By Yiannis Chrysostomidis & Mahmood Sonday
For decades the organisation knew exactly what it stood for and what it was good at. It held a strong position in its market, carried a reputation its people were proud of, and ran on a model that had worked for a generation. Then its operating conditions changed - new competitors, technological shifts, geopolitical dynamics, and new expectations from stakeholders. Each of these had been visible in different ways for some time. The combination is what became problematic and urgent. The work it was proud of began to feel less relevant to the people it served, and the results its board expected were increasingly falling short. People inside the organisation could feel the challenges before management attempted to say it out loud, which made the situation even more difficult. So the organisation had to change, and concerned for its future, the senior leadership team did what it knew how to do. It studied the problem, consulted staff, ran a survey, and used the results to shape a strategy that was promptly signed off and announced with a clear timeline.
A year and a half on, the change had not taken hold. No one had opposed it outright and no one had acted badly. The organisation had simply drifted, because it could not think the problem through together. When this becomes visible from the outside, the options have narrowed: decisions get made under pressure, or they get made for you.
The strategic direction had become obscured. And what direction there was could not be executed. In both cases, the cause was the same: unresolved and stubborn factions, tensions and conflicts. The greater cost at this point was not the lack of plan, but the lost time and opportunity. What follows is an account of how that happens, and what it would take to avoid it while there is still room to choose.
The plan was sound on paper, but it was introduced into an organisation that held a range of views about how to move forward, as in many organisations. These different views were never explored because surfacing them looked like inviting confrontation and required energy the organisation could not spare. Surfacing them would also distract from the core task of staying afloat through a volatile period. Postponing felt prudent, but at the same time it was also expensive.
In one part of the organisation, people read the announcement with concern, because they had been through change before and remembered commitments from the last round that had not been kept. For them, this plan raised real questions about their jobs and about work they were proud of. In another part, people had wanted this shift for years and were glad it had finally come. Those working closest to the ground felt the plan had been shaped from a limited perspective at some distance from where the work actually happened, and newer and longer-serving staff pictured the future in different ways. None of the parts was simply for the change or against it; each wanted the organisation to succeed. Each held a piece of the truth, seeing it from where they stood, because people operate from different assumptions and memories of the past that shape different versions of the future.
At the beginning, the organisation moved ahead as planned: leadership held meetings to set out the thinking, the room listened, and a survey surfaced the unease, while a shared roadmap was created so everyone could understand their role. While all of this was done in good faith, it didn't really bring the different groups closer to think the change through together. Over the following months, the positions settled and hardened, the distance between them widened, and much of the real conversation moved out of the meetings and into the corridors and the group chats. Each month added drift, making it harder to start.
After a few months, you could see this problem looming over even small things. Meetings that used to run over often ended early. People checked who was in the room before they felt ready to speak. The trust needed to move together had now gone, and the energy that could have gone into the change went into managing the distance between the groups. The strategy the leadership believed in did not take hold, and the change the organisation needed did not materialise. No one acted badly, and most people were doing their best with the view they had, but the organisation had simply not yet found a way to think about its future together.
The organisation above is a composite, drawn from several engagements and changed in its details. It is not one organisation's story because the pattern is not one organisation's problem. The forces driving these issues are arriving faster and from more directions than before. Energy security, decarbonisation, security of supply, AI, demographic shifts, and shifting geopolitics are reshaping whole industries at a pace no one has prepared for, and on timelines set elsewhere.
The strain shows up most in organisations that can least afford to fail in public - large employers and institutions that carry more meaning in a country than their balance sheets suggest. Employees feel it. Edelman's 2026 Trust Barometer, which surveys nearly 34,000 people across 28 countries, found that worry about trade conflicts harming one's company reached an all-time high of 66 per cent this year, and fear of recession-driven job loss hit 67 per cent, the highest it has recorded.
Under that kind of pressure, people pull inward. Seven in ten now say they are hesitant or unwilling to trust someone who differs from them in values, in the facts they rely on, or in how they'd solve a problem. In 20 of the 28 countries surveyed, the share of people who get news from sources with a political leaning different to their own, at least weekly, fell significantly in a single year, to 39%. That retreat does not stop at the office door. 42% of employees say they would rather switch departments than report to a manager whose values differ from theirs; a third admit they would put less effort into a project led by someone whose beliefs differ from their own. Edelman's conclusion: unmitigated differences stall economic growth. These are the sharpest cases, but they set the baseline — the general willingness to work across difference has dropped, which makes the ordinary differences inside any organisation harder to work through than they were a few years ago.
Moving through pressure of this kind, planned or unplanned, requires an organisation to be resilient. A big part of resilience rests on people's ability to think together, trust one another, stay in strategic dialogue, and keep their relationships strong as they act differently. When those relationships fray and people pull into camps, these abilities weaken and resilience shrinks. So the capacity an organisation most needs, the capacity to hold together and change, is the very thing these forces put under strain. The supply falls as demand increases.
The capacity to think, see and decide together is the key asset
This capacity is often treated as something optional, a matter of morale or messaging but it is what decides whether a strategy can be executed. When an organisation has it, a plan has shared ground beneath it and can proceed with real energy and support. It is worth building, investing in, and renewing before the moment it’s needed. The return on having it is hard to prove. The cost of not having it is not: it’s eighteen months, the narrowed options, and the decision finally taken without anyone behind it.
The usual approaches to change are not designed to build this capacity. We offer four observations on why this happens.
