Quick answer

To get organisational change back on track, examine what is happening before automatically reinforcing the original plan. Some difficulties need clearer decisions, training or better implementation. Others arise from the ways people, systems, incentives and established practices interact. AIMS can help leaders examine and influence the conditions in which people work, notice what develops and adjust their approach.

Five ways to get organisational change back on track:

  • Question your assumptions: Check whether the original plan still reflects what is happening.
  • Look beyond resistance: Examine the rules, systems and incentives influencing people’s decisions.
  • Change interactions: Create opportunities for people and teams to work together differently.
  • Notice emerging patterns: Look for useful and harmful developments that project reports may miss.
  • Adjust the conditions: Test manageable interventions, protect essential boundaries and respond to what you learn.

Getting change back on track does not always mean returning to the original plan. Sometimes the organisation needs to discover a better way of achieving its purpose.

Why does organisational change lose momentum?

In my first role in the corporate world, I supported a large automotive company on a transformation project. Over US$30 million was spent over five years and it failed miserably. I was new to corporate life back then, and I found it difficult to understand how an organisation could commit so much money, effort and time and still achieve so little of what it intended. Looking back, what stands out is the ambition and scale of the undertaking. It was a classic five-year, waterfall-style approach: an extensive plan established at the outset, with implementation expected to follow over a long period. My impression was that the initiative failed because it had become too ambitious, too complex, too large and far too prolonged.

A plan, like that in the transformation above, is useful. It helps people agree a purpose, make commitments and coordinate work. The difficulty comes when following the plan becomes more important than paying attention to what is happening. Over several years, markets change, priorities shift, people move roles and informal practices develop around the formal arrangements. A programme can complete substantial amounts of planned activity without delivering the benefits that justified the investment.

When progress slows, an understandable response is to reinforce implementation through additional communication, training, progress reviews or management attention. Sometimes those are exactly the right interventions. I would first want to understand what is making the change difficult in practice, particularly where people appear to be complying with the new arrangements while continuing to work in old ways.

To explore that question throughout this article, I will use an illustrative example of an organisation introducing a shared customer management process across sales, operations and customer service. The intention is to improve responsiveness, reduce duplication and clarify responsibilities. Six months after implementation, the technology is operational and employees have completed their training, but customer handovers remain inconsistent. Teams continue maintaining separate records, decisions are delayed and managers disagree about who should take responsibility when problems arise.

The programme director sees this as an adoption problem and asks managers to reinforce the agreed process. Compliance improves on paper, but duplication continues. Sales is measured on responsiveness, operations on efficiency and customer service on resolving problems that frequently originate elsewhere. Some spreadsheets hold information missing from the new system, while experienced employees still rely on informal relationships to resolve difficult cases. The formal process has changed, but many of the conditions influencing everyday decisions have not.

Are we trying to solve the right problem?

When change is struggling, leaders often look for an explanation they can address. Employees are resisting, managers are not committed, communication has been inadequate or the implementation plan was too ambitious. Any of these could be true, but identifying one explanation too quickly can obscure what is happening.

A manager might support the new operating model but continue making decisions through established relationships because the formal arrangements are unclear. Employees may understand the purpose of a new system but maintain workarounds because it does not provide information they need. Two departments may both be performing well against their individual targets while making the overall process less effective.

It is worth asking whether people are behaving irrationally or responding quite reasonably to the circumstances in which they work.

Some change problems have identifiable causes and relatively straightforward solutions. If employees cannot use a system because they have not received training, the answer may be to provide it. If responsibility for a decision is unclear, somebody needs to clarify it. There is little value in treating these situations as more complicated than they are.

Other difficulties arise through the way people, processes, technology and organisational arrangements affect one another. Changing a reporting relationship may alter informal influence and cooperation. Introducing a new performance measure may encourage behaviour that nobody intended. A process designed to improve efficiency in one department may create additional work in another.

These consequences are not always predictable when the original plan is developed. We can establish objectives and make decisions, but we also need to pay attention to what develops as people respond to the change. This is one of the ideas behind emergence in complexity theory: patterns develop through interactions and cannot always be understood by examining each element separately.

In these circumstances, looking for a single root cause may not be particularly helpful. An intervention that improves cooperation in one department might create difficulties elsewhere, while a modest adjustment to working arrangements could produce benefits nobody anticipated. AIMS offers one way of working with this uncertainty while retaining leadership responsibility.

How can AIMS help me influence organisational change?

