11/18/2024
After years of leading organisational change—from managing the change stream during Malaysia Airlines’ transformation following their aviation disasters, to establishing crisis response systems during Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires, to supporting scaling organisations across Australia—I keep coming back to four critical elements that determine success when leading change.
But here’s what the textbooks don’t tell you: these elements only work if you’re honest about how difficult they actually are to execute.
The Four Elements (And What They Actually Require)
1. Leadership Alignment
Yes, leadership teams need to align on operating model, cultural priorities, and integrating architecture. Without this foundation, even well-designed initiatives falter.
But here’s what that actually requires in practice: leaders being honest about what they don’t know, admitting when they’re uncertain, and having difficult conversations about trade-offs rather than pretending every decision is win-win.
When Natrio Asia Pacific experienced fourfold growth over three years, scaling from small to medium organisation, their Managing Director Mark Johnston knew they needed to do more around their HR function to support their growth plans. We started with a People and Culture Health Check—not to tick boxes, but to understand where the biggest gaps were before we could align the leadership team around priorities.
The result wasn’t perfect consensus where everyone agreed on everything. It was clarity about what mattered most, shared understanding of trade-offs, and genuine commitment to a direction—even from leaders who would have preferred different choices. This quickly led to a restructure that helped Natrio get clear around core functions and roles and how to work more efficiently together.
2. Compelling Narrative—Beyond the Vision Statement
The differentiator in successful transformation is how we engage our teams. Beyond strategy, you need a compelling narrative that connects with every level of the organisation. This means clear communication, visible leadership modelling, and robust feedback mechanisms to track engagement.
Every organisation has a vision statement. Most are forgettable.
What people actually connect with are stories about why this matters, what we’re trying to protect or build, and how their specific role contributes. But compelling narratives don’t come from the communications team writing them. They come from leaders at every level being able to articulate—in their own words, in their own contexts—why the change matters to their specific teams.
When we worked with a client in the renewable sector on refreshing their goal-setting approach, the compelling narrative wasn’t just “we need better processes.” It was “we’re building organisational capability that will let us deliver on our climate commitments at scale.” That’s what made the transformation worth the disruption.
3. Systematic Implementation—The Unglamorous Work
True transformation requires more than surface-level changes. It demands systematic implementation through updated processes, governance structures, and measurement systems. We’ve found that appointing dedicated change agents or champions and developing detailed roadmaps significantly increases success rates.
This is where most change initiatives die. Not because anyone disagrees with the strategy, but because the systematic work of updating processes and governance is tedious and nobody wants to own it.
When we supported Attend Anywhere (now part of Induction Healthcare Group UK) as they scaled across Australia, UK, and Pakistan, the unsexy work was critical. Within six weeks, we led the design, implementation and embedding of a new organisation structure to meet plans for future expansion in the UK, Europe and United States. We also procured their first HR information system and refreshed their approach to recruitment and onboarding. None of that makes for inspirational LinkedIn posts. All of it was essential to making their growth sustainable.
This is also where having dedicated change agents becomes non-negotiable. Not people whose job title includes “change” but who spend 90% of their time in meetings. Actual people with protected time to do the detailed implementation work: updating process documentation, training people on new systems, troubleshooting when things don’t work as expected.
4. Unwavering Execution—Or More Honestly, Relentless Follow-Through
The final piece is unwavering execution. By maintaining focus on our strategic priorities while continuously measuring progress through pulse surveys and feedback loops, organisations can embed lasting change. This consistent approach ensures that transformational initiatives deliver their intended impact rather than becoming another corporate initiative that fades away.
But let’s be honest about what this actually means: maintaining momentum when you’re exhausted, when early wins haven’t materialised as quickly as promised, when cynicism starts spreading, and when leaders are tempted to declare victory prematurely and move on.
This requires honest measurement. Not just tracking outputs (we completed the training) but tracking outcomes (people are actually using what they learned). Pulse surveys and feedback loops matter, but only if you’re willing to act on what you hear—including when what you hear is “this isn’t working.”
Why These Elements Work (When They Work)
Whether it’s a system implementation at a smaller current client or managing the change stream of the transformation of Malaysia Airlines, it comes back to these four elements.
But frameworks alone don’t deliver results. What matters is execution grounded in reality: understanding your specific context, working embedded with your teams rather than advising from the sidelines, and being honest about what’s hard.
When we joined Insight Data Solutions Technology Services as a strategic advisor to support the people and change management streams of a multi-million dollar state government tender in land valuation, we weren’t advising from the sidelines. Under very tight timeframes, we provided critical advice on tender direction and completed the relevant portions of the tender response to extremely high standards.
The Question That Actually Matters
So here’s what I’d ask leaders thinking about organisational change: Are you prepared for it to be harder than you expect, take longer than you planned, and require more of you personally than you’re currently giving?
If the answer is yes—if you’re genuinely committed to doing the difficult work, having the uncomfortable conversations, and staying engaged when it gets messy—then frameworks like these four elements can be useful. They give you structure to navigate complexity.
But if you’re looking for a methodology that will make change invariably easy, I can’t help you. That doesn’t exist.
What does exist: experienced partners who’ve been through this before, who can help you avoid the predictable mistakes, who will tell you the truth about what they’re seeing, and who will work alongside you through the difficult middle where most change efforts stall.
That’s what we do at Beacon Consult. Not because we have magic formulas, but because we’ve done this work in crisis conditions, across industries, and at scale. We know what it actually takes.
What approaches have you found effective in driving organisational transformation?
OrganisationalChange Leadership BusinessStrategy ChangeManagement TransformationalLeadership
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