The Change Was Communicated. Why Can't People Act on It?

Section 01

The moment the change meets the work

Consider a company introducing a new way for departments to collaborate.

The platform is available. Employees know why the organization wants greater collaboration. Training explains how to contribute, locate information, and share knowledge.

Yet participation remains limited.

It would be easy to conclude that employees are reluctant to collaborate or that managers need to reinforce the message.

But imagine looking at the work itself.

Employees are still accountable for the same individual deliverables. No time has been allocated to maintain shared resources. Nobody knows who owns contributions after they are submitted. Cross-functional work is encouraged, but existing priorities consistently take precedence.

Employees may understand the change perfectly.

Their daily responsibilities simply do not accommodate it.

This is an illustrative scenario, not a claim about a specific organization. The distinction matters because the appropriate response would be very different depending on what is actually preventing participation.

Section 02

Communication establishes understanding. It does not establish feasibility.

Communication can explain what is expected, why it matters, and how responsibilities are changing.

It cannot, by itself, create time, remove conflicting priorities, establish operational ownership, or make an unreliable process usable.

Research on behavior change provides a useful foundation for this distinction.

Susan Michie and colleagues identified three interacting conditions that influence behavior: capability, opportunity, and motivation. Their COM-B model recognizes that knowing how to perform a behavior is not enough if the conditions necessary to perform it are absent. [1]

For organizational leaders, the implication is significant. When employees understand an expectation but cannot act on it, repeating the message may do little to address an obstacle rooted in the work itself.

This is not an argument against communication. It is an argument for recognizing what communication can and cannot accomplish.

When a change appears to stall, leaders need to distinguish at least three possibilities:

These conditions can coexist.

The mistake is assuming that every gap between intention and behavior is fundamentally a communication problem.

Section 03

The manager cannot compensate for every unresolved condition

Middle managers occupy an important position in organizational change.

They translate enterprise priorities into everyday expectations, help employees interpret the impact on their roles, and encounter practical obstacles before those obstacles appear in executive reporting.

But there is a difference between equipping managers to explain a change and enabling them to support it.

A manager can be an excellent communicator and still lack the authority to resolve a conflict between departmental priorities.

They can reinforce a new process without having the capacity to address its exceptions.

They can encourage participation while knowing that the team's performance commitments leave little room for it.

Research examining middle managers' implementation responsibilities supports the importance of these organizational constraints.

A qualitative study of middle managers implementing innovations in healthcare identified competing responsibilities and limited decision-making authority among the challenges affecting their implementation roles. [2]

Although the findings come from a particular sector, they raise an important question for enterprise leaders:

Are managers being held accountable for outcomes without sufficient authority or capacity to address the obstacles employees encounter?

When these conditions remain unresolved, organizations risk asking managers to compensate through influence for problems that require operating decisions elsewhere.

The important question is not whether managers are communicating enough.

It is whether managers can obtain the answers and support employees need when communication has done its job.

Section 04

Examine the first attempt, not just the rollout milestone

One useful leadership practice is to examine what happens when an employee first tries to apply the change under normal working conditions.

Not in the demonstration.

Not in the training environment.

Not during a carefully facilitated pilot session.

In the actual workday, alongside the responsibilities that have not disappeared.

What happens when the employee needs information from another team? When the new responsibility conflicts with an existing priority? When the process encounters an exception? When participation requires time that has not been allocated?

These moments distinguish a change people know about from a change they can reasonably perform.

They can also expose important variation. A process that works well for one department may be difficult for another because the surrounding work is different.

The appropriate response should follow the evidence.

Sometimes that will be better communication or training. Sometimes it will mean revisiting the way work has been arranged.

And sometimes it will reveal a problem with the original expectations themselves.

Section 05

Measure whether the change is workable

This distinction should influence what executives ask to see.

Communications delivered, training completed, and system access granted are useful implementation measures. They do not establish that people can perform the intended behavior.

This is not a new insight in implementation research.

In their foundational work on innovation implementation, Katherine Klein and Joann Sorra distinguished the introduction of an innovation from the consistency and quality of its use. Their model also emphasized the importance of an organizational climate that supports implementation. [3]

Later research examining middle managers' roles in implementing evidence-based practices further explored how their activities and organizational circumstances influence implementation. [4]

Together, these perspectives suggest that making something available and establishing its effective use are different achievements.

A more informative executive conversation examines what happens when employees try to perform the changed work.

Are people able to complete it under ordinary conditions?

Which problems recur?

Who is responsible for resolving them?

Are the same obstacles appearing across multiple teams?

Do corrections improve employees' ability to perform the work differently?

These questions do not necessarily require a new enterprise measurement system. They require leaders to treat evidence from actual work as consequential.

They also make organizational change management more precise.

OCM can help organizations understand the conditions influencing employee behavior, identify barriers to adoption, and inform appropriate responses without claiming ownership of every operational problem.

The distinction matters because not every barrier identified through OCM can be resolved through an OCM intervention alone.

Some require decisions about how the organization operates.

Section 06

What executives should reconsider

The most consequential implication is not that organizations need to communicate less.

It is that they need to be more discerning about what their communications are expected to accomplish.

A leadership message can establish direction. It cannot guarantee that employees have the capacity to act on that direction.

A training program can develop capability. It cannot necessarily resolve conflicting priorities.

A manager can clarify expectations. That does not mean the manager has the authority to make those expectations feasible.

When these distinctions are overlooked, organizations can continue investing in activities that are functioning as designed while leaving the actual obstacle untouched.

The organization communicates again. Managers reinforce expectations again. Employees are reminded of the importance of the change.

Meanwhile, the work remains difficult to perform.

The resulting frustration can be interpreted as resistance, insufficient engagement, or lack of accountability.

Those explanations may sometimes be correct.

But they should be conclusions supported by evidence, not assumptions made because the communication and training milestones have been completed.

For executives, the more useful discipline is to ask what the organization has established beyond awareness and understanding.

Has the expected behavior been made practical?

Have the necessary conditions been addressed?

And where they have not, does leadership recognize the difference between asking people to change and making that change possible?

Section 07

The question leaders should be asking

When a change fails to produce the expected behavior, the natural response is often to increase the effort surrounding it.

Communicate more. Reinforce expectations. Provide additional training. Ask managers to demonstrate greater commitment.

Sometimes those responses are appropriate.

But when the obstacle is embedded in the way work is organized, more effort can leave the underlying problem untouched.

The research does not suggest that communication is unimportant or that organizational conditions explain every instance of unsuccessful adoption. It establishes a more useful distinction: understanding an expectation and being able to act on it are not the same thing.

That distinction should change how leaders interpret implementation progress and how they respond when behavior does not follow intention.

Before prescribing another intervention, determine what is actually preventing the expected behavior.

And before declaring a change ready for employees, ask whether the organization has made it possible for them to succeed.

A communicated change is an intention. A workable change is something employees can actually carry out.