There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being asked to lead change inside a system you did not design and cannot fully control. That is one of the reasons I was so glad to sit down with Adriano Pianesi to talk about how we can support leaders who are stuck in change.
I see it all the time in my work with leaders. A new strategy is announced and a reorganization is underway. The message from above is often clear enough in theory, but much less clear in practice. Somewhere in the middle of all of that are managers and leaders who are trying to translate vision into action while also tending to the reality on the ground. They are fielding skepticism from their teams, pressure from leadership, and their own very human worries about whether they are somehow the problem when things don’t move as quickly as everyone wants.
Adriano is an executive coach, professor, and organizational change expert whose work sits at the intersection of systems thinking, human behavior, and practical transformation. He has helped more than 2,500 leaders across sectors, from Microsoft to the World Bank, navigate change with greater clarity and strategic insight.
What makes his perspective especially valuable is that it is informed not only by his work in organizations, but also by his own lived experience of change. He has moved across countries, sectors, and professional identities, building a career that spans nonprofit, for-profit, government, and academia. In other words, he knows change not just as a theory, but as a lived reality.
What I appreciated most about this conversation is that Adriano does not pathologize leaders who feel stuck in change. He does not assume they lack commitment, intelligence, or resilience. Instead, he helps us see that in many cases, the real challenge is navigational. Leaders are trying to create movement inside systems that are not yet aligned for what is being asked of them. That is a very different framing.
Why Organizational Change Fails More Often Than It Should
One of the most striking points Adriano made in our conversation was his pushback on the familiar statistic that 70 to 80 percent of change efforts fail. Many people have heard some version of that figure, usually delivered with a kind of resignation: change is hard, people resist it, and most initiatives never really stick. Adriano does not dispute that change often fails. What he challenges is the implied explanation.
He pointed to research suggesting that when middle managers are actively involved in change efforts, success rates rise dramatically. In fact, he referenced findings that show change initiatives succeed roughly 80 percent of the time when middle managers are meaningfully engaged. That statistic matters because it shifts the conversation away from blaming frontline leaders and toward understanding the role they actually play.
Middle managers are often asked to translate top-down strategy into day-to-day behavior. They are close enough to senior leadership to understand the formal goals, and close enough to frontline teams to understand the practical obstacles. They operate at the point where vision meets reality. That makes them enormously important, and also uniquely vulnerable.
When change fails, these are often the people who feel the blame most directly. But according to Adriano, the problem is not that these leaders are inherently incapable. It is that they are often operating without the maps, alliances, or systems support required to lead change effectively. That distinction matters. It turns shame into strategy.
The Human Cost of Leading from the Middle
One of the things I appreciated most about this conversation is that Adriano understands the emotional reality of middle leadership. He does not speak about change as if it is just a sequence of decisions on an org chart. He understands what it feels like to stand in the middle of competing forces and still be expected to generate momentum.
That emotional reality is one of the reasons so many leaders feel stuck. It is not simply that the work is complicated. It is that change often carries invisible emotional labor. People experience uncertainty, loss, confusion, and skepticism. They grieve the old way of doing things, even when they understand intellectually that the new direction may be necessary. Leaders in the middle are asked to absorb that emotional complexity while still appearing calm, strategic, and forward-moving.
Adriano said something in our conversation that I found deeply useful: people do not resist change simply because they dislike newness. They resist the losses that change creates. There may be a loss of competence, familiarity, status, autonomy, ease, or confidence. Even positive change often contains some form of letting go.
This aligns with a great deal of change management research. William Bridges’ work on transitions, for example, distinguishes between change and transition, reminding us that external shifts and internal adaptation do not happen at the same speed. Kurt Lewin’s early model of unfreeze-change-refreeze, while simplified, also points to the reality that movement requires destabilizing what was once familiar. In more contemporary organizational psychology, leaders are encouraged to look not only at resistance, but at what people believe they are being asked to give up.
Preparation Is More Than Planning
One of the most useful aspects of Adriano’s framework is that it gives leaders language for where change often breaks down. His model includes four elements: Preparation, Power, Participation, and Progress.
Preparation, in his view, is not just about putting together a project plan or building a deck. It is about understanding the system. What is happening in the organization right now? Why is this the strategic moment for this change? What is the organization ready for? What are the formal and informal conditions that will affect success?
This is where many change efforts become too administrative and not strategic enough. Leaders are handed a timeline, a mandate, and perhaps a few talking points, but they are not always encouraged to ask deeper questions about readiness, alignment, and context. Adriano’s point is that preparation should help leaders understand what terrain they are walking into, not just what tasks they are expected to complete.
