Dec 18, 2025
The repeating patterns of successful change strategies
This article explores change management with a clear focus on the human side of change, addressing resistance, uncertainty, and organizational dynamics that often derail transformation initiatives. It is written for leaders, executives, and transformation teams who are navigating organizational change, cultural transformation, leadership alignment, and stakeholder management, and who are looking for people-centric, structured, and sustainable change approaches rather than short-term fixes. It is written and curated by our EKON Change Expert Team who has led companies in FMCG, the pharmaceutical industry, manufacturing, banking and e-commerce through extensive transformations and has observed three repeating patterns of those who fail versus those who succeed.
In this blogpost we focus on how to design and lead sustainable transformation without chaos, how to work constructively with resistance instead of fighting it, and how to anchor change through leadership behavior, psychological safety, and meaningful involvement. The perspective combines hands-on change leadership experience with insights from organizational psychology and leadership research, translating theory into practical change frameworks that work across industries.
If you are searching for ways to improve change readiness, employee engagement, buy-in, communication coherence, and long-term adoption, this article outlines the core principles and patterns we repeatedly observe in successful change initiatives.
The Three Essential Pillars of Sustainable Change Strategies: An Emerging Pattern Across Industries as observed by EKON Experts
But first. Why is change still so often misunderstood as an event?
Across industries and organizational sizes, change is still frequently treated as a moment in time, a launch, a town hall, a new structure, a new process. Done and dusted.
After many years of orchestrating change in practice, we observe something very different in successful transformations. Change is rarely loud at the beginning. It is less visible, more extensive, far more relational than most project plans suggest, and fundamentally a process, not an event.
Across change initiatives we have accompanied at EKON Studio, one pattern stands out clearly, the quality of preparation and people-centric strategy determines the credibility of change long before it is formally launched.
What follows is a methodological perspective on three pillars that consistently distinguish sustainable change from well-intended but short-lived initiatives.
Change Essentials, Pillar 1 of 3: Architecting Direction Before Announcing Change.
Why does rushing strategy undermine change before it even starts?
One of the most common and most costly mistakes in transformation efforts is rushing into strategy formulation and communication before the underlying direction is sufficiently clarified.
Effective change starts with architecting direction, not announcing solutions.
Or, put more bluntly, culture will eat strategy for breakfast if decisions are taken overnight simply because “we are in a rush”.
This early phase is often invisible to the wider organization, yet it carries disproportionate impact. While people may ask, “Where is this change everyone is talking about?”, experienced change leaders know, we are already in the middle of it.
What actually happens in the invisible preparation phase?
From our experience, this invisible phase determines at least 50 percent of change success.
It includes:
Aligning leadership perspectives beyond surface agreement.
Stress-testing strategic assumptions against operational reality.
Clarifying trade-offs instead of masking them.
Explicitly naming tensions rather than hoping they disappear.
Just as importantly, it means resisting premature communication or overpromising, especially before multipliers are able to back messages with coherence, a reliable roadmap, and one shared vision.
How do organizations create clarity before communicating?
Organizations that navigate this phase well invest time upfront to:
Create a shared narrative We call this the Mover Story, a coherent explanation of why change is necessary, what problem it truly addresses, and what success will look like beyond slides and slogans.
Define clear change guardrails We explicitly clarify what will change, what will not, and why. These Change Guardrails prevent interpretation gaps and unrealistic expectations later on.
Anticipate friction on the people side Emotional, political, and operational friction points are not side effects, they are structural. Ignoring them almost guarantees failure later in the process.
Half of the work in change happens before the first town hall is held. If that is not the case, it is usually a signal to go back to the drawing board.
Our role as EKON Studio is to help organizations look at the entire drawing board, including the corners that still lack clarity, so that change can be launched with credibility, not noise.
Change Essentials, Pillar 2 of 3: Activating Multipliers for Coherent Communication and Real Feedback.
Why do change messages so often lose credibility after the first town hall?
A pattern we repeatedly observe, especially in small and mid-sized organizations, is this, the town hall is well prepared, the message sounds convincing, leadership leaves the room satisfied.
And then the real conversations start.
