The Practice of Change
Leading change is hard. Maybe it is not even possible. More like being a steward, or a gardener. You do not have to be the boss to participate effectively in the change you want to see; to improve the practice of changing. The practice of change has to meet the reality of what exists now and consider how to prepare people for what is to come, and how active a participant in bringing about that future they will be.
All of the content in this series is in support of a single, comprehensive model of change practice. By the end, you will have a set of observable probes, practical methods, and a structural understanding of how organisations process change; from the moment a disruption is perceived to the moment new capability is self-sustaining. This introduction explains the architecture of the whole.
1. The Model: IOTA
The practice of transformation is not a linear journey. It is a balancing act between the internal logic of the organisation (Inside-Out) and the external reality of the environment and people (Outside-In), as well as the theory of what you intend to do and the reality of the action you can take.
The model has four phases, each addressing a different question. They are not sequential stages. They are four lenses through which to view every action; from the small interactions you have day to day to the very large initiatives you lead. How to move between the very large and the very small (and the small interactions really matter most) is one of the central topics of the series.
Each phase is organised around three levers; Identity, Information, and Interaction; and each lever has what I call a governor. The term is borrowed from engineering, not from politics. A governor in a steam engine does not command the engine. It regulates it: sensing speed, adjusting input, keeping the system within the range where it can function. The governor thinkers in this series work the same way. They are not the most important thinkers in their phase, nor the ones whose prescriptions you should follow most closely. They are the thinkers whose ideas provide the structural scaffold around which the other thinkers are organised. Bourdieu governs Identity in the Learning phase not because he has the best advice for leaders but because his concept of habitus explains, at a deeper level than any other thinker in the series, why the Identity probes work the way they do. Every other thinker who addresses Identity; Kegan, Goffman, Heifetz; can be understood more precisely by seeing how their work connects to the mechanism Bourdieu describes. The governor does not replace the other thinkers. It gives them a common foundation, so that the reader can see why apparently different ideas about apparently different problems are expressions of the same underlying dynamic.
Learning (How to Learn). This phase addresses how the organisation perceives reality. If the top half of the model is about intent, this phase is about the feedback loop from reality. It explains why transformations fail: not because of poor strategy, but because the organisation is structurally incapable of admitting error or perceiving complexity. The questions it asks: is it safe to tell the truth? Are we solving the right problem?
Deciding (How to Get Clarity). Before an organisation can build effectively, it must understand what it is trying to achieve. This phase is the domain of specification; moving from vague intent to precise agreement based on what has been learnt. The questions it asks: what is our purpose? Do we speak the same language?
Building (How to Build). Once clarity is achieved, the focus shifts to execution. This phase focuses on the mechanics of delivering value efficiently: removing friction, visualising work, ensuring that the build process is a predictable engine of delivery rather than a chaotic art form. The questions it asks: how do we minimise waste? What is the constraint?
Leading (How to Guide Action). The final phase turns theory into influence. Leadership here is not about command and control but about navigating the messy human and political dynamics of change; designing structures and interventions that mobilise people toward the new state. The questions it asks: how do we mobilise people? How do we structure for flow?
These four phases are, as Richard Normann put it, a process to be spun. You do not complete one and move to the next. You hold all four simultaneously, attending to whichever the situation demands.
2. The Mechanism: ELSA
If IOTA describes what the organisation must attend to, ELSA describes how change actually moves through the organisation. It is the mechanism by which each phase is navigated.
ELSA has four stages:
Event. Something happens that cannot be unseen. A disruption, a demonstration, a competitive move, a technology shift. Events are charismatic in Weber’s sense: they derive their power from direct experience and emotional impact, not from rules or tradition. They create a burst of transformative energy.
Language. The organisation begins to name what the event revealed. New categories emerge. Shared reference points are established. The event becomes discussable. Language begins the process of routinisation; channelling disruptive energy into stable concepts that people can work with.
Structure. The new language becomes institutional. Governance frameworks are written. Teams are reorganised. Processes are redesigned. Incentives are realigned. The new patterns are formalised into arrangements that can operate without the original catalyst.
Agency. The new patterns become self-sustaining. People act from the new framework because they have internalised it through practice, not because they were told to. The organisation has not merely adopted a change. It has become a different kind of organisation, one whose dispositions generate different behaviour.
