I want to take you back to 2005. I'll spare you the full nostalgia trip — though you can choose whether you want Gwen Stefani's 'Hollaback Girl' or Kanye West's 'Gold Digger' to soundtrack this article...
In 2005, the change management playbook looked like this: appoint a sponsor, hire a change manager, do a complicated change assessment, "do comms", run some training, go live, declare success. Change was something a small, credentialled team delivered to the organisation. Everyone else's job was to receive it gracefully.
I was cutting my teeth in the pragmatic world of mining and manufacturing, closer to Lean Six Sigma than Kotter. The Change Management stuff always seemed very heavy and procedural...I avoided being branded with it.
But that model had some merits in the world it was designed for. Stable hierarchies. Predictable timelines. Clear authority. Waterfall delivery.
That world is largely gone. And not just because Kanye has lost the plot.
What 700 change practitioners just told us about the future
The Change Management Institute recently published their Futures of Change research — led by futurist Dr Elissa Farrow, drawing on nearly 700 participants globally and more than 18,000 data points.
One of the five major findings piqued my interest.
"Leadership is shifting from authority to influence, control to contribution, and from hierarchy to networks. By 2035, change will be co-led by diverse contributors — from informal influencers and middle managers to digital agents and partner ecosystems."
It's a significant statement from an authoritative source. But here's my honest reaction:
I've been doing this for twenty years. And I didn't learn distributed change leadership because it was fashionable.
I learned it because the organisations I worked with couldn't afford to do it any other way.
Here are some reflections from my own career.
Campbell Page: 56 out of 85 offices
Early in my career I worked in-house for Campbell Page, a not-for-profit employment services organisation operating out of 85 locations across Australia.
I made it to 56 of them.
From Noarlunga to Moe. Warwick to Caboolture. I worked with people in the hubs then read the local paper and listened to town gossip in the local cafe or bakery.
This wasn't glamorous transformation work. The budget was tight, the sector was tough, and the people doing the work were there because they genuinely believed in their communities. Helping people find employment, often people who'd been run in circles by every other system.
There was no centralised change team. There couldn't be. If you wanted anything to shift — culture, practice, behaviour — it had to be led locally, by people who had earned the trust of their community. You couldn't parachute in from the Sydney corporate office and mandate your way to change in Batemans Bay or Warwick.
What I learned: change travels on relationships, not reporting lines. And in organisations where the mission runs deep, the informal leaders...the ones people actually listen to...have more influence than any org chart will ever show.
I sought them out across 56 offices and personally called the rest. It was the only way to get results with what little we had.
My first ever clients: councils. And why you can't design well over 100 services from the top.
I've spent a meaningful part of my career working with and around local councils. In the first year of learning the craft of facilitation, I worked with City of Charles Sturt and City of Adelaide extensively.
Now I live in City of Victor Harbor and I'm 'peak invested' in council fulfilling its role. I've watched our Mayor, Dr. Moira Jenkins, lead with a kind of humble yet high resolve and consultative inclusiveness that you don't often see in formal leadership roles.
Because here's the thing about councils: they are structurally, legally, and culturally designed to resist top-down change. They deliver well over 100 services. They answer to elected members, ratepayers, community groups, state government, and history — often simultaneously.
You cannot run a change programme in a council the way you'd run one in a corporate. The stakeholder map alone would break your Gantt chart.
Change in a council environment only works when it's owned locally — by the community, by the front-line officers, by the people who actually know what matters in this suburb, this street, this demographic. Distributed, by structural necessity.
The CMI research calls this the future of change. For councils, it's just Tuesday.
(Upon reflection I also saw this in action with the Murray-Darling Basin Authority Planning Team)
Footy clubs and the irrational power of belief
To counter-balance my sharpened business nous, I am a delusional Adelaide Crows supporter. Possibly in therapy about recent performances. Everyone who knows me, knows this.
On top of that, I often discount (to my disservice) what I've learned from spending a tragic amount of time around footy clubs, as an offensively under-skilled 'lower grader' in amateur clubs...that run almost entirely on volunteers.
You cannot manage a footy club's culture from the top. At best, you get a "generation" of 2 to 3 years of aligned players and support staff...before the natural progression of time dissolves that core.
(Note: this is equally applicable to all kinds of sports clubs, not just Aussie Rules.)
The coach has formal authority over a fraction of the people who shape the club. The committee, the senior players, the social club committee, the parents on the boundary, the kid who's third generation at the club - they all have influence. Some of them have more than the coach.
And the thing that binds all of them isn't the strategic plan, the budget or the comms framework. It's belief. Irrational, inconvenient, deeply human belief in the club; what it stands for and where it's going.
When that belief is distributed, the senior players own the culture as much as the coaching staff and you get genuine, durable change. The kind that makes some clubs perennial contenders in their respective leagues. (Tempted to tag UTS Australian Football Club, but that might be biased...)
When belief starts to falter, you get 'compliance' at best...mutiny at worst.
Replace "footy club" with "your organisation" and ask yourself honestly: who are the people whose belief actually drives behaviour? Are they in your change plan? Do you even know them...?
What the 2005 model gets wrong
The traditional change model assumes authority flows downward and change follows it.
But authority and influence have always been different things. We just used to be able to pretend otherwise.
Right now, with flatter structures, hybrid work, mobilised community organisations, multi-stakeholder environments, "the algorithm" and a generation of employees who will simply leave if they don't believe in what they're being asked to do...that pretence can become expensive.
The CMI research identifies this shift as one of the defining changes in the profession between now and 2035. I'd argue it's already the defining change, in the organisations that are getting it right.
I wrote some time ago about Quiet Influencers — the people in organisations who carry trust, not titles. Who others go to with questions, not because they're senior, but because they're credible. Those people are your distributed change network, whether you've mapped them or not.
The question isn't whether distributed change leadership is coming. It's whether you're building for it — or still handing a change manager a Gantt chart and expecting them to deliver.
Distributed change leadership is not the same as uncoordinated change
Someone still has to hold the thread. From the boardroom articulation of why this matters, all the way to the specific conversation a middle manager has with their team on a Tuesday morning. That thinking that runs from strategy to behaviour — the golden thread, the connective tissue, whichever metaphor is your favourite — is the hardest part and therefore most frequently half-baked.
The organisations that will navigate the next decade aren't the ones with the biggest change teams. They're the ones that made change everybody's job — and then invested in the capability and coordination to make that actually work.
Every organisation has more volunteers in it than its org chart admits — people whose discretionary effort, trust and belief you cannot command. Peter Drucker saw this coming decades ago:
"In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts."
That coordination, from boardroom to the specific Tuesday morning conversation, is where I've spent twenty years. It's still the hardest part. And it's still the most frequently skipped.
The model is distributed. The discipline isn't.
The CMI Futures of Change research is publicly available — worth an hour of your time if you work in or around change. Thanks to Dr Elissa Farrow and the CMI team for commissioning research and provoking these thoughts.