The Duality of change — and why it holds organisational transformations together.

You wouldn't engage me if you didn't have a financial strategy…so why should I take you seriously if you didn't have a cultural strategy?

A transformation without a functional budget (that's regularly contextualised) is going to fail. What is the cultural or behavioural equivalent?

Moreover…why do I even have to ask that?! Why is it not 'a thing'?

The odd couple on my CV that pairs perfectly.

People occasionally squint at my CV: a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt sitting alongside an Executive Coaching accreditation? Process nerd or people person — surely you pick one?

That pairing (amongst others) is my lived experience of a balancing act within genuine change and transformation. Perhaps self-aggrandisingly, I call this The Duality: the discipline of holding both the functional and the psychological at once, in both directions, without assuming that fixing one will resolve the other.

I've gestured at this before and made it the core argument of Chapter 2 of my upcoming book.

Two kinds of loss. Only one makes the project plan.

Have you ever been involved in a change process where you systematically, honestly and upfront consider what you are asking people to give up?

There are two kinds of loss in any significant change. My shorthand for this is Hearts and Minds.

The Minds are functional. These are the things that change in the work itself; the systems, the processes, the role descriptions, the reporting lines, the workflows. They are concrete. They can be listed. They are almost always on the project plan.

The Hearts are psychological. These are the things that change in the person doing the work — and they are almost never on the project plan.

Power. Certainty. Autonomy. Identity. The pride of being the expert in something that no longer exists in its current form. The trust of customers who have dealt with the same person for a decade. The sense of ownership over something we have collectively helped build.

It's becoming better understood that the primary reason change programs fail is because the functional transition is derailed when the psychological transition is neglected.

The primary reason I have been successful in my career is that I have been able to make the reverse translation too.

Unclear functional definitions and plans also erode the psychological transition in a change. A messy role description is an attack on the certainty of the person asked to operationalise that role.

But transformation is uncertainty! So good change leaders work both lines at once.

A tool to make it visible: the Let-Go Inventory.

My humble contribution (stacked on top of a multi-millennial observation of the human condition, when confronted with loss) is a two-column exercise I call the Let-Go Inventory.

Start: For your most significant stakeholder group (the people whose adoption matters most) map two things:

Column 1 — Functional losses. What changes in the work itself? Everything tangible that is different on the other side of the change.

Column 2 — Psychological losses. What changes in the person doing the work? Their status. Their certainty about what tomorrow looks like. Their relationships. Their identity.

Here's what that looked like in practice for a product team during Elders' integration years — de-identified, representative, but close to what the actual work produced:

MINDS — Functional losses          | HEARTS — Psychological losses
-----------------------------------|--------------------------------------
Standalone pricing authority       | Expert identity — 'the people who
                                   | built this business from nothing'
-----------------------------------|--------------------------------------
Direct customer relationships      | Trust built over ten-plus years
managed independently              | with specific customers
-----------------------------------|--------------------------------------
Self-directed operational rhythm   | Certainty of a known customer base
                                   | and workflow

When you look at that table, you begin to understand why the integration was hard. Less about "resistance" and more about the fact no one had proactively worked on what they were being asked to leave behind.

Now do it for your program. Don't rush the psychological column. The functional losses will come easily. The psychological losses will require you to stand in someone else's shoes for long enough to see the world from their perspective.

What you find there...is what the change really costs.

If you can't come up with anything, that's a signal in itself. Maybe you need to visit your equivalent of 'the local branch'. The Japanese call this walking the gemba which is roughly, 'where the work happens'.

(Running this with your leadership team? Send each leader into Pragma to draft their own two columns first…then compare notes in the room. The gaps between their answers are the conversation.)

So I ask again...what is your cultural or behavioural strategy for this transformation?

Your transformation has a financial strategy. A budget, a baseline, a review cadence.

What is the cultural and behavioural equivalent?

Why do I even have to ask?

Make it 'a thing'.

This article carries the argument of Chapter 2 of my upcoming book, Pragmatic Change. It is ofcourse the follow-on from Chapter 1's case that you're far better at change than you think. Register your interest here to be notified when it's released.