Is it bogus to have a consultant lead a change program?

Irresistible Change Live in the Haight

The Irresistible Change® newsletter is about organizational culture, transformation, and design. It’s written for executives who recognize that tools and methods come and go, but it’s culture that drives sustainable, differentiated outcomes. And that the status quo is a culture’s mortal .

Irresistible Change Live-The Haight | DJ bØ9ü$ provided the ambience for CPS Lectures #167 | Photo credit: Lisa Gilbert

Last night’s CPS Lectures event was a special stop on the book tour. Founded by my good friends Kelly and John Close in memory of her father, who was a voracious reader and generous conversationalist, they’ve hosted more than 160 authors in their home. Being #167 was an honor, but the real joy was reconnecting with old friends in a room built for honest, unguarded dialogue. (Notwithstanding disco interludes from DJ bØ9ü$!)

Because of that intimacy, we were able to dig into a question that hasn’t surfaced much on the tour:

If change is a product, what does that demand of the leadership team?

It’s a good question, and one that gets its own chapter in Irresistible Change. But last night surfaced a related question I don’t address directly in the book, and I heard it twice, both from leaders inside government organizations:

If consultants are the ones leading the change effort, does that alter the Irresistible Change model?

Interestingly, not really. After all, the whole model is built on solving a very specific problem: How do you get 400,000 people to do something when none of them report to you? Whether the “you” is an employee or a contractor matters far less than people assume.

Of course, that statement needs a qualifier. I’m not suggesting that any outsider can lead a major change effort; or that this can be a part time role. It can’t. What I am saying is that what matters most isn’t employment status—it’s the person’s remit and their capability. If the change leader is explicitly empowered, and if they build the leadership team with the right design principles, the model still holds.

The more important questions are:

• Does the leader operate like a startup CEO/product leader, able to make decisions, lead people, and orchestrate across domains? They can’t simply be “the expert” in the change provocation being inserted.

• Is the leadership team built not only to advance the change provocation (e.g. AI, Design, Agile), but also to protect it from legacy systems that will inevitably push back?

• Does the team include people responsible for two simultaneous missions: delivering the program to incoming teams, and modernizing the scaled systems—HR, Finance, Communications, CIO—so the organization can sustain the new behaviors over time?

Because here’s the fundamental truth: what leaders think is the work is almost never the real work.

Introducing new tools, methods, or team practices is the visible part. But at least half the effort lies in changing the deeper systems that reinforce culture. Those systems—performance management, incentives, career ladders, budgeting, governance, decision rights—are the real levers of lasting change.

At IBM, our change program was called Hallmark. And the leadership team’s job wasn’t just helping thousands of teams adopt new ways of working; it was hacking, updating, and ultimately rewiring the underlying systems so those new behaviors could persist. The glamorous part wasn’t the work. The plumbing was.

I’ll let these words from Chapter 3 of Irresistible Change take it home:

When assembling the leadership team for any change program, I’d suggest you make it a priority to assess each individual for their attachment capabilities. Top leaders on the program team need to be people the organization will be highly receptive to working with. In the best cases, they are familiar faces within the company who know how to get things done inside the existing culture.

Everyone on my team was dedicated to do whatever it would take to ensure that IBM’s dominant culture wouldn’t prevent change from taking hold. Initially, this meant working within the system, obtaining exceptions to rules so that Hallmark teams could do their work. But it alsommeant working to change those rules for all, which was the long-term goal. In essence, my leadership team was tasked with smuggling our new set of cultural behaviors into IBM’s processes and systems, using the tactical successes of each Hallmark project as the proof for why this should be done.