Dave Snowden discusses AIMS in his writing for The Cynefin Co. (Snowden, 2024), and the Cynefin Wiki also outlines the framework (The Cynefin Co., n.d.). It considers four connected elements: Actants, Interactions, Monitors and Scaffolding. Rather than assuming change can be achieved primarily by persuading individuals to adopt new attitudes, it directs attention to the influences operating within an organisation, the interactions through which patterns develop, ways of noticing emerging changes, and the structures that enable or constrain what happens.

AIMS element What it concerns Leadership question
Actants People, technologies, rules, incentives and other influences What could we change about the elements involved?
Interactions Connections and relationships between those elements What new or different interactions might we enable?
Monitors Ways of detecting emerging patterns and consequences What should we pay attention to as things develop?
Scaffolding Structures and constraints that shape what can emerge What support and boundaries would enable useful change?

These are not four steps to complete before choosing a solution. A leader might change who works together, remove an unnecessary constraint and watch the consequences, making further adjustments as the situation develops. AIMS does not require a complete explanation of everything happening within the organisation. In a complex situation, that may be impossible.

Actants: What could we change about the elements involved?

An actant is something that influences what happens within a system. The term has roots in actor-network theory, and it is useful precisely because it directs our attention beyond people and stakeholders. A software system, performance target, approval procedure or organisational policy can influence what people do, sometimes more powerfully than instructions from their managers. This wider view may reveal opportunities for intervention that would be missed if we concentrated entirely on attitudes and behaviour.

This matters because change programmes often concentrate on the individuals expected to work differently. Leaders ask whether employees are committed, whether managers understand their responsibilities and whether people are following the new process. Those questions have their place, but they may miss other influences that are reinforcing existing practices.

In the illustrative customer management example, departmental performance measures encourage different priorities, approval procedures slow decisions and the new system lacks information that employees previously relied upon. These arrangements influence behaviour regardless of how often managers communicate the benefits of change.

Rather than immediately asking employees to demonstrate greater commitment, the programme director could consider changing some of these actants. A performance measure might be adjusted to encourage shared responsibility for customer outcomes. The new system could make missing information available. An approval requirement that adds little value might be removed.

Some influences are outside the leader’s authority, while others protect important organisational requirements. Existing practices also deserve examination before they are removed. The informal spreadsheets may be compensating for a genuine weakness in the new system. Removing them before understanding their function could make the situation worse.

Things to try

  • Map the influences on one recurring problem: Take a difficulty that has persisted despite the change and identify the people, systems, performance measures, rules and informal practices affecting it. Ask which of these were overlooked in the original plan.
  • Investigate a workaround: Find out why people still use a spreadsheet, informal approval or old process. What does it provide that the new arrangement does not, and what would happen if it disappeared?
  • Test one manageable adjustment: Where you have the authority, consider a temporary change to a measure, rule or approval requirement. Agree what must remain protected and watch for consequences elsewhere.

Interactions: What new patterns might develop if we changed how people work together?

Organisational charts show reporting relationships, and process maps describe how work is intended to happen. Neither necessarily reveals how people actually cooperate, exchange information, resolve disagreements or work around difficulties.

In complex situations, interactions between people and other actants matter because patterns develop through those connections. Changing who interacts, how frequently they interact, what information they share or what decisions they can make together may influence what becomes possible.

Sales and operations have different expectations about what constitutes a complete handover. Customer service frequently discovers problems after decisions have been made elsewhere, but has limited opportunity to influence those decisions. Experienced employees know whom to contact when something goes wrong, while newer colleagues struggle to find the right person.

A shared review of actual customer cases would let people from all three departments see where their expectations differ. It could also reveal whether difficulties arise from missing information, unclear decisions or the way problems are passed between teams.

Existing tensions, differences in authority and competing priorities will still matter. Working together on real cases may nevertheless create opportunities for different patterns to develop. Different teams might also try different arrangements: a short daily discussion, direct contact between designated colleagues or a shared review of unresolved cases.

The leader would need to observe whether these changes help people solve problems or merely add another layer of meetings. Existing tensions and differences in authority will still affect what is possible.

Things to try

  • Examine one real case together: Bring people from the departments involved in a difficult handover or decision into the same conversation. Ask each person to explain what happened from their perspective and where the work became difficult.
  • Shorten a communication route: If everyday questions travel up and down management chains, try allowing the people doing the work to speak directly, with clear boundaries for decisions that still need escalation.
  • Vary the way people coordinate: Try a short cross-functional review or a temporary connection between teams. Check whether it resolves more problems than the extra coordination creates.