Here is the critical insight: the Agency that emerges from one ELSA cycle becomes the Event that triggers the next. An organisation that has developed the agency to learn (Learning phase) now sees, with unflinching clarity, what it must decide. That clarity is itself a disruption. It is the Event that opens the Deciding phase. And the Deciding ELSA cycle runs the same mechanism: a new event (the recognition that a decision must be designed, not merely taken), new language (shared vocabulary for the domain), new structure (decision architecture), and new agency (the capacity to make and remake decisions as conditions change).
The same handoff occurs at each phase boundary. Deciding Agency becomes the Building Event. Building Agency becomes the Leading Event. And Leading Agency; the organisation’s capacity to mobilise people and structure for flow; produces the expanded perception that enables it to see the next Learning Event, at a scale it could not have imagined before the first cycle began.
The ELSA cycle does not run once. It runs at each phase, and each phase’s agency triggers the next phase’s event. This is the mechanism by which the four IOTA phases connect into a continuous practice of change.
3. The Diagnostics: Probes and Methods
Each phase has its own set of observable probes; conditions you can look for without a survey or a dashboard. The probes diagnose whether the ELSA cycle can advance at each transition, or whether it has stalled.
The Learning phase has nine probes, structured across three levers: Identity (what the person can perceive and tolerate losing), Information (whether truthful signals reach the people who need them), and Interaction (whether the parts of the organisation relate in ways that enable or prevent learning). These probes ask: can the organisation tell the truth about its own performance? Are its people close enough to reality to see what is actually happening? Can it integrate conflict rather than suppress it?
The Deciding phase has its own probes, structured across the same three levers but governed by different thinkers. Where the Learning probes ask “can this organisation learn?”, the Deciding probes ask “can this organisation treat decisions as design challenges?” Can it name what it will not do? Does a shared language for the domain exist? Does the decision process produce what it intends?
The Building and Leading phases will develop their own probes as the series continues. Each set diagnoses the conditions for its ELSA cycle. Together, they form a comprehensive diagnostic for the organisation’s capacity to navigate continuous change.
4. What the Series Builds Toward
By the end, you will have:
A model of change practice (IOTA) that describes what the organisation must attend to: learning, deciding, building, and leading; held simultaneously, not sequentially.
A mechanism of change (ELSA) that describes how change actually moves through the organisation: event, language, structure, agency; with each phase’s agency triggering the next phase’s event.
A set of observable probes for each phase that diagnose whether the organisation can navigate the ELSA cycle or whether it has stalled, and where.
A set of practical methods for each phase that translate the probes into actions a leader can take now.
A library of thinkers whose ideas ground each probe, each method, and each phase in sixty years of research across organisational theory, philosophy, cognitive science, and machine learning.
The whole constitutes a single comprehensive model of change practice. Not a framework to be admired from a distance. A practice to be used; tested, adapted, and revised in the light of what you learn.
5. How to Read the Series
Each article introduces a thinker whose work illuminates one dimension of the practice. The thinkers are presented in an order that mostly follows the IOTA phases, moving from Learning through Deciding and eventually to Building and Leading. But there are interludes: articles that explore questions of specific technical or philosophical depth; the relationship between organisational intelligence and AI, the ethics of machine-generated normative language, the structural parallels between how LLMs learn and how organisations do. These interludes are not digressions. They are the connective tissue that holds the model together.
Every article ends with an Organisational Prompt: a specific action or experiment you can run immediately. W. Edwards Deming taught that experience by itself teaches nothing. The prompts are designed to pierce the veil of work-as-imagined and reveal the reality of your system. They are probes you can run in your own organisation, and the results will teach you more about your organisation’s capacity for change than any strategy document.
Sources and frameworks are presented across the phases, but the series is designed to be read in any order. Each article stands alone. Read together, they build cumulatively toward the full model. The architecture will become visible as you read, and if it does not, the synthesis articles at the end of each phase will make it explicit.
The practice of change is not something you learn and then apply. It is something you practise, and the practising changes what you are able to see. Start anywhere. The probes will tell you where you are.
Prompt your Organisation
Finally, I refuse to let this remain an academic exercise. W. Edwards Deming taught that “experience by itself teaches nothing.” Therefore, every article concludes with an Organisational Prompt - an action or experiment you can run immediately. These prompts are designed to pierce the veil of “Work-as-Imagined” and reveal the reality of your system, allowing you to move beyond passive reading and start probing your environment to see what actually works.
I write about the industry and its approach in general. None of the opinions or examples in my articles necessarily relate to present or past employers. I draw on conversations with many practitioners and all views are my own.
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