deserve immediate attention.

Respond: What is worth trying, and what will you watch?

Once you have explored the situation, decide what kind of response the observation warrants. Where cause and effect are reasonably clear, the appropriate response may be to correct a fault, clarify a decision or stop an unsafe practice. In a more complex situation, however, there may be several plausible explanations and no reliable way to know in advance which response will work.

Rather than committing immediately to one solution, consider one or more small, bounded and recoverable actions that will help you learn. These might involve testing a different handover conversation, changing who has access to particular information or clarifying decision boundaries with one team before making a wider change.

Decide what you will monitor before you begin. What would suggest that the response is helping? What harmful or unexpected effects would require you to stop or adjust it? What new developments might deserve further investigation?

Then respond to what emerges. Amplify a beneficial pattern where the evidence supports doing so. Dampen or stop an intervention that is causing harm. Investigate an unexpected result or try a different probe when the situation remains unclear.

The purpose is not to find the perfect intervention at the first attempt. It is to interact with the situation carefully enough to learn, while retaining the ability to change course. Then begin the cycle again: notice what has changed, explore what it might mean and decide what is worth trying next.

What does this look like in practice?

The table below keeps the method practical without turning each observation into an automatic diagnosis. The same signal can have different explanations in different circumstances.

How can I monitor change without creating another reporting system?

The intention is not to establish another dashboard, meeting or layer of administration. It is to make better use of existing conversations, operational information and opportunities to observe the work. Conventional reporting can continue to show whether the programme is delivering its planned activities, while a short sensing conversation helps leaders notice what those reports may miss.

Reserve 15 minutes in an existing weekly change review for three questions:

1. What have we noticed happening differently this week?
2. Where is something working better or worse than expected?
3. What deserves further exploration or a response?

Invite observations from people close to the work rather than relying exclusively on those responsible for programme reporting. Customer service employees, operational colleagues, team leaders and people working across departmental boundaries will see different parts of the change. Ask for recent examples rather than broad judgements, and make it legitimate to report useful adaptations as well as problems.

Occasionally follow a real customer case or operational task from beginning to end. Compare what the process is supposed to do with what actually happens. Notice where information is re-entered, where people wait, who gets contacted informally, which decisions are escalated and what the customer experiences. One case does not prove a pattern, but it can give you a grounded observation worth exploring elsewhere.

Finally, record only what helps the next decision: The observation, what you currently think it may mean, the response you have chosen and what you will watch next. That creates a light learning record without turning sensing into another reporting burden.

Five questions to ask when monitoring organisational change

1. What is happening in everyday work that our project reports do not show?
2. Where are people adapting the change, and what might those adaptations tell us?
3. What patterns are emerging in events, relationships and attention?
4. Where are the bright spots, and what conditions might explain them?
5. What should we encourage, investigate, adjust, constrain or stop?

Monitoring organisational change is not a separate task to be delegated entirely to a project office. It is a continuing leadership responsibility. The programme team can tell you whether planned work is being delivered. Leaders also need to stay close enough to everyday experience to notice how the organisation is responding, explore what emerging patterns might mean and make proportionate adjustments while there is still time to shape what happens next.

Recommended reading

If you would like to explore these ideas in more depth, the following four articles and two book summaries examine different aspects of noticing, interpreting and responding to change in complex organisations.

• How do I adapt my leadership style to engage my whole team through change? Look beyond simple labels such as support and resistance, distinguish between active and passive responses, and adapt how you lead people who are proactive, accepting, resisting or disengaged.
• How do I lead change when people agree in public but resist in private? Explore why visible agreement can conceal withdrawal, self-protection and quiet non-adoption, and how to make concerns and losses discussable before they become embedded in behaviour.
• Leading in complexity: How pilots, probes, and experiments help organisations learn their way forward. Understand the differences between testing a promising solution, exploring several possibilities and examining a specific hypothesis when the appropriate response remains uncertain.
• How to use estuarine mapping to navigate change in complex systems. Examine the constraints, habits, people and resources shaping the present situation, identify where movement is realistically possible and develop a portfolio of small interventions.
• OpenSpace Beta by Niels Pflaeging and Silke Hermann: book summary. Consider an approach to organisational transformation built around invitation, self-organisation, rapid feedback and changing the conditions in which people work rather than imposing a predetermined future state.
• Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems by Adam Kahane: a practical book summary. Explore how systems change through small everyday actions, diverse relationships, attention to cracks and bright spots, and practical experimentation rather than heroic leadership or grand transformation plans.

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Sources:

Balogun, J. and Johnson, G. (2004), “Organizational Restructuring and Middle Manager Sensemaking”, Academy of Management Journal, 47(4), pp. 523–549. https://doi.org/10.2307/20159600

Balogun, J. and Johnson, G. (2005), “From Intended Strategies to Unintended Outcomes: The Impact of Change Recipient Sensemaking”, Organization Studies, 26(11), pp. 1573–1601. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840605054624

Eoyang, G. H. and Holladay, R. J. (2013), Adaptive Action: Leveraging Uncertainty in Your Organization. Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books, an imprint of Stanford University Press.

Heath, C. and Heath, D. (2010), Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. New York: Broadway Books.

Snowden, D. J. and Boone, M. E. (2007), “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making”, Harvard Business Review, 85(11), pp. 68–76.

Varney, S. and Vogel, B. (2014), “Domains of Emergent Change: Making Sense of Emerging Patterns in the Midst of Change”, Academy of Management Proceedings, 2014(1), Article 12192. https://doi.org/10.5465/ambpp.2014.12192abstract