Change Theatre is Costing You
The deck was beautiful. Twenty-three slides explaining the new process, complete with swim lanes, success metrics, and a change readiness assessment that came back green. The town halls were well-attended. The training completion rate hit 94%. Leadership declared victory.
Three months later, the old system is still running. People are double-entering data. The workarounds have workarounds. And when you ask what happened, someone mentions "adoption challenges" like it's weather—unfortunate, but what can you do?
Here's what happened: You launched a change initiative. Your people didn't change.
Most organizations are performing change instead of building it. And the difference isn't semantic—it's expensive.
What Change Theater Looks Like
Change theater is the elaborate production companies stage when they want to feel like they're managing change without actually changing how people work.
It's the roadshow where executives present the vision to increasingly exhausted audiences. It's the branded initiative with the inspiring name that nobody uses after week two. It's the training sessions where people nod along, then return to their desk and do exactly what they did before—because nothing about their actual job has changed except the tool they're supposed to use.
It's the dashboard that tracks "engagement" and "awareness" instead of whether anyone actually stopped doing the old thing and started doing the new thing.
The giveaway is always the same: leaders celebrating launch day like it's finish line. "We rolled it out." "We went live." "We launched."
But your people are still showing up to work asking, "So... what do I actually do differently on Tuesday?"
You launched a thing. They didn't adopt a behavior. These are not the same.
Why Smart People Keep Doing It
There's no villain here. This happens because change theater feels like progress.
Leaders confuse agreement with adoption. Someone nods in a meeting, and we interpret that as commitment. Someone completes training, and we check the box. The roadmap shows green, so we assume the work is happening.
Meanwhile, teams are optimizing for proof of work rather than actual work. We can show the communication plan, the training materials, the change champions network. We can produce evidence that we did the change things. That feels safer than admitting we don't actually know if anyone changed.
And here's the deeper problem: most organizations are terrified of the real conversation, which is, "What has to change about how we work, who does what, and what we stop doing?"
That conversation is hard. It surfaces conflicts. It requires decisions. It makes people uncomfortable.
So instead, we make a nice deck.
The Compounding Cost
Let's get concrete. A financial services company spent $8 million implementing a new platform. Training: complete. Comms: comprehensive. Launch: on time.
Six months in, teams were maintaining shadow spreadsheets because the platform didn't match their actual workflow. Data quality was abysmal because people were entering the minimum required to make the system stop nagging them. Customer wait times increased because reps were toggling between old and new processes. The project was declared "successful." The costs were invisible.
Until they weren't. The rework, the workarounds, the cycle-time creep, the customer friction—it all compounds. Employees burn out trying to make broken adoption look functional. Your best people leave. The next initiative lands on top of the last one's failure, and adoption debt starts accruing interest.
Here's what makes it worse: this happens again with the next change. And the next one. Each failed adoption makes the next one harder. People learn that new initiatives are theater—things to wait out, not take seriously. Your credibility becomes the cost of your performance.
What Actually Works: Building Conditions, Not Campaigns
Real adoption happens when you change the conditions people work in, not when you ask them to work differently in unchanged conditions.
We call this the Five-Lever model: intention, habits, norms, capacity, and trust. These aren't soft skills or nice-to-haves. They're structural constraints. If any lever is set wrong, adoption fails regardless of how good your comms plan is.
Intention means people understand not just what to do, but why this specific behavior matters to their specific work. Not the corporate vision—the actual reason this change makes their Tuesday better or worse.
Habits are the micro-behaviors that need to shift. You can't will yourself into new habits while old triggers still exist. If the old system still works, people will use it.
Norms are what the group actually reinforces. If everyone says they're using the new process but the respected veterans still use the old one, guess which norm wins?
Capacity means time, cognitive load, and capability. "Just add this to your plate" is not a change plan.
Trust is whether people believe leadership will support them through the messy middle, or punish them when adoption is hard.
Here's what this looks like in practice: Instead of training everyone on the new CRM, one company identified the three behaviors that actually mattered (logging calls within 2 hours, tagging opportunity stage, updating close dates weekly). They removed two old reporting requirements to create capacity. They had managers review the first week's entries with their teams, not at them. They made the old system read-only on day one, removing the habit trigger. Adoption hit 89% in three weeks because they changed the conditions, not just the tools.
Ten-Minute Reality Check
If you're leading a change initiative right now, answer these four questions:
What specific behavior has to change, by role, by day 30? (If your answer is "use the new system," go deeper. How will they use it? What will they do Monday that they didn't do Friday?)
What gets harder for people on day one? (If your answer is "nothing," you're lying to yourself.)
What will people stop doing? (If your answer is "nothing," you just added work with no capacity plan.)
How will you know if someone isn't adopting—before the project dashboard tells you? (If your answer is a survey, keep thinking.)
If you can't answer these clearly and specifically, you don't have an adoption plan. You have a launch plan. These are not the same thing.
Stop Performing. Start Building.
The hard truth is that building real adoption feels harder than change theater. It takes longer. It requires uncomfortable conversations. It doesn't produce pretty decks for the steering committee.
But it's the only thing that actually works.
The alternative is expensive: millions spent on implementations that never stick, workarounds that ossify into permanent dysfunction, and a workforce that learns to ignore you.
If you want fewer workarounds and faster adoption, let's talk. Bring your current change plan. We'll tell you where it's theater and what to do instead. Book a consult HERE.
Because at some point, you have to stop launching things and start changing things.
