Change is hard

In today’s environment, disruption isn’t a one-time event—it’s a constant. Markets shift, technologies evolve, and consumer expectations change faster than ever. What worked yesterday may be irrelevant tomorrow. This relentless pace demands more than digital adoption; it requires leaders to continually reimagine the business itself—its products, services, structures, and ways of working. The challenge is not just to keep up, but to stay ahead, with agility, speed, and a mindset open to reinvention.

Leaders must continually reimagine and reinvent the business itself.

You will need to rethink the way you do business, to become more efficient, smarter, and, most importantly, to be customer-centric.

This is about leadership of the organisational and cultural changes needed to re-align around the cross-functional value-chain, so that revenue is secured by iteratively delivering augmented products and services, so that the company stays relevant as the world moves on.

Please read on for an insight into why change is hard, and what you can do about it.

Do you recognise these challenges?

1. Customer indifference. Your customers are no longer to be marketed to and persuaded to buy. Instead they seem to network with each other, seeking social proof rather than listening to your marketing department, and are wary of any sales manipulations you offer.
2. Asymmetric Competition. Your business used to compete with rival companies that looked very much like yours. Today companies from outside your industry, who look nothing like you, offer competing value to your customers. You've pulled the levers that used to work, but you're not agile enough to stop this asymmetric challenge.
3. Data overload. You've noticed that data is generated in unprecedented quantities from every conversation, interaction and process, inside and outside of your business. But it's no longer structured, and there is so much that it's becoming overwhelming. The challenge is understanding what it all means, and then using that insight to make vital decisions
4. Innovation and iteration. You know that you need to innovate to stay relevant, but it is difficult. So many ideas float up, but you can't do them all and don't know which ones to back. There is still a singular focus on the finished product, because market testing is difficult and costly, and you rely on the intuition of your time-served managers, with the hope that there is meaningful data, somewhere, to give you insight. Your competitors are rapidly iterating their products and it appears that their continuous learning makes them quick to gain market feedback, and to act on it.
5. Increasing irrelevance. Your successful company had a clear value proposition, had found a point of market differentiation (price, features, service or quality) and focused on execution year on year. Now, you realise that relying on an unchanging value proposition will be inviting challenge and disruption by new competition.
6. Command and Control wins out over Trust and Inspire. Your traditional hierarchical organisation structure has created silos and internal protectionism. It's difficult to focus your resources on the cross-functional business processes necessary to create ongoing customer value. Your competitors seem to have a flat, value-creating organisation, with staff empowered to make decisions.
7. Stubbornly high operating costs. Despite efforts to streamline and automate, your cost base remains rigid. Legacy systems, entrenched processes, and fragmented accountability mean that efficiency gains are slow and incremental. You suspect that your competitors are running leaner, more adaptive operations, but whilst you are still making large profits and keeping the stock market happy, internal resistance to change and lack of visibility into true cost drivers make it hard to act decisively. The challenge is not just cutting costs, but rethinking how value is created and delivered.

Market disruption, and the ongoing need to control cost, has meant that traditional businesses have been forced to rethink their products and services, and to reconsider the structure of the organisation that delivers them. You will need to think through your response to the challenge - and opportunity - this represents.

There are good reasons to embrace your future sooner rather than later:

Increased profits. Businesses can expect to grow revenues significantly as a result of adopting digital strategies. Digital mastery is an outcome when digital capability and leadership capability are combined; the MIT Center for Digital Business established that a high-performing cohort of organisations who were digital masters outperformed their peers in every industry, by as much as 26%.

Agility and speed to market. The real challenge isn’t just digital disruption, it’s the accelerating pace of change. Success now depends on how quickly and effectively your organisation can respond to shifting customer needs, emerging competitors, and evolving technologies. Businesses that build agility into their operating model - through flatter structures, empowered teams, and rapid decision-making - are better positioned to seize opportunities and adapt before others even react.

