Conditions Before Change: The Change Is Ready. The Organization May Not Be.

If you have ever been asked to drive adoption for a process that still does not work, train people on decisions that are still changing, or address "resistance" when managers have no capacity left for another transition, you already know the problem.

The OCM plan may be sound. Communication may be clear. Training may be available. Sponsors may be visible. And the change may still be struggling because the condition that needs to change sits somewhere else.

Experienced practitioners recognize this situation quickly. A future-state decision is still unsettled. The workflow is not yet workable. The old work has not gone away. Capacity was removed before effort disappeared. Managers are carrying several transformations at once. A policy, incentive, or system still rewards the behavior the change is supposed to replace.

Another communication does not resolve those conditions. Neither does another training session. And their presence does not, by itself, establish an OCM execution failure.

That is the practical idea behind Conditions Before Change: before asking people to carry a transition, look at what the organization has made possible, impossible, clear, conflicting, resourced, or unresolved around them.

The environment around change has changed

Organizations are increasingly managing AI adoption, operating-model redesign, acquisitions, divestitures, workforce shifts, technology modernization, cost pressure, and regulatory change at the same time. The practical consequence is not simply "more change." Initiatives compete for the same capacity, alter one another's assumptions, create temporary work, and ask the same leaders, managers, and teams to absorb several transitions at once.

Recent research on organizational change capability reflects this reality. Véra-Line Montreuil's 2024 conceptual work describes change capability as dynamic and multi-temporal: organizations need to learn from past change, manage episodic and continuous change, protect core operations while changing, and anticipate future change. McKinsey's 2025 work on reinvention makes a related practice observation: organizations increasingly need to navigate multiple transformations simultaneously.

Readiness already gives us part of the answer

This is not an argument against readiness. Bryan Weiner's theory of organizational readiness for change is useful precisely because it does not reduce readiness to enthusiasm. It describes readiness as shared commitment to implement a change and shared belief in collective capability to do so. That capability is shaped by how people appraise task demands, resource availability, and situational factors.

The profession therefore does not need to abandon its foundations. It needs to use them with a wider field of view.

Conditions Before Change extends that field of view into the work OCM sees every day. When a transition is struggling, the question cannot be only whether people understand, support, or feel ready for the change. It also has to include whether the organization has created conditions in which people can reasonably perform the new way of working.

The profession already knows this in practice

Senior practitioners often see these issues before the organization has language for them. The sponsor asks for stronger adoption while a critical decision remains unresolved. Training is scheduled while the process changes daily. Managers are told to reinforce new behaviors that performance measures still punish. Employees are asked to stop old work that the business still depends on.

The uncomfortable part is that OCM may be the first function expected to absorb the consequences of those decisions, while lacking the authority to change them.

That is the point where professional judgment matters. OCM can surface a condition without claiming ownership of it. It can explain why the condition matters to the transition and put the decision with the leader, process owner, technology owner, manager, or governance body that can actually act.

Sometimes the most professional thing OCM can say is:

“Another OCM intervention will not resolve the operating condition producing this behavior.”

Conditions Before Change

Before asking how to drive adoption, ask what must be true for people to perform successfully during and after the transition.

The answer will differ by situation. It may involve decision clarity, a workable process, capacity, manager support, incentives, information access, workflow fit, technology reliability, role clarity, exception handling, or coordination across organizational boundaries.

Conditions Before Change is not a universal checklist. It is a discipline of looking upstream before prescribing downstream action.

This makes familiar OCM interventions more precise, not less important

Communication, training, sponsorship, stakeholder engagement, reinforcement, coaching, and manager enablement remain essential. But they become responses to a defined need rather than default treatments for every visible difficulty.

If a capability gap is preventing performance, training may be exactly right. If people lack context, communication may be exactly right. If leaders are behaving inconsistently, sponsorship work may be exactly right. But if the problem is an unresolved operating decision, a broken workflow, or missing capacity, the intervention needs to match that reality.

The transition itself deserves to be designed

Current state and future state are useful concepts, but for a meaningful period many organizations live in neither.

During an ERP implementation, old and new workflows may coexist. During an acquisition, Day 1 may establish legal ownership long before teams, systems, decision rights, and processes converge. During AI adoption, employees may be expected to use new tools while governance, role boundaries, review responsibilities, and measures of value are still evolving.

That middle period is not empty space. It is an operating state.

It creates real work: duplicated effort, temporary handoffs, workarounds, additional review, new dependencies, unresolved ownership, and often hidden capacity demands. Conditions Before Change therefore also means examining the conditions of the passage itself, not only the desired future state. People have to work somewhere while the organization is becoming what it intends to become.

Enterprise change capability should reduce repeated rescue

An organization is not necessarily becoming more change-capable because it can deploy the same OCM activities across more projects. Stronger capability means the organization gets better at recognizing what change requires, resolving ownership earlier, learning across transitions, managing overlapping changes without breaking core operations, and carrying that learning into the next change.

Seen this way, Conditions Before Change is not simply a pre-launch question. It becomes part of enterprise capability: the organization gets better at creating workable conditions before each new initiative depends on OCM to compensate for what was left unresolved.

The goal is not to make OCM bigger. It is to make the organization better at changing.

A more credible role for OCM

This is not about making OCM responsible for more.

It is about making OCM responsible for the right things.

The profession does not become more valuable by accepting every problem handed to it. It becomes more valuable when practitioners can distinguish what OCM can change, what the organization must change, and what has to become true before people can reasonably be expected to carry a transition.

That is the deeper promise of Conditions Before Change. It gives practitioners language for something many already know from experience: sometimes the barrier to change is not a lack of willingness, communication, or training. Sometimes the organization has not yet created the conditions in which the change can succeed.

That is a harder role. It asks practitioners to use evidence, judgment, organizational understanding, and professional courage, not just execute a playbook.

It is also a more credible one.

Change Collaboration | Organizational change, seen whole.