Alberto Terol

If you were born in the 70s or 80s, you’ll remember the movie “My Girl”. Anna Chlumsky haunted by death in a household where her father runs a funeral home from the ground floor. In one scene, Jamie Lee Curtis is doing the makeup on the reverend’s wife in a way that, let’s say it elegantly, is far too colorful and cheerful for a corpse.

I think of that scene from time to time when Change Management team gets the call.

Because we tend to get the call late. Late as in the project is already in advanced stages of decomposition: a botched design, a “hooligan” sabotaging the team’s good work from the inside, an incentive architecture that rewards everything except the transformation we’re supposed to deliver. And then someone, usually with a polished slide deck, suggests we “manage the change.”

What they’re really asking for is corporate thanatopraxy.

Let’s name it: there are entire industries dedicated to this trade. Consultancies, training providers, “change practitioners” applying makeup to projects already in rigor mortis, beautifying the communications, staging the alignment ceremonies, running the co-creation workshops. Painstaking, expensive, well-meaning work. Almost always in vain. Because we keep attacking consequences instead of causes.

Real Change Management is something infinitely more valuable than embalming.

There’s an old Dakota proverb: “when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.” It’s striking how reliably organizations do the opposite. They appoint a committee to study the horse. They hire external riders. They redefine what “alive” means. They benchmark against other dead horses in the sector. Sometimes they buy a bigger saddle. Change Management becomes the alibi: an elegant excuse for not dismounting. Because dismounting requires someone willing to bell the cat. Someone willing to stand up, in front of the very people who chose this horse, and say we need to get off and start over. Who in the organization has that authority? More importantly: who has the courage?

What we routinely call “resistance to change” is not resistance, it is collective intelligence. The people in the organization are reading the incentive architecture correctly (the system that punishes some behaviors and rewards others) and acting accordingly. When we label that rational reading as “resistance,” we come dangerously close to gaslighting our own colleagues: we ask people to behave irrationally inside a system that punishes that very behavior, and then call them the problem.

Richard Thaler, the Nobel laureate, has a name for the invisible barriers that make the right behavior costly: sludge. Most “resistance” is sludge that nobody has had the honesty to map. Remove the friction and the so-called resisters will surprise you. They were never the obstacle, the system was.

So let’s stop treating the Change Manager as the therapist of misunderstood resistance, and start seeing them as an architect. An architect of the new behavioral environment we want people to inhabit. Buckminster Fuller said it best: “You never change things by fighting existing reality. Build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete.” That is our trade: not eulogies, but architecture.

In my experience, projects don’t get stuck for lack of communication or training plans. They get stuck for three reasons that nobody puts on the kickoff slide. First, the challenge has been badly framed, and as I’ve written before, there are no good answers to bad questions. Second, the team is wrong for the mission: sometimes simply incapable, sometimes proactively eager to wreck it. And third, the one nobody wants to touch: the incentive architecture is misaligned with the very purpose of the change.

Javier G. Recuenco puts it bluntly: “every organization, beyond a certain size, dedicates more energy to self-preservation than to fulfilling its purpose.” Donella Meadows, the great systems thinker, puts it even more cleanly: “the purpose of a system is what it does.” It doesn’t matter what the charter said in the kickoff. It doesn’t matter how many co-creation workshops we ran. The system will behave according to its architecture, period. And if you want to change behavior, you have to pull a lever at least at the same level as the lever producing the unwanted behavior, because, as Einstein reminded us, “no problem can be solved at the same level of consciousness that created it.”

So next time someone hands you the corpse and asks for a tasteful makeup job, ask this question: do we need a thanatopraxist, or do we need a coroner, and then a surgeon?

Real Change Management is infinitely more valuable than embalming. It is the discipline of redesigning the architecture of projects which are about to fail, and of telling the truth about what is working and what will (if not adjusted) compromise the overall project success.

Even when that truth is the most politically expensive thing you can say in the room.

Especially then.