Why change programmes do not stick.

Most organisations that feel the gap eventually do something about it.

They bring in a consulting firm. Or they commission a leadership programme. Or both. The work is often good. The diagnosis is credible. The recommendations make sense. And then many months later, the same tensions are back. The same conversations are happening in the same rooms. The energy that the intervention generated has quietly dissipated, and the organisation has returned to something close to where it started.

This is one of the most demoralising experiences in organisational life. And it is far more common than anyone in the consulting or leadership development industry likes to acknowledge.

It is not, in most cases, a failure of the intervention itself. The analysis was probably sound. The facilitators were probably skilled. The recommendations were probably right. The problem is not what was done. It is where it was done.

Most interventions work on either the canopy or the roots.

The canopy is the visible layer of the organisation: the structures, the strategies, the processes, the behaviours that can be observed and measured. Many consulting engagements work here, and rightly so. Revenue performance. Decision speed. Market position. These are real and important things to understand and address.

Others go deeper. Good leadership development, systemic coaching, and organisational development work can reach the roots, the purpose, the culture, the trust dynamics, the psychological safety that generates or depletes institutional capacity. That work matters too.

But there is a layer between the roots and the canopy that most interventions, whether they work from the top down or the bottom up, don’t fully reckon with. The friction zone is not in the roots and it is not in the canopy. It sits between them. It is the accumulated terrain that value creation potential must pass through before it becomes visible performance. And it is largely invisible to the instruments most organisations bring to bear.

A restructure that does not account for the decision logics embedded in the friction zone will produce a new structure with the same problems wearing different names.

A leadership programme that surfaces new awareness without dissolving the tacit silences filtering what leaders can act on will produce more capable people operating inside the same constraints.

It’s simple organisational mechanics.

The friction zone does not respond to surface-level intervention. It responds to something more direct: being seen, named, and worked with honestly.

That requires a different kind of diagnostic. Not one that starts with the canopy and asks what is underperforming, but one that starts beneath it and asks what conditions are producing the underperformance.

What assumptions are driving decisions that no longer serve the organisation?
What tensions are being managed around rather than resolved?
What is consistently not being said, and what is that silence costing?

These are not comfortable questions. They require a willingness to look at the organisation as it actually is, rather than as it is presented in strategy documents and board reports. They require leaders who can hold what they find without immediately moving to fix it, because the instinct to fix is often the instinct that prevents genuine understanding.

In my experience, the organisations that sustain change are not the ones that implemented the best programme. They are the ones that were willing to see what was actually driving their behaviour before they tried to change it.

That seeing is harder than it sounds. It takes a structured approach, the right questions asked of the right people in the right way, and the ability to translate what surfaces into something the organisation can work with practically and economically.

But it is not impossible. And it is, I would argue, the only kind of intervention that actually holds and sustains.

In the environment we are currently operating in, every organisation needs to change and adapt. The question is whether the change you are investing in is reaching the layer where it needs to land.

In the next piece, I look at what happens when it does not, through three organisations whose decline was visible in the roots long before it appeared in the numbers.