Designing change increments
Stop running change programmes. Start building the capability to change.
We design change as a sequence of deliberate increments — grounded in real work, owned by leaders and teams, and strengthened through learning. Change that sticks doesn’t arrive in one flow. It compounds.
Service type:
Continuous Strategy, Flow Alignment, Leadership & Team Coaching, LeanTech Excellence
Audience(s):
Large and Mid-Size Organisations
System for Continuous Change:
ChangeHub
The challenge
Most business change is still shaped by market pressure and a consulting ecosystem that sells recipes — often built on very little substance. These approaches aim for scale by bulldozing out-of-context practices, processes, or frameworks into organisations.
They fail — spectacularly and expensively — because they ignore what makes change actually stick. They chase visible transformation while every enterprise carries structural inertia. Teams are overloaded with training while still having to run the business the old way, retaining little of what they are taught.
Change becomes academic, disconnected from daily work, and quickly stalls.
What follows is the theatre of change: rebadging, new names, new rituals — but little that materially improves performance.
The deeper constraint is capacity.
People are already busy — often working inefficiently, but with very limited headroom. Change cannot be absorbed in one flow. It has to be built gradually: small steps, regained time, then further change.
This is why continuous improvement outperforms wholesale transformation — every time.
Our point of view
Change must adapt to how businesses actually operate, not how frameworks assume they should.
We take a coaching approach to change: starting from current conditions, building clarity, and placing ownership squarely with the leaders and teams involved.
We help leaders and teams:
See their reality clearly
Make sense of what is actually happening in the system
Reflect on constraints, trade-offs, and options
Take responsibility for progress
Change sticks when those closest to the work own both the problem and the evolution.
The goal is not compliance with a model.
It is the capability to change continuously.
Our practices and services are deliberately designed to support this way of working.
What we design and improve
We design change increments from where the business is now, not from an idealised future in a box.
Each increment:
Builds on existing conditions, constraints, and momentum
Is informed by direct observation of work (gemba), not second-hand reporting
Follows clear playbooks for teams and leaders
Focuses on business effectiveness, not methodological purity
Creates learning that directly informs the next increment
Early increments often combine:
A view of the landscape (Flow, effectiveness, and system dynamics)
Sense-making with leaders and teams to challenge assumptions
Clear strategic directions translated into executable change vectors
Change is grounded in real work, real teams, and real leadership decisions — not parallel change machinery.
The business outcomes
Change progresses without overwhelming the organisation
Change embeds through the journey, as skills, confidence, and clarity build
Leaders and teams develop ownership rather than dependency
Capability grows alongside performance improvement
The organisation becomes more resilient, adaptive, and self-challenging
Because we do not drive change for leaders, they develop the ability to do it themselves — sustainably.
Over time, organisations also develop a clearer sense of progress, using narrative and operational signals to understand what is improving, what is stalling, and where to focus next.
How to start
We typically begin by taking a view of the landscape:
Gemba across teams and leadership forums
Flow and effectiveness assessment
Understanding constraints, friction, and leadership dynamics
This is often combined with sense-making activities that help leaders and teams surface what is really happening — beyond dashboards and surveys — creating a more accurate starting point for change .
We often start with one or two lighthouse teams, allowing us to:
Test assumptions in real conditions
Gauge the organisation’s propensity to change
Learn dynamically rather than diagnostically
From there, we design directions and change increments.
Increments run in 3–6 month cycles, deploying a mix of facilitation, team coaching, leadership work, and individual coaching. Progress is reviewed monthly, allowing the focus and support to be adjusted as needed. Each cycle is shaped in anticipation of the next, based on what actually emerges.
As capability grows, we progressively step away.
Some clients maintain a light, discreet ongoing relationship — periodic coaching, facilitated sense-making, or external challenge — to keep perspective sharp, avoid regression, and continue strengthening their change capability over time.