Greater resilience. Disruptive challengers, world events such as Covid-19 and new technologies will continue to shake up customer expectations and processes. A digitally enabled business builds resilience by replacing rigid structures and inflexible processes with a workplace culture and infrastructure that can respond and adapt to new demands.

Engaged employees. Disengaged employees cost the economy ££ billions each year. Digital businesses empower employees through transparency, learning opportunities, and open communication. By providing employees with data on how the business is performing – and their part in it – performance improves.

Avoiding the competency trap. Many companies assume that their current success (and the methods that enable it) will continue indefinitely. Then they end up scrambling to adapt when it stops working, making decisions for short-term survival rather than long-term growth.

Controlling operating costs. Many organisations find that despite major investment, process improvement and reducing staff numbers, operating costs remain stubbornly high. Tackling this requires more than incremental efficiencies, it demands a fundamental rethink of how work gets done.

Corporate transformation is mainly about the leadership needed to implement organisational agility and the cultural changes needed to make the company entirely customer-centric. Digital technology is an enabler, but not the main focus.

Take action

You will need to instigate the changes your company must implement, by focusing on:

Leadership. Transformation is an all-company activity, but having respected leaders committed to achieving transformation outcomes is seen as a signal of intent, and significantly increases success.

Clarifying Purpose and Reimagining Roles. Transformation begins with clarity; leaders must be explicit about why the organisation exists and what it is fundamentally here to deliver, and drill down through each business unit to the same outcome. This purpose must be aligned with the needs of each operation unit’s customer, whether internal or external. From there, it becomes essential to define the products and services that fulfil that obligation, and to identify the activities required to deliver them. Only then should roles be shaped around those activities. Too often, organisations start with existing roles and try to retrofit them to new demands. Leaders must break free from this constraint, rethink the activities needed to create value, and build new roles around the skills and capabilities required to perform them. This shift enables agility, relevance, and a more customer-centric operating model.

Capability Building. Transformation success is more than three times likelier when respondents say their organisations have invested the right amount in the right talent. Developing skills and talent is one of the most important factors for success in any change effort, as is redefining roles and responsibilities so that they align with a transformation’s goals. Success is at least twice as likely when innovative recruitment takes place, using techniques that appeal a candidate’s innate sense of opportunity.

Empowering Workers. Strategic transformations require cultural and behavioural changes such as calculated risk taking, increased collaboration, and customer centricity. Establishing new ways of working is more likely to result in success. Leaders must encourage employees to experiment with new ideas and allow team members to learn from their failures. You will need to create the space for people to make decisions without fear, and give them the authority to make the decisions, teachng them how to make decisions likely to be in the customers' best interests.

Upgrading Tooling. When businesses empower employees to work in new ways digitising tools and processes can support success. You will need to work on implementing new tooling, including AI which can take on the newly devolved decision rights, together with the readiness activities and mindset adjustments needed to make the most of the investment.

Communication. Clear communication is critical during any major transformation initiative. Communicating the change story is vital – it helps employees understand where the company is headed, why it is changing, and why the changes are important. You will need to create engagement messages which explain the vision and help foster a sense of urgency for change.

Why change is hard – and what you can do about it

Change is hard because it requires more than new tools or processes; it needs a fundamental shift in mindset, structure, purpose nd operational outcome - and it demands that leaders acknowledge that this shift is absolutely necessary.

The pace of disruption, evolving technologies, and shifting customer expectations mean that yesterday’s solutions won’t solve tomorrow’s problems, and they won't take cost out of the business.

To lead effectively through this complexity, leaders must first capture and clarify their organisation’s core obligations to customers, internal and external.

From this foundation, they can redesign ways of working to deliver on those obligations with agility and precision.

This means building an optimal organisational structure that aligns products and services with customer needs, defines the activities required to deliver value, and then shapes roles around those activities, not the other way around.

By doing so, leaders will create a leaner, more responsive business that delivers sustained value at a lower, more manageable cost.

Innovation constantly renews the value that the customer seeks. Transformation makes changes to the organisation that delivers the value.