If It's Good, Why Do You Need to Manage the Change?

Some of the bigger consulting companies heavily discount the implementation phase of a project only to rake it in on "change management" contracts. Which raises a question: If something works, is awesome, and noticeably makes your employees' lives easier, why does that change need to be managed?

Granted, some nuances in a company-wide rollout matter: Who maintains it? What are the right usage metrics? How do we measure ROI? But if the process becomes heavy, it hints at bigger problems.

• Does the solution actually solve the problem people have?

• Or does it solve the problem executives think people have?

• Is the UX so bad it creates friction — which hinders adoption, which requires heavy-handed mandates around usage?

People saw right away that email was faster than a paper memo via the office mail cart. No six-figure consulting contract required. ChatGPT went to hundreds of millions of active users practically overnight. People like using it so much that companies now worry about "Shadow AI" — employees using these tools in unauthorized ways. They like it enough to take that risk.

This is the experience of a startup before and after product-market fit: Before, you push push push. After, you feel pull.

Change management should start from a place where people genuinely want the change and need help making it happen faster, better, or smoother — not from a place where they need to be convinced.

If you have to convince people to use it, ask whether you built the right thing.