How to Avoid a False Start When You’re Leading a Big Change

Summary:

Here’s a story I’ve heard 10 times in as many weeks: XYZ company has a new AI-enabled internal workflow initiative. Rollout happens as a decisive move toward “AI-first operations.” The rollout fails. What happened? Not long after launch, usage data shows us the story. A fraction of frontline teams use the new system consistently. Others participate occasionally but revert to legacy ways of working when there’s pressure or a problem. The remainder bypass the change altogether, relying on spreadsheets, email, or familiar workarounds.

Here’s the interesting part of the story: No one openly resisted. You can’t find a single dug-in detractor. Employees simply didn’t get on board. Why?

Was it AI skepticism? No, it was more basic than that. The organization never fully engaged in the change. The initiative may have had every reason to succeed, and yet it turned into a false start. In fact, I’ve seen that across the spectrum of organizational change, false starts are the most common form of early failure. That’s why so many are littered with their remains.

Why False Starts Happen

Think of organizational change as two back-to-back races. Race 1 = adoption: the surge. Race 2 = completion: the sustainment. Most failures don’t happen in Race 2. Rather, they barely make it out of the starting blocks of Race 1.

A false start is a failure of adoption. Leaders launch a change initiative, but the organization only partially engages because it fails to assemble the requisite sponsorship, alignment, urgency, and energy-producing early wins. People treat the initiative as the flavor-of-the-month and stay in their old routines. Rather than achieving lift off, the effort stalls, fades, then fails.

False starts are common, which signals that their underlying causes are likely preventable. I’ve conducted hundreds of postmortem analyses with change teams that committed false starts and uncovered several clear patterns in the failures. Here are six interweaving factors that commonly result in false starts:

Moral authority gap. Lack of early adoption results from a lack of moral authority: trusted, values-based leadership that converts compliance into conviction. If employees don’t trust the leader, they won’t break camp and leave the status quo.
Underappreciating a fossilized status quo. Leaders grossly underestimate the resilience of a fossilized status quo. The structural inertia lodged in equilibrium naturally resists change and preserves existing structures, procedures, routines, and sunk investments.
Unclear or uncommunicated case for change. Change must always be justified based on one or a combination of three drivers: 1) increasing value; 2) reducing cost; or 3) meeting safety, security, or compliance requirements. Without a case for change that is stronger than doing nothing, there is little urgency to propel people to action. This also means contextualizing the change based on organizational history, politics, path dependence, and market timing.
Perverse incentives. Middle managers, often the make-or-break layer, may resist if their incentives remain tied to old priorities.
Over-hasty launch. Executives sometimes rush into change without preparation, mistaking recklessness for healthy urgency. They simply don’t have an appropriately detailed plan of execution. This often reflects a lack of shared belief in the need for change, an appropriate path for change, or the capability to implement the change.
Neglect of the human transition. Leaders often focus on what is changing (strategies, systems, structures, and roles) but overlook who must change. They underestimate employees’ psychological reactions to what might appear to them to be a change in structure only. It’s also true that employees may comply behaviorally but resist emotionally.

The common denominator across false starts is not a lack of technical merit, but rather a lack of support, which spreads through social systems. Think about what a change initiative lacks at the time of launch: Every new initiative has a credibility problem until it generates tangible results; an ambiguity problem until clarity emerges; an energy problem until there is critical mass; and a communication problem until there is shared understanding.

In the early stage of change, the effort is fragile as it works against established norms, routines, structures, and incentive systems. In the absence of results, it relies on vision, anticipated benefits, endorsements, and leadership credibility. These proxies must allay fear and uncertainty when the journey begins. If, at the point of launch, the perceived risk, uncertainty, skepticism, time requirements, errors, and social friction outweigh the power of the vision and its endorsements, the effort will likely result in a false start.

How to Avoid a False Start

If these are the patterns of a false start, how do you prevent them? First, review the six factors above and solve for each one. Then consider four field-tested recommendations that I’ve identified in working with organizations on a host of large-scale change initiatives:

Do the awful triage

If strategy is the deliberate reduction of alternatives, change is the execution of the ones left standing. Remember, change capacity is a finite resource that must be spread across the entire change agenda. That means doing some things in parallel and other things in sequence. It most certainly means saying no to a host of potential initiatives.

I remember an eager new CEO who wanted to share with me his 11 major change initiatives for the year. I tried to warn him about keeping a manageable scope, but he ignored the advice and rushed headlong into his plan. His stacked initiatives created change fatigue, overtaxed the organization, and turned into 11 false starts.