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Change management comes after the decision
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Differing groups struggle to think about the future together
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The usual tools move in one direction
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There are never only two sides
Change management assumes that a decision has been made and that the work is to move people towards it. This work belongs earlier, when the direction itself is contested or execution keeps stalling on tensions nobody has named, and there is nothing yet to roll out. Rolling a plan out anyway tends to produce a compromised strategy that stalls in execution.
Groups in this situation are usually in contact - but they meet to argue positions, not to think. Each arrives with a settled view and sets it out. Representing a position tends to firm it up, because the task in the room is to make the case and prove you are right. What is missing is a different kind of space - one where they can step back, think together across their differences, and discover what they share, which is almost always a common wish for the organisation to do well. Part of the reason is structural. People work inside their own teams, with their own roles, accountabilities and powers, and there is rarely a team that cuts across the whole system, sometimes including a few external stakeholders, whose job is to hold the wider perspective.
Meetings, surveys, and roadmaps move information in one direction, either from management to employees or from employees to management, and useful as they are, none of them puts the different groups in the same room to think together. They suit simpler tasks, such as collecting input or passing on a decision. They are not built to hold a range of views at once, and they can mislead, because they let an organisation feel it is communicating while the shared understanding it needs has yet to be built.
The usual approaches also lean on a two-sided picture, because a clear opponent is the quickest way to pull a group together and give it something to push against. But in organisations, as in the world at large, several groups and differences exist at once. And even within these several groups, people hold more than one view depending on the day and the room they are in. Any approach that reduces all of this to two camps will miss much of what is going on, which is why the task is to hold the full range of an organisation's perspectives in view at once.
There is one piece of good news in the trust data: the employer is now the most trusted institution people have - trusted by 78% of employees globally - and 75% believe their employer has an obligation to bridge divides between groups who distrust each other. The workplace is one of the last rooms where people who differ still meet, and many leaders feel the responsibility that comes with that. It makes it the best place to rebuild the capacity to think together, for those willing to use it.
We do this at Reos Partners, by bringing the different groups in systems, sectors and organisations into a shared process where they build a picture of the future together, using a method called transformative scenarios. With transformative scenarios, rather than working through a single fixed plan, people explore several possibilities side by side. This lets them step back from their starting positions and see the situation, and each other, more clearly.
This work is most valuable when a situation is too complex for any single part of the organisation to resolve on its own, leadership included, and when the questions reach every level. Conventional advice assumes a strong centre issuing a direction and a firm to help sharpen it. When that centre is under strain, a handed-down answer will not hold, however good it is. It has to be built with the organisation. That takes time an organisation under pressure feels it does not have, which is the reason to start before the pressure peaks.
We have done this work for close to two decades, with leading organisations across energy, financial services, aviation, agriculture, public institutions, and philanthropy in Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Middle East. Some were in the middle of a merger, others facing a regulatory shift or a leadership transition. The sectors differ; the pattern of a plan that cannot find shared ground beneath it does not.
We have used it inside a global federation whose national affiliates had pulled into camps over what the organisation was for; inside a private hospital group that had come to see the public health system as an adversary rather than a counterpart and which went on to build a partnership with it; and inside a large corporation working through a potentially painful and contested organisational transformation in a rapidly changing environment. The presenting problem differed in each case, and underneath each was the same one: no single part of the organisation, leadership included, could reach a decision that would hold on its own. Standing still was untenable, every option carried real costs, and the direction was contested. The clock was running, and those paying attention could see it.
The third of those cases has recently (at the time of writing) become public. The company published four futures of where it might be by 2030. One imagines taking a harder line in collective bargaining: costs come down, room for investment opens, and part of the workforce feels a long-standing promise has been broken. A second puts rebuilding trust and collaboration first, and treats that as the ground on which anything lasting has to be built. A third sees the organisation become smaller on its own terms but stronger inside the wider group it belongs to. The fourth describes what happens if the difficult decisions keep being deferred - a forced restructuring, a smaller operation, and far fewer jobs. The company was careful to say these are not plans, predictions or decisions, but perspectives against which to test the thinking it already has. Its chief executive put it more plainly: "waiting is not an option; delay has consequences."
What makes this noteworthy is what the process enabled. The company's leadership chose to open this space without knowing where it would lead, and the team that built the scenarios, drawn from very different perspectives across the company and beyond, stayed in it when the conversation became difficult. Together they co-produced the four futures before any decisions were taken. The unions have since said that scenarios are not intentions, that it remains to be seen what leadership will do, and that they remain concerned about jobs. The disagreement is still live, and because every voice was part of the process, it is being had in the open and constructively. The conversation is happening earlier, while there is still room to act, and the consequences of inaction are visible to everyone affected. Even where decisions remain contested, they make more sense to those who will live with them.
A shared picture of what the future might look like does not buy consensus. It buys a high quality of engagement, enables the strongest arguments to surface, and broadens the possible pathways to navigate into the future, when it counts.
What is most important to us when doing this work is the quality of the process by which an organisation reaches its decisions because we believe that the process of how a group reaches its answer carries at least as much value as the answer itself. Grappling, debating and struggling are what build trust, strengthen relationships, and create shared futures that people are more willing to participate in. That takes a process that brings the groups together and leaders who are open to letting people from across their system think alongside them about the future. In our experience, differences that had seemed fixed often begin to move once the conditions exist to genuinely engage different vantage points on the future.
If your organisation is working through change while holding competing views about the way forward, a useful first step is to see where you stand, and it is worth doing early. This short diagnostic takes stock in ten statements, and nothing you enter is stored or sent. If the reading feels close, we would value a conversation
