Conditionally: Setting the Conditions for Change in Complex Systems
For a long time, leadership treated change as a communication problem.
If people understood the rationale, if leaders showed up visibly, if the rollout was sequenced correctly, the organization would follow. Resistance could be managed. Adoption could be driven.
That approach worked in an earlier operating environment. Systems were slower. Authority was clearer. The distance between decision and execution was small enough to be bridged with words.
What leaders are encountering now is not resistance.
It is something quieter and more structural.
What leaders are actually experiencing
Most organizations today are communicating more than ever.
There are more updates, more town halls, more decks, more alignment rituals. Leaders are present. Messaging is frequent. Intent is visible.
And yet clarity does not hold.
Decisions do not land cleanly. Escalation increases instead of resolving issues. Interpretation fragments across teams. Trust erodes without a visible breaking point.
The system looks active.
Very little integrates.
This is not a failure of effort or care.
It is a mismatch between what is being introduced and what the system can currently absorb.
What change management assumed
Change management was built on a set of assumptions that were once reliable.
It assumed authority already existed and would be exercised. It assumed responsibility was routed clearly enough to support adoption. It assumed people needed persuasion more than preparation. It assumed communication could close the gap between intent and behavior.
When those conditions were present, managing change meant managing messaging, sequencing, and reaction.
Today, those conditions are often absent.
No amount of explanation compensates for unclear authority.
No volume of communication stabilizes meaning when interpretation is fragmented.
Under these conditions, communication often accelerates confusion rather than resolving it.
A note on where this comes from
This perspective is not formed from the outside.
I have led change management teams. I have been trained and certified in formal models, including ADKAR. I have worked in environments where change was not theoretical. The stakes were high, visible, and immediate. When things failed, they did so publicly and at scale.
In those conditions, discipline mattered. Sequencing mattered. Communication mattered. For a long time, the methods worked as designed.
What changed was not the people, the intent, or the effort.
What changed was the system those methods were operating inside.
The real issue is not resistance. It is readiness.
When leaders say an organization is not ready, that statement is often interpreted as emotional or cultural.
Readiness is not about mindset.
It is about system capacity.
An unready system misinterprets signals. It politicizes information. It overcorrects or freezes. It routes responsibility downward and escalates risk upward without resolution.
In these environments, even well intentioned communication becomes destabilizing. Messages arrive before the system has the conditions required to integrate them.
The issue is not how much information is shared.
The issue is whether the system is prepared to receive it without losing agency and judgment.
Conditioning is the leadership work now
Conditioning is not persuasion.
It is preparation.
It is the work leaders do before introducing change, not after resistance appears.
Conditioning focuses on different questions.
Is authority clear enough to support this decision.
Is interpretation stable enough to hold new information.
Will responsibility route correctly or compress at the edge.
Is the system calm enough to absorb change without distortion.
When the answer to those questions is no, better messaging is not the responsible move.
Setting the conditions is.
That may require slowing expression.
Reducing noise.
Clarifying decision rights.
Naming unresolved conditions instead of smoothing over them.
Allowing silence to do work communication cannot.
This is not avoidance.
It is stewardship.
Where change management and communications fit
This shift does not make change management or communications work obsolete.
It places them correctly.
Change management remains a valuable discipline once the conditions for change are present. When authority is clear, interpretation is stable, and responsibility is correctly routed, change management does what it has always done well. It helps organizations introduce decisions, support adoption, and guide people through transition.
The problem is not the discipline.
The problem is when it is asked to compensate for conditions that are not yet in place.
In many modern systems, communication and change practices are asked to smooth over unresolved authority, stabilize meaning that has not yet settled, and create reassurance in environments that remain structurally uncertain.
That is not a failure of communication.
It is a signal that the system is not yet ready for communication to carry that load.
Conditioning does not replace these disciplines. It precedes them. It creates the conditions that allow communication and change management to operate without distortion or overreach.
When the system is conditioned, communication becomes lighter. Messages land with less effort. Change practices feel supportive rather than compensatory. Trust holds because expression matches reality.
This is not a critique of the people doing the work. It is an acknowledgment of how much has been asked of them as systems have grown more complex.
Conditioning restores the boundary. It ensures that communication and change management are applied when they can do what they are best at, rather than being forced to absorb structural gaps they cannot resolve.
What effective leaders are doing differently
Leaders who navigate change well today are not louder or more charismatic.
They are more restrained.
They delay expression until decisions are real.
They speak less, but with consequence.
They resist premature reassurance.
They prepare systems before introducing change.
They treat silence as a legitimate leadership act.
They do not manage change.
They condition systems so that when change arrives, people retain agency and judgment rather than losing them.
A closing recognition
Change management was not wrong.
It was built for a different operating environment.
What replaced it is not resistance or apathy.
It is complexity.
Complexity does not respond to persuasion.
It responds to preparation.
The organizations that change well today are not convinced.
They are conditioned.
Your point about conditioning is sharp, Justin, but I'd push further: in my experience, the organizations where transformations actually stick aren't the ones with the clearest authority or most stable interpretation. They're the ones with enough baseline trust that people can tolerate the ambiguity during the change. When teams trust each other and the system, they don't need perfect clarity to move forward. They can hold multiple interpretations, sit with vagaries, and collectively sift signal from noise as things evolve. The conditioning that matters most isn't structural clarity. It's relational. You can't communicate your way into that, and you can't force it. But without it, even the best-prepared system fragments the moment reality gets messy.