3 Strategies for Driving Organizational Change  ## Metadata - Author: [[Meg Adams]] - Full Title: 3 Strategies for Driving Organizational Change - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #change-management - #engineering-leadership - #organizational-behavior Author: Meg Adams Source: LeadDev (Article) Reference: https://leaddev.com/process/3-strategies-driving-organizational-change date created: 2025-08-22 00:00 --- # Title: 3 strategies for driving organizational change ## Table of Contents: - 📚 Overview (#-overview) - 🧭 Context & Goal of the Article (#-context-goal-of-the-article) - 🎺 Cheerleading Strategy (#-cheerleading-strategy) - 🔆 Bright Spots Strategy (#-bright-spots-strategy) - 🐦 The Gannet Strategy (#-the-gannet-strategy) - 🚀 Start Now (#-start-now) - 🔗 References (#-references) - 📝 Summary (#-summary) - 📖 Main Content (#-main-content) - 🗒️ Notes (#-notes) - 📖 References (expanded) (#-references-expanded) - 🗣️ Paraphrase (#-paraphrase) - 📰 Newsletter (#-newsletter) - ✅ Action Items (#-action-items) - 🧪 Hypotheses (#-hypotheses) - 📊 Methodology (#-methodology) - ❓ Questions (#-questions) - 🔮 Future Research (#-future-research) - 💡 Implications (#-implications) - 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment (#-learning-styles-assessment) - 📊 Accessibility Assessment (#-accessibility-assessment) - 🌍 DEIB Assessment (#-deib-assessment) - ✅ Logical validity (#-logical-validity) - 🔍 DARVO Analysis (#-darvo-analysis) - 🔍 SEO Evaluation (#-seo-evaluation) - 🎯 Conclusion (#-conclusion) Note: The article is a single-page web piece without media timestamps; below, “timestamps as links” are implemented as section anchors to specific parts of the page. ### References: - Chip & Dan Heath, “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard” - LeadDev article by Meg Adams (linked above) ## 🧭 Overview - The author reframes change management as human behavior change and offers three tactical strategies leaders can use, depending on context: Cheerleading, Bright Spots, and The Gannet. The piece emphasizes intentionality, consistency, and designing communication to match both culture and urgency. ## 🧭 Context & Goal of the Article - Context: Leaders often lament “we need better change management” but fail to include tactical behavior-change plans alongside technical and project plans. - Goal: Provide practical, adaptable strategies to increase adoption and sustainment of organizational change. ## 🎺 Cheerleading Strategy - Core idea: Use enthusiastic, playful, and visible rituals to invite participation and celebrate early wins, creating a temporary community around the change. - Best for: Cultural shifts and slow-adoption changes. - Example: A light-hearted public leaderboard for error ownership and resolution, paired with consistent recognition. - Risks: Starting strong but failing to maintain the ritual; ending without intention can signal the initiative wasn’t important. Direct anchors: - Introduction framing: #overview - Strategy list intro: #context-goal-of-the-article - Cheerleading details and example: #cheerleading-strategy ## 🔆 Bright Spots Strategy - Core idea: Identify where the desired behavior already exists, learn why it works, and replicate it. - Best for: When progress stalls; refocus from deficits to successes. - Example: Data discoverability improved by noticing that several effective teams had access to a helpful data architect (“Anna”). This insight led to personalizable wayfinding in the data catalog and growing active users. - Key step: Enroll bright-spot owners as champions; acknowledge them and invite them to evangelize. Direct anchors: - Bright Spots framing and source: #bright-spots-strategy ## 🐦 The Gannet Strategy - Core idea: Tackle change from both the top (broad comms, policy, runbooks) and the bottom (personal outreach, team-specific support). - Best for: Mandatory changes with deadlines (e.g., migrating to a new data warehouse). - Example: Organization-wide runbooks plus targeted notes and support to drive action ownership for migrating scripts. - Anti-pattern: Copy-pasting the same message in both high-level and low-level channels, creating multiple outdated “sources of truth.” - Remedy: Maintain a centralized canonical “how-to” and link to it from macro and micro communications. Direct anchors: - The Gannet details and guidance: #the-gannet-strategy ## 🚀 Start Now - Encouragement to practice change tactics, learn through mistakes, and embrace the “wonderful and weird” nature of human behavior change. Direct anchor: - Call to action: #start-now ## 📝 Summary: The article argues that successful organizational change depends on intentional behavior-change strategies, not just technical or project plans. It presents three tactics: Cheerleading (build celebratory, visible rituals to spark cultural shifts), Bright Spots (find what already works and replicate it systemically), and The Gannet (combine broad, centralized guidance with tailored, personal outreach for