Monitors: How will we notice what is emerging?

Many change programmes monitor progress through milestones, budgets, training completion, implementation activities and agreed performance measures. These are useful, particularly when leaders need to know whether commitments are being delivered. They may tell us less about what is happening as people begin working differently.

A project can report successful implementation while employees continue maintaining informal workarounds. Training completion may be high while confidence remains low. A new process may be operating as designed, but the effort required to make it work may be increasing.

The programme director knows how frequently the new system is being used. What remains less visible is why people continue using separate records, where handovers break down and which informal arrangements help resolve difficult cases.

Monitoring in complex situations involves paying attention to emerging patterns, including developments that were not anticipated when the original measures were established. This may require examining actual cases, listening to people close to the work and comparing experiences across departments. It also means being alert to useful developments, not just problems. One team may discover a more effective way of coordinating handovers, or two departments may establish an informal arrangement that improves decision-making.

What the project report shows What else might we investigate?
Training completion is high Can people apply the new process effectively?
System adoption is increasing Are employees maintaining parallel records?
Milestones have been achieved Are the intended benefits appearing?
Managers report progress What difficulties are people experiencing between departments?
Exceptions are declining Are problems reducing or becoming less visible?
One team is performing particularly well What is different about how that team works?

An isolated complaint or unusual event may tell us little. I would look for recurring patterns, compare perspectives and resist drawing conclusions too quickly. Monitoring should also include unintended consequences. A faster process might create extra work elsewhere, while an apparently successful local practice may depend on one person carrying an unsustainable workload. The purpose is not simply to confirm that an intervention achieved what was intended, but to notice what is developing.

Things to try

  • Add signs of actual benefit: Alongside implementation milestones, identify two or three observable changes that would indicate the new arrangements are helping, such as fewer repeated handovers or less duplicated recording.
  • Follow a case from beginning to end: Trace a recent customer request or decision through the process. Note where work waits, information is recreated or somebody relies on an informal contact to move things along.
  • Ask what has changed unexpectedly: Invite people close to the work to describe what is easier, harder or different from the agreed process. Compare accounts over time before treating one incident as a pattern.

Scaffolding: What conditions would allow useful practices to develop?

Scaffolding refers to the structures and constraints that support or shape what can happen. In organisations, these might include decision rights, reporting relationships, policies, meeting arrangements, shared resources and agreed standards.

Some structures are essential. Legal obligations, safety requirements, financial controls and customer protections should not be left to local interpretation. Clear responsibilities can also reduce uncertainty and help people cooperate. Other arrangements may limit people’s ability to adapt without providing much benefit.

The organisation in our example needs consistent standards for customer information, accountability and regulatory compliance. It may not need every department to organise its daily coordination in exactly the same way.

The programme director might establish temporary arrangements to support experimentation. Representatives from different departments could be given time and authority to work on recurring handover problems. They might have access to relevant customer information, permission to test alternative coordination practices and a clear route for raising issues that cannot be resolved locally.

These arrangements provide support without prescribing exactly what the teams must discover. Some scaffolding may eventually become unnecessary. Once teams have established dependable relationships and effective ways of coordinating their work, a temporary facilitated meeting or additional oversight arrangement may no longer be needed. Other structures should remain because they protect essential requirements or provide stability.

Some problems require an immediate and direct response. If employees are bypassing an essential safety procedure, the organisation should address that directly. If people lack necessary training, providing it may be the appropriate response. The judgement is about which boundaries must hold and where flexibility can be useful.

Things to try

  • Check the purpose of a constraint: Choose one approval, policy or meeting requirement that affects the change. Establish what it protects and whether there is a safe way to give people more discretion.
  • Give a group room to try something: Set aside a little time and appropriate decision authority for colleagues to address a recurring problem. Be explicit about customer, safety, financial or regulatory boundaries.
  • Remove support when it is no longer needed: Review temporary meetings, escalation arrangements and additional oversight. Keep what helps people coordinate and reduce what has become unnecessary.

What can I do differently when change is losing momentum?

When a change programme is struggling, it is tempting to identify the cause and then design a solution. That works reasonably well when the problem is identifiable and the consequences of an intervention are predictable. In more complex situations, there may be several interacting influences, and it is difficult to know in advance what will happen when one of them changes.