Power is Not a Dirty Word
The second element in Adriano’s framework is power, and I was glad he named it so directly. In many organizations, conversations about power are either avoided or treated with discomfort. But change is always influenced by power. Who has authority? Who has credibility? Who can accelerate a decision? Who can quietly stall one? Who is trusted by others? Who is skeptical but influential?
Adriano encourages leaders to think politically, not in the cynical sense, but in the strategic sense. If you are trying to move change through a system, you need to understand where influence lives and how alliances are built.
This is particularly important for leaders who want to believe that good ideas will naturally win if they are compelling enough. Sometimes they do. Often they do not. Systems move through a combination of logic, timing, trust, history, and influence. To ignore power is to misunderstand the system you are trying to change.
What I appreciated is that Adriano does not talk about this in a manipulative way. He talks about it as part of leading responsibly. If the goal is meaningful, human-centered change, then understanding power is not optional. It is one of the ways leaders reduce naiveté and increase effectiveness.
Participation Has to Be Real
The third part of the framework is participation, and this is where I think many well-intentioned leaders unknowingly fall short. Participation is often confused with communication. A leader explains the change, invites questions, maybe runs a town hall, maybe offers some incentives or training, and assumes people have now been included. Adriano challenges that assumption. He argues that participation has to move beyond passive awareness and into real co-creation.
People are much more likely to support what they helped shape.
That does not mean every decision can or should be made collectively. It does mean that if leaders want real buy-in, they need to create meaningful ways for people to contribute insight, shape implementation, and see their influence reflected in the final direction. Otherwise, “participation” becomes performance.
This aligns with what many of us know from both leadership practice and organizational research: ownership grows through involvement. It is not enough for people to understand the change. They need to feel that they have some agency in how it comes to life.
Progress Has to Be Visible
The fourth and final element in Adriano’s model is progress, and this one may be the most encouraging for leaders who feel stuck. Progress, as he describes it, is not about tracking how hard people are working or how many meetings have been held. It is about visible movement on the variables that matter. Are we seeing signs of traction? Are we witnessing any shift in behavior, alignment, confidence, or adoption?
This is important because in many change efforts, leaders become over-focused on effort and under-focused on evidence. People stay busy but begin losing heart because the work does not feel like it is going anywhere. Adriano’s emphasis on visible progress helps reintroduce momentum into a process that might otherwise feel like endless strain.
This is also where his idea of a “15% change” becomes useful. For leaders who feel overwhelmed or immobilized, he recommends starting with a small, discretionary action that is within their control. Not a total transformation. Not a dramatic relaunch. Just a meaningful move that creates enough traction to remind people that change is possible. I love this idea because it respects both the complexity of systems and the psychology of hope.
What Leaders Can Do Right Now
One of the reasons I think this episode is so relevant is that it gives leaders both validation and a path forward. It names the difficulty of leading in the middle without romanticizing it, and it offers a practical lens for moving through complexity with more agency. For leaders who are navigating change right now, a useful place to begin is not by asking how to force momentum, but by asking what part of the system needs more attention. Try starting with these questions:
- Does this effort need deeper preparation?
- Does it require a better understanding of power and influence?
- Is participation too superficial? Or is the team simply not able to see enough evidence of progress to believe the effort is worth it?
A practical action I would encourage, based on this conversation, is to identify one current change effort and map it through Adriano’s framework. Not as an abstract exercise, but as a way to understand where the friction really lives. In many cases, the answer is not “work harder.” It is “work more precisely.”
Why This Conversation Gave Me Hope
What stayed with me most after this conversation was not just Adriano’s framework, although I think it is very strong. It was the hopefulness underneath it. He does not dismiss how hard change can be. He does not pretend systems are easy to move. But he also does not believe leaders are powerless inside them.
Because many people listening to this episode are not CEOs. They are not the final decision-makers. They are the people who have to translate vision into reality while still staying connected to the human beings around them. They need more than encouragement. They need a way to understand what is happening and where they can still exert meaningful influence. And in a world where organizational change is often constant, messy, and exhausting, that kind of grounded, strategic hope is incredibly valuable.
To me, that is what made this conversation so resonant. It reminded me that even when leaders do not control the whole system, they are not without agency. They can prepare more strategically. They can build alliances more intentionally. They can create deeper participation. They can make progress visible. And sometimes, that is exactly how change begins to feel possible again.
