Lead People Through Organisational Change
Employee Experience · Ongoing (plan in 2–3 days) · Advanced
The job
Plan and execute a change initiative that addresses how people actually experience the change, not just the project management plan.
What the sponsor gets
Each canvas and map from this playbook — Stakeholder Map, Empathy Map, Pre-Mortem Canvas, Retrospective Canvas, Journey map — exports as a PDF, or as PowerPoint on Pro, straight from the session, and the whole run exports as one PowerPoint for the sponsor. Nothing is redrawn.
The method
Define the change scope and rationale
Clearly articulate what is changing, why, and what the future state looks like. The rationale must be honest — people detect corporate spin instantly.
Tip: If you can't explain the "why" in one sentence that a frontline employee would accept, the rationale isn't clear enough.
Map your stakeholders
Create a Stakeholder Map plotting everyone affected by the change by influence and impact. Identify champions, resistors, and the silent majority.
Tip: The most important group isn't the resistors — it's the fence-sitters. Win them early.
Map the change journey
Create a Change Management journey map from first announcement through transition to embedding. Map what people will experience at each stage.
Tip: The emotional curve is the most important lane — change is primarily an emotional experience, not a rational one.
Understand the most affected group
Create an Empathy Map for the stakeholder group most impacted by the change. What are they thinking, feeling, saying, and doing?
Tip: Resistance is usually rational from the person's perspective — understand their logic before trying to change it.
Pre-mortem the change
Run a pre-mortem asking "It's 6 months from now and this change has failed. What went wrong?" This surfaces risks the project plan misses.
Tip: Include people who are sceptical of the change — their concerns are your risk register.
Design the communications plan
Create a tailored communication plan for each stakeholder group. Different groups need different messages, channels, and cadences.
Tip: Two-way communication (town halls with Q&A, manager conversations) beats one-way (emails, intranets) every time.
90-day checkpoint retrospective
Run a retrospective at 90 days to assess adoption, sentiment, and unintended consequences. Adjust the approach based on what you learn.
Tip: Measure adoption behaviour, not just awareness — people can know about a change without actually changing.
The canvases and maps
- Stakeholder Map
- Power against interest in four quadrants, so engagement effort goes where it matters and nobody important is handled by accident.
- Empathy Map
- The goal first, then what the person sees, says, does, hears, thinks and feels, so the room separates what it has observed from what it is guessing.
- Pre-Mortem Canvas
- It starts from failure — the project, how it failed, root causes, mitigations and early warnings — so people can voice doubts as foresight rather than dissent.
- Retrospective Canvas
- What went well and what to improve, then start, stop and continue, so reflection ends in actions rather than a list of complaints.
- Journey map
- Stages run across and lanes run beneath them, so the experience reads in the order people live it and each low point lines up with what causes it.
What it doesn't do
It doesn't run the room for you or decide for the client. The steps, canvases and duration are a starting point you adapt; the judgement stays yours.