mandated, time-bound changes). Consistency, champion enrollment, and single-source documentation are emphasized. The author encourages leaders to start practicing now, accept imperfection, and iterate. ## 📖 Main Content: - Reframing: Change management is fundamentally about human behavior. Project and technical plans often omit a behavior-change plan, undermining success. - Strategy fit: - Cheerleading: Creates momentum and belonging; gamifies early wins. Works well for norms like “zero exceptions” error handling. Requires multi-person support and a clear beginning/end. - Bright Spots: Switch from problem-finding to solution-cloning. Discover hidden enablers (e.g., “Anna” the data architect), then encode those enablers into systems (personalizable wayfinding), and recruit bright spot owners as champions. - The Gannet: Use two planes of action—mass guidance plus individualized nudges. Centralize the “how-to” and link to it everywhere to avoid multiple truths. Effective for migrations with ambiguous ownership. - Practice orientation: Start small, iterate, make it fun; human systems respond to energy, clarity, and consistency. Personal insights: - For engineering orgs, Cheerleading pairs well with DevEx dashboards and reliability scorecards; Bright Spots complements platform product discovery; The Gannet maps to “program + TAM” patterns used in large migrations and security remediations. - The “central canonical doc + tailored outreach” pattern is crucial to avoid confusion and trust erosion. ### 🗒️ Notes - Change ≈ behavior change; leaders should bring tactical behavior plans. - Strategy selection: - Cheerleading - Use visible, themed rituals (leaderboards, shoutouts). - Celebrate early evidence of desired behavior. - Maintain with cadence; define end-state. - Multi-owner stewardship prevents drop-off. - Bright Spots - Identify existing success pockets. - Analyze enablers (people, processes, affordances). - Systematize enablers (e.g., catalog wayfinding). - Enroll bright-spot owners as evangelists. - The Gannet - Macro: Broad comms + runbooks. - Micro: Personal outreach, Q&A, office hours. - Canonical source to avoid divergence. - Best for required, time-bound changes. - Anti-patterns: - Ritual decay (Cheerleading). - Ignoring champions (Bright Spots). - Message duplication and multi-truths (Gannet). - Meta: Start practicing; accept imperfection; iterate. ## 📖 References: - Meg Adams, “3 strategies for driving organizational change,” LeadDev: https://leaddev.com/process/3-strategies-driving-organizational-change - Chip Heath & Dan Heath, “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard” ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1) Original idea: “Change management... we’re talking about human behavior change... I see technical plans and project plans, but rarely plans that nourish change.” Paraphrase: When organizations discuss “change management,” the real target is shifting human behavior. Leaders frequently produce strong technical and project roadmaps but neglect the behavior-change plan that actually unlocks adoption and success. 2) Original idea: “The Gannet... approach change from top and bottom... broad comms and runbooks paired with individualized outreach... avoid duplicating messages; maintain a centralized how-to.” Paraphrase: The Gannet method tackles change on two fronts - Summary: Implementing organizational change can be challenging, but there are strategies that can help drive successful transitions. One strategy is "cheerleading," which involves enthusiastically inviting others into a change and celebrating early signs of that change to create a temporary, collaborative community. Another strategy is to focus on "bright spots," finding areas where the desired change is already happening and expanding that model throughout the organization. The third strategy is called "The Gannet," which involves approaching change from both a top-down and bottom-up perspective, with broad communication and guidance plans for the masses and personalized outreach for individuals. It is important to start practicing change management strategies and be open to making mistakes and learning from them. - URL: https://leaddev.com/process/3-strategies-driving-organizational-change [Meg Adams](https://leaddev.com/community/meg-adams) Introducing change to your organization can feel like an uphill battle, but it doesn’t have to. Here are some tactics to implement for more successful transitions. One of my favorite business jargon phrases is “change management.” [Change management](https://leaddev.com/process/managing-complex-organizational-change) encompasses the approaches used to prepare, support, and help both individuals and teams [make organizational change happen](https://leaddev.com/team/engineering-leaders-guide-tackling-change). Boiled down, we’re talking about human behavior change. In my experience as a leader, I have heard people discuss this topic *a lot*. When looking towards the future, colleagues will generalize