Org Charts Change Fast. Nervous Systems Change Slow.

It should come as little surprise that transformation programs have been producing results in smaller quantities and shorter durations, despite the efforts to quantify and measure impact. What is not often seen, however, is that, in transformation efforts, what cannot be counted is often rebranded as people change, and given a few workshops with a comms channel that, somehow, changes culture. Nonetheless, the intangible or informal elements (e.g., capability, engagement, team effectiveness, and culture) are where the real outcomes of transformations are generated, and they are much tougher to tackle because they deal with the lived reality of work, not the diagram of work.

The Gap That Keeps Organizations Addicted to Transformation

You’ve been there. A new operating model is announced. Reporting lines shift. Systems get replaced. A floor is reconfigured into neighborhoods. Somewhere, someone proudly calls it end-to-end.

Then Monday hits.

And the daily experience is… the same.

Decisions still stall.

People still hedge.

Teams still protect themselves.

Meetings still feel like theater.

The organization spends months “changing” yet feels strangely unchanged.

Many organizations have effectively built a habit of transforming the formal system while hoping the informal system will somehow fall into place. The formal is tractable: you can rewrite roles, redesign processes, and push a technology rollout. The informal is not tractable in the same way because it sits in beliefs, trust, sensemaking, and identity.

So much change management ends up as superficial effort taken to serve the priorities of the business. Not because practitioners are incompetent, but because the program’s center of gravity is usually cost, speed, and controllability, and the informal system doesn’t submit to those pressures without consequences.

Why the Tangible Wins the Budget (Even When It Loses the War)

Unfortunately, it’s easier to spend millions on a tool (say, CRM) than it is to equip people with the motivation and relational skill to build customer relationships. The logic generalizes:

• Software has a price tag, a timeline, and a vendor who promises certainty.
• A culture shift has ambiguity, slower feedback loops, and outcomes that can’t be cleanly attributed.

So leadership buys what feels safe.

In disruption, formal hierarchies respond by increasing control (i.e., more targets, tighter oversight, more reporting) because control feels safe. The irony is that this often increases brittleness and anxiety in the system, pushing people into survival mode.

Neuroscience: Why “Superficial People Change” Backfires

Neuroscience explains the transformation paradox: you can’t expect deep behavioral change while simultaneously triggering threat. Under stress, especially chronic stress, prefrontal cortex functions that support working memory, cognitive flexibility, and judgement degrade (Arnsten, 2009; McEwen & Morrison, 2013). In plain terms: when people feel watched, rushed, and unsafe, they become less capable of the very things transformation asks for: learning new ways of working, adapting, collaborating, and making wise decisions.

This is one reason superficial “engagement” efforts fall flat. If the formal system changes (reorgs, new KPIs, constant restructuring) create a threat environment, the nervous system overrides the slide deck.

Motivation research adds a second layer. Self-determination theory shows that intrinsic motivation depends on autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Many transformations damage all three:

• Autonomy shrinks through approvals and compliance.
• Competence erodes when people are expected to change without time to learn.
• Relatedness fractures when incentives pit functions against each other.

Then leaders wonder why “adoption” is low.

The Real Divide: Manipulating Structures vs Developing Capability

It’s not that formal change is bad. It’s that formal change without informal development is incomplete, and often counterproductive.

The informal system includes:

• Individual capability: do people have the skills to exercise judgement, collaborate, and lead without positional power?
• Engagement and agency: do people believe they can act, or are they stuck in learned helplessness?
• Team effectiveness: can teams hold constructive tension, build shared reality, and generate wisdom together?
• Culture: what is tolerated, rewarded, and repeated until it becomes “how we do things here”?

Although we were deeply impacted by our work with the recently passed John Katzenbach, in HumanCorps Andrew and I lean on Schein’s definition of culture as shared basic assumptions learned through experience and taught as the right way to perceive, think, and feel. That means culture doesn’t shift through posters; it shifts through repeated, reinforced experience.

So when transformation prioritizes business timelines over human learning timelines, the informal system interprets the move as: this is being done to us, not with us. And the informal system always wins, because it governs behavior when no one is watching.

From Change Theater to Real Transformation: What HumanCorps Implies

As Andrew and I see it, HumanCorps proposes an “inside-out” shift: build human-centered organizations where the formal system becomes flexible scaffolding, not a control cage, and where leaders become creators of space for ownership and agency. That means practical redesign, not motivational speeches:

• Start with candid assessment of how work really happens. Where do decisions stall? Where is talent under-used? Where is engagement low?
• Invest as much in mindset-to-behavior change as in tech. If you only accelerate tools, you accelerate dysfunction.
• Distribute authority with clear standards. Empowerment without decision rights is theatre.
• Create psychological safety and “brave space.” HumanCorps argues organizations need environments where people would rather contribute an educated guess than sit on the fence.

If you do those things, operating models and tech stop being “the transformation.” They become enablers of the transformation.

Questions to Surface Whether Your Transformation Is Real

• If you removed your new org chart and your new toolset, would people still behave differently?
• What has changed in decision rights, trust signals, and psychological safety, not just in reporting lines?
• Are you optimizing for program delivery, or for human capability growth?

Formal change is easy to announce. Informal change is hard to earn. That is exactly why most transformations look impressive and land shallow.

Works referenced

• Arnsten, AFT. 2009. Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10.6.410-22. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2648
• Deci, EL, & Ryan, RM. 2000. The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry 11.4.227-68. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15327965Pli1104_01
• McEwen, BS, & Morrison, JH. 2013. The brain on stress: Vulnerability and plasticity of the prefrontal cortex over the life course. Neuron 79.1.16-29. https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(13)00544-8