Rather than waiting until they believe they have understood everything, leaders can begin by changing some of the conditions in which people work. They might bring together people who rarely interact, remove an unnecessary approval requirement or allow several teams to try different approaches to a recurring problem. The intention is to discover what becomes possible, rather than assume that one proposed solution will work.

These interventions should be manageable, with boundaries that protect people, customers and the organisation. In complexity-informed practice, they are sometimes described as safe-to-fail probes (Snowden and Rancati, 2021). A pilot generally tests a solution already selected, often to establish whether it is suitable for wider implementation. A probe begins with greater uncertainty: its purpose is to discover how the situation responds to an intervention, including consequences nobody anticipated. Pilots can generate learning too, but the primary intention differs. Several probes can run in parallel, provided their effects can be monitored and harmful consequences contained.

With the customer management process, the programme director might support three different approaches to improving handovers. One group could experiment with direct coordination between colleagues, another with a shared review of difficult cases, and a third with greater decision authority for routine problems. Each would operate within the same essential requirements for customer information, accountability and regulatory compliance.

The leader would then pay attention to what develops. Are handovers becoming more reliable? Is unnecessary duplication reducing? Can employees resolve problems without repeatedly escalating decisions? Are improvements appearing in unexpected places, or are new difficulties developing elsewhere?

It is also worth examining how improvements are being achieved. If handovers become faster because one experienced employee is personally resolving every difficult case, the arrangement may be difficult to sustain. If decisions improve because teams are bypassing an essential control, the apparent benefit may introduce unacceptable risk.

What you notice What you might try
Departments rarely solve problems together Create opportunities to work on shared, real cases
Decisions depend on a small number of experienced employees Enable new connections and distribute appropriate decision authority
Existing measures encourage competing priorities Adjust incentives or introduce shared measures
Teams have developed different workarounds Explore what the workarounds achieve before deciding whether to change them
Several local approaches appear promising Allow different practices to develop and compare what happens
An emerging practice creates unnecessary risk Introduce or strengthen an appropriate constraint

Some interventions may be worth encouraging or extending, others will need adjusting, and some should be stopped. An unexpected practice may deserve further exploration even if it was never part of the implementation plan.

Suppose the shared review of customer cases reveals that sales and operations use different definitions of a complete handover. The teams could test a common definition, while customer service identifies information it needs earlier in the process. Over several weeks, the programme director would watch whether handovers become more reliable, whether the separate spreadsheets still serve a purpose and whether the changes create difficulties elsewhere. This is a possible development of the illustrative case, rather than a claimed outcome. The point is to make the next decision from what has been learned, instead of assuming that the original process design must be defended.

There is a difference between preserving the purpose of a change and preserving the method chosen to achieve it. The organisation may remain committed to improving customer responsiveness while discovering that the original process design needs considerable adjustment. That can be uncomfortable when leaders have invested time, resources and credibility in a particular approach, but continuing with something that is not working simply because it was agreed earlier is unlikely to help.

Five questions to ask when organisational change is losing momentum

Think about a change you are leading where progress is slower or less consistent than expected.

  1. What are we assuming about the problem? Are we treating the situation as an implementation failure when interactions across the organisation may be influencing the outcome?
  2. What could we change about the conditions? Which systems, incentives, rules or working arrangements might be encouraging the patterns we are seeing?
  3. What different interactions could we enable? Who might benefit from working together differently, and what could we allow them to try?
  4. What should we monitor? What useful or harmful developments might emerge, including those not anticipated in the original plan?
  5. What could we safely try? Which small interventions are within our authority, what boundaries are necessary, and how will we decide whether to encourage, adjust or stop them?

Getting organisational change back on track does not necessarily mean returning to the route originally planned. It may mean creating the conditions in which a better route becomes possible.

Recommended reading

If you would like to explore the ideas behind AIMS in more depth, these five articles look at different aspects of leading change in complex organisations.

Want some help getting organisational change back on track?

For You: Leadership Clinic

Bring one change initiative that is losing momentum. I prepare beforehand, then we spend 90 focused minutes exploring what may be influencing progress and identifying practical interventions worth considering. One challenge, one session, no ongoing commitment.

For You: Executive Coaching

Leading change over time involves uncertainty, competing priorities and difficult decisions. Work with me to examine your assumptions, consider your influence and respond more effectively as the situation develops.

For Your Organisation: Leadership, Teams & Facilitation

I can provide change facilitation support, planning and execution, and/or change management training to leaders at all levels, so they can deliver complex change more effectively.

Choose the level of support that fits what you are working through.

Sources

Image source: Eluj on Pixabay