that, “We need better change management as a company.” When looking back retrospectively, they’re more prone to, “That change wasn’t managed effectively.” If you’re really looking to get some nods from around the table it’s one of those things you can say with very little pushback, because it’s almost always true. However, what I rarely hear or see are tactical change management plans from engineering leaders who are proposing an idea or a project. I see technical plans. I see project plans. But I nearly never see plans that nourish change in a project that could be instrumental in certifying its success. Change is inevitable. The need for individuals and teams to modify thinking and behaviors in response to change is critical. As leaders, it’s our whole job to enable organizational change. To get great at doing that job, we must practice change management strategy as part of our leadership craft. #### Strategies to try depending on context The most effective change management strategy for your project will vary depending on the type of shift you’re trying to implement and the environment the change will occur in. Here are three tactical strategies that you can experiment with as part of your leadership toolkit to find the one that best suits your situation. #### 1. Cheerleading The strategy that I implement most, as it comes most naturally to me, is what I refer to as “cheerleading.” In a sports context, cheerleaders exist to engage an audience. Using high-energy, rhyming chants that people can’t help but shout along to, they pull the crowd in and transform them from observers to active participants. Cheerleaders use the superpower of their own enthusiasm to engage and celebrate. They facilitate a temporary bubble of community that exists during the course of a game. In change management, cheerleading is about enthusiastically and playfully inviting others into a change and loudly celebrating early signs of that change. It’s about creating a highly visible opportunity to be a part of a temporary, [collaborative, joyful community](https://leaddev.com/managing-distributed-teams/building-culture-collaboration-modern-enterprise). I always find cheerleading useful, but I find it works best for cultural changes and changes that can be adopted slowly. The most recent example of a cheerleading strategy I applied was in the context of helping an organization activate toward a “zero exceptions” culture. The change needed was for teams to [review, self-assign, and resolve errors triggered within the systems that they owned](https://leaddev.com/culture-engagement-motivation/fostering-culture-accountability). We created a “greatest opportunity for greatness” leaderboard where we posted the owners of the top five errors being triggered in our environments each week, celebrating with public accolades once those errors were resolved. Our leaderboards were public and intentionally light-hearted, with ever-changing themes. Here’s an example of someone’s leaderboard entry from a week where the inspiration was the hyperbolic introductions from *Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Competition*:  The important thing with cheerleading is consistency. The most common mistake I see is starting incredibly strong and then getting too busy to maintain the ritual you’ve put in place. With the cheerleading strategy, you are creating a public and shared narrative for a temporary community. You are its caretaker. It only exists because of your attention and enthusiasm and, without those things, it dies. Be sure your initiative has a multi-person support infrastructure and be sure to begin and end it with intention. Abandoning an effort like this midway is confusing and implies that it’s not actually all that important. #### 2. Bright Spots *[Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard](https://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752)* by Chip and Dan Heath is on the short list of must-read books I give to new managers. It’s a quick education on [human behavior](https://leaddev.com/level-leadership-human-centered-design) and change management theory. The concept of “bright spots” is taken from this work. Bright spot theory encourages people to focus less on what isn't working or needs to be fixed, and more on what *is* working and how it can be cloned. Look for a place where the thing you want to create already exists; find out why it’s working; and expand that working model elsewhere in the organization. I notice this strategy to be particularly useful to reach for when you feel [you’ve tried to drive something forward and it just isn’t working](https://leaddev.com/personal-development/maximizing-your-impact-when-moving-leadership-role). When I feel frustrated with a change, I take that as a signal that I should stop, look to my bright spots, and see what there is to learn. This strategy was effective when I applied it to help an organization improve the discoverability of their data. We needed to change