HR consultant Lucy Adams has led more change management programs than she can count. In her previous role as HR director at the BBC, she watched project after project mobilize workstreams, deploy change champions and produce three-letter acronyms and then produce almost nothing.
“I honestly can’t point to one change that resulted,” she said at HR Tech Europe, where she joined Hester Van Oene, director of HR at advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, to dissect what keeps going wrong.
The core problem, Adams said, is that most change programs are still built around approaches that run counter to basic human psychology. Here are three places Adams and Van Oene say HR should stop wasting effort.
Stop over-investing in resistors
Adams’ most pointed admission involved what she called her “nemesis” at the BBC, a colleague who resisted everything. Her instinct was to work harder on that relationship, pulling the leader into every consultation group and diluting proposals to win her over.
Meanwhile, an enthusiastic early adopter in another division sat waiting. She’d put the enthusiastic adopter on hold while managing the resister, Adams recalled thinking.
Van Oene said she made the same mistake early in her career, trying to confront the biggest resistors head-on. “I learned the painful way,” she