Behind the scenes, in informal settings, through the grapevine, meaning is renegotiated. In organizations where people know each other well, informal leaders and influencers shape perception far more than formal communication channels.
If these people are not recognized early, involved instead, and activated deliberately, the message gets lost, or worse, reframed by those multipliers who spread the “news” and derail the messaging.
Who are these multipliers and why are they so critical?
Multipliers are not defined by hierarchy. They are:
Trusted informal leaders.
Long-tenured employees.
Cultural carrier.
People others listen to before forming an opinion.
When these informally powerful individuals are not on board, no amount of formal communication can stabilize meaning after a launch.
This is precisely why we work with a Change Agent approach.
How do we identify and activate multipliers (= change agents) in practice?
At EKON Studio, we do not select change agents based on intuition alone.
Depending on organizational size and complexity, we work with:
A structured assessment with approximately 20 targeted questions to identify influence, trust, and connectivity.
Organizational network analysis in larger systems to make informal leadership visible.
This allows us to identify the people who truly shape narratives and involve them early, deliberately, and transparently. Before the townhall.
Why is early involvement of multipliers a strategic move, not a nice-to-have?
Early involvement is not about consensus. It is about co-creating meaning before it spreads informally anyway.
When multipliers are involved during the strategic development and preparation phase:
Messages are stress-tested in reality.
Blind spots surface early.
Credibility is built before communication scales.
Feedback from organizational members who happen to be multipliers and well-informed can be collected before we learn from error.
Most importantly, network effects work in favor of the change, not against it.
How does coherent communication actually emerge in change?
Coherence does not emerge from a single master slide deck.
It emerges when:
The Mover Story and Change Guardrails are developed with identified multipliers.
Language is refined collectively, not just in the boardroom.
Feedback is integrated early, before communication goes broad.
This work happens intentionally within the preparation phase described in Pillar 1. Communication coherence is not a downstream task, it is an upstream design choice.
Change Essentials, Pillar 3 of 3: Enablement and Ownership for Buy-In and Against Resistance.
What does enablement through listening really mean?
Enablement through listening means more than collecting opinions. It means creating real participation in sense-making and rebuilding fear through involvement and transparency.
People feel ownership when:
They are explicitly asked for their perspective.
Their feedback flows bottom-up and is visibly used.
Adaptations occur, or clear reasoning is given when they do not.
Even when decisions ultimately go against individual preferences, having had a voice changes everything.
Why does participation matter even when decisions stay the same?
We repeatedly observe the following dynamic:
If people are in the room but not asked for their opinion, they do not develop ownership, even if they agree with the outcome.
If people are asked, express disagreement, and see a collective decision taken transparently, buy-in is significantly higher.
Ownership does not come from winning. It comes from being taken seriously in the decision-making process.
Why is a coaching mindset critical for leaders representing change?
A coaching mindset enables leaders to move beyond broadcasting realities toward understanding other people’s realities.
Leaders who manage change effectively:
Ask strong questions.
Listen without immediately defending decisions.
Seek to understand the reasons behind resistance.
Learn from lived experience on the ground.
This is why listening and questioning are the core skills of effective change leadership.
At EKON Studio, we deliberately enable this capability, working with certified coaches who bring long transformation experience and support change agents, leaders, and top management throughout critical phases of change.
How does ownership translate into sustainable change?
When people co-own decisions:
Accountability increases naturally.
Implementation accelerates.
Criticism becomes more constructive.
Energy shifts from resistance to contribution.
Most importantly, ownership creates psychological safety.
Why is psychological safety a non-negotiable factor in change?
Psychological safety emerges when people:
Feel heard.
Can speak up.
Can criticize decisions respectfully, even after they are made.
This is not only practical experience, it is also strongly supported by leadership research.
Research at ESMT Berlin, including extensive work on leadership and team dynamics, repeatedly shows that psychological safety is a key predictor of team effectiveness, particularly in times of uncertainty and change. We actively integrate these research insights into our work with leadership teams and organizations.
Without psychological safety, change stalls quietly. With it, change becomes adaptive, resilient, and self-sustaining.
Looking at your change process, these three pillars should not and cannot be left unattended.