If you have an overly aggressive change agenda, de-fatigue your system by making the painful tradeoffs that will bring you back to traction and success. For example, a healthcare technology company launched eight major initiatives: a cloud migration, a CRM replacement, a pricing redesign, a new product development process, a reorganization of sales territories, a cybersecurity upgrade, a leadership development rollout, and a cost-reduction effort. Individually, each initiative made sense. Collectively, they overwhelmed the system. The leadership team went back, conducted the triage, and identified two initiatives they felt were mission critical for the year.

Conduct a “do-nothing” analysis

For the initiatives that make the first triage cut, move them to a second cut: a “do-nothing” analysis. This means bringing together all relevant stakeholders, including active and potential detractors, and asking this question: “Do we really need to change or should we do nothing?” The answer might not be obvious. Perhaps doing nothing really is the better option. Or perhaps “wait and see” is really “wait and sink.” Doing nothing is not neutral. It’s a choice. And that choice has consequences, some predictable, some not. Most resistance to change isn’t about logic but rather loss aversion.

In my experience, leaders tend to think the cost of inaction is low. But when you take time to map it out, you often find something very different. The leader’s job is to see the costs of not changing clearly. Sometimes, the greatest threat to your organization’s future is the belief that doing nothing is harmless. A do-nothing analysis can surface those blind spots. The healthcare technology leadership team completed a do-nothing analysis for the two initiatives left standing—cloud migration and a new product development process—resulting in even greater alignment and urgency to implement them.

Build a guiding coalition early

A coalition is a group of stakeholders who will support and help you lead the change. Coalitions scale influence and help you through the process of implementation.

Assemble your coalition as early as possible. Identify senior leaders, experts, partners, opinion leaders, and respected frontline managers who will support the effort and then create a strategy to recruit each one. When you set out to build a guiding coalition, think through how they will help you win the first race of adoption:

Choose people with a mix of authority, influence, expertise, and relationships. You need credibility in the room and in the field.
Involve them early. Let them help refine the change roadmap, not just implement it. This creates ownership.
Be transparent about their role. They’re not a ceremonial group; they’re the ones making it happen.
Equip and empower them. Give them the vision, messaging, resources, and support they need to influence others.
Listen to them. Implementing change will include experimentation. Their feedback isn’t a detour but data to help you adapt.

When a hospital system prepared to standardize clinical handoffs across its emergency departments, the COO spent six weeks assembling a guiding coalition: the chief of emergency medicine, two respected attending physicians, a charge nurse from a high-volume site, an IT integration lead, and an influential department manager. Before anything was rolled out, the group tested the proposed process and identified where it would slow care. When the initiative launched, it felt like a decision the field had made, not a mandate from leadership.

Plan and create early wins

Once you begin implementing the change initiative, people start watching for proof. They look around for evidence that the change is working. I call this the “span of uncertainty”: the invisible countdown clock between launch and the first real signs of progress. It’s the length of time people will give discretionary effort to a change without seeing actual evidence that it’s working. It varies by person, team, and organization, but it always has an expiration date. As the old saying goes, “Thunder don’t water the crops”—you can make all the noise you want, but people need to see the rain. So break the bigger milestones into concrete, visible, and symbolically important small wins along the way that you can achieve, communicate, and celebrate. This will create sustainable momentum and make backsliding less likely.

A regional bank launched a new customer onboarding process to reduce account-opening errors and rework. Leaders planned and executed three early wins: First, within 30 days, they removed a redundant verification step for low-risk accounts. Relationship managers felt the change immediately. Second, within 60 days, rework caused by documentation errors dropped by 25% in pilot branches. This metric was simple, visible, and symbolically important in creating more momentum. Third, within 90 days, the bank retired the old onboarding checklist and required pilot branches to use the new process exclusively. The initiative was far from finished but showed concrete evidence of progress. Branch managers stopped protecting the old process and started improving the new one.

. . .

Many leaders believe the greatest risk in change is moving too slowly. That’s often true. For the times it’s not true, the greatest risk is moving before the organization is ready to move with you. A false start doesn’t just delay progress, it erodes credibility, consumes scarce change capacity, and teaches the organization to wage a war of attrition by waiting out the next pronouncement. Ultimately, you have to manage risk as you balance adoption with speed. Because they trade off against each other, you may have to pull from speed to gain adoption and pull from adoption to gain speed. Just make sure you win the adoption race and avoid a false start.

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