[{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/coachingourselves.com\/change-program-conversation-problem\/#Article","mainEntityOfPage":"https:\/\/coachingourselves.com\/change-program-conversation-problem\/","headline":"Your Change Program Does Not Have a Communication Problem","name":"Your Change Program Does Not Have a Communication Problem","description":"When a change is not landing, the instinct is to communicate harder. That is usually the thing making it worse. A familiar sequence. The change is announced. A few weeks in, someone notices it is not really happening — people are nodding in meetings and carrying on as before. The diagnosis is almost always the […]","datePublished":"2026-09-29","dateModified":"2026-09-29","author":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"CoachingOurselves","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/coachingourselves.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/co-LOGO-max60tall.webp","url":"https:\/\/coachingourselves.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/co-LOGO-max60tall.webp","width":269,"height":60}},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/coachingourselves.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/photo_working_style_differences-scaled.webp","url":"https:\/\/coachingourselves.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/photo_working_style_differences-scaled.webp","height":1709,"width":2560},"url":"https:\/\/coachingourselves.com\/change-program-conversation-problem\/","about":["Article\/Blog"],"wordCount":1030,"articleBody":"When a change is not landing, the instinct is to communicate harder. That is usually the thing making it worse.A familiar sequence. The change is announced. A few weeks in, someone notices it is not really happening — people are nodding in meetings and carrying on as before. The diagnosis is almost always the same: we have a communication problem. So there is a town hall, a refreshed deck, an FAQ, a manager toolkit, and a cascade.Then a survey comes back showing people are tired, and everyone is surprised.The numbers on this are unusually bluntIn a Gartner survey of 473 HR leaders in July 2024, 73% said their employees were fatigued from change and 74% said their managers were not equipped to lead it. McLean & Company’s 2026 HR Trends report put 70% of organizations in difficulty managing change, framing it as a widening gap between how much change organizations are attempting and how much leadership capacity they have to absorb it.Notice what those two figures do not say. They do not say people are uninformed. Nobody in a well-run change programme is short of messaging. What is missing is somewhere to put the reaction.Transmission is not conversationCommunication, as most organizations practise it, is transmission: a message is prepared centrally, pushed outward, and its success is measured by whether it arrived and whether people can repeat it.Transmission is genuinely useful for facts — what is changing, when, who to ask. It is close to useless for the thing that actually determines whether a change happens, which is a manager working out what they are going to do differently with the specific people in front of them, some of whom will be unhappy about it.That is not a knowledge problem. Nobody solves it by being told the message again, more clearly. It gets solved by thinking it through — and thinking of that kind is markedly better when it happens out loud, with people facing the same thing.Why the cascade breaks at the managerThe standard model asks the manager to be a relay: receive the message, retransmit it downward, handle the reaction.It is a strange thing to ask. The manager usually has less context than the people who wrote the message and more exposure than anyone to the people affected. They are expected to answer questions they were not briefed on, defend decisions they were not part of, and appear confident about a change they may privately have doubts about. Very few of them have anywhere to take those doubts, because the one place they cannot take them is to their own team.So the doubts go unaddressed and reappear as flatness — the technically-compliant, visibly unconvinced delivery that teams read instantly.What a conversation requiresFour things, none of which the average cascade provides.Peers, not an audience. Managers will say things to other managers at their level that they will not say upward or downward. Mixed-seniority sessions get politeness.Their own situation on the table. Not a case study, not a scenario. The actual person on their team who is not on board, the actual part of the change they cannot explain.Something structured to react to. An open-ended “how are we all feeling about the change?” produces either silence or a complaint session. A conversation needs material — a concept, a distinction, a question good enough to be worth answering — to push against.A second meeting. A single session is a vent. What turns talk into behaviour is committing to something in front of peers and knowing you will be asked about it next month.This is an old idea with a track recordNone of this is new. Organization development practitioners have grouped methods like Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, Future Search and the World Café together for years as dialogic approaches — a family of practices built on the premise that in complex change, structured conversation is not the preparation for the intervention. It is the intervention.What those methods share is the assumption that the people doing the work already hold most of what is needed to make the change work, and that the job of the practitioner is to build the conditions for them to say it to each other — not to install an answer from outside.CoachingOurselves sits in that family, which is less of a coincidence than it sounds: David Cooperrider, who originated Appreciative Inquiry, and Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff, who created Future Search, all write discussion guides for us.Three things you can do without a budgetConvene managers by level, not by team. Four to six of them, from different parts of the organization, all facing the same change from the same altitude. The cross-functional mix is what makes candour possible — no one is anyone’s boss.Give them something substantial to react to. A short piece of real content on how change actually moves through organizations does more work than another slide about why this change is necessary. It gives the group a way to talk about the situation without it becoming a referendum on the leadership team.Ask for one commitment each, and diarise the follow-up. Small and specific: one conversation they have been avoiding, one thing they will stop doing. Then meet again in a month and start by asking what happened.That is a change intervention. It costs ninety minutes a month and no external facilitator.The uncomfortable partIf you run this properly you will hear things about the change that the steering committee has not heard. That is the point, and it is also the risk: the exercise only earns credibility if something visible comes back the other way.Organizations that get value from it treat what surfaces in the groups as data about the change, and let it alter something. Organizations that treat it as a pressure valve get exactly one round of honesty, and then a much quieter set of meetings.More on using peer groups for culture and change work, or read why a changed individual rarely changes an organization.Sit in on a live session"},{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Your Change Program Does Not Have a Communication Problem","item":"https:\/\/coachingourselves.com\/change-program-conversation-problem\/#breadcrumbitem"}]}]