the mindset of employees from a mistrust and reluctance toward even trying to look for it, to consistently accessing and using high-quality data. In this scenario, the bright spots were the few teams who were effectively using data to make decisions. We sought out what was working in those environments and found something surprising: each of the disparate teams had a personal connection to exactly one data architect (let’s call her Anna) who worked on a different team. Anna was naturally helpful and had deep knowledge of the organization’s core data sets, having designed many of them herself. These teams were leveraging their friendship with Anna to ask for help when they couldn’t find their way rather than getting themselves lost in the data maze. “Who is friends with Anna?” and “How do we systematize the knowledge Anna has?” weren’t two questions that would have been at the top of the company’s list to ask in pursuit of improved data discoverability. But, they were critical questions that ultimately guided the team to build robust and personalizable wayfinding functionality into the data catalog, [bringing subject matter expert guidance directly into users’ workflows](https://leaddev.com/managing-managers/how-streamline-your-processes-engineering-manager). The active user count for the data catalog began to increase quarter over quarter. The most common missed opportunity I see with this strategy is not enrolling the people associated with bright spots into your vision. Learn what’s going well in their approach; acknowledge them for what they’ve helped to create; and then invite them to be evangelists and champions of the change you’re implementing. Ask them to look for opportunities to talk about what they know with others. It’s an easy way to force multiply your change efforts. #### 3. The Gannet A gannet is a seabird that can both fly high in the sky and dive deep into the ocean. This strategy, like its namesake, is about approaching a change that needs to occur from two separate dimensions: the top and the bottom. This looks like designing a broad communication and guidance plan for the masses and also designing a more specific communication and guidance plan for individual outreach. This strategy is best for changes that are absolutely required and must be implemented on a prescribed timeline. I consistently use this strategy when many teams must complete a migration task on the systems that they own. For example, I previously applied this strategy when supporting an organization’s move from one data warehouse to another; this included the migration of hundreds of data scripts, a large percentage of which didn’t have any clear owners. Here, our aim was to encourage individuals to take ownership of translating scripts and validating resulting dataset changes. The core change needed was inaction to action. To create broad awareness of the importance of the initiative, [we designed guiding communications](https://leaddev.com/communication-relationships/five-essential-tips-great-internal-communication) with self-service migration runbooks that went to the full technology group. Unfortunately, the number of people who took action from that sort of broad communication was, and often is, incredibly low. To counterbalance, we additionally organized individualized outreach for each team, sending more personal notes pointing people to those broad comms, ensuring that they’d read and understood them, and offering extra support and space for questions if needed. The broad comms set the container, letting people know that the initiative was important for the whole organization, while the personal notes encouraged the needed action to occur. A mistake that can be made here is duplicating (copying and pasting) the exact message used in high-level comms for low-level – and vice versa. This results in many sources of truth that can quickly become outdated as time goes on. To help here, create a centralized version of the [“how to” material you’ll broadcast, in this case, a migration runbook](https://leaddev.com/communication-relationships/writing-matters-how-improve-your-written-communication-skills). When you’re then reaching out to members of the company on both a macro and micro scale, link to this consolidated source. This will help streamline communication and will simplify the process of updating, altering, and correcting the original content as things change over the course of your project. #### Start now! If you’ve not been actively strategizing and practicing change management, the odds are you aren’t very good at it yet. You probably won’t be for some time. So start now! Try some of these strategies on and see if they work for you. Make some mistakes and then learn from them. Most importantly, have some fun while you do it. Humans are wonderful and weird, so playing in the space of human behavior change can be wonderful and weird, too., 3 Strategies for Driving Organizational Change, Meg Adams, 01haygv9ph8hcdt00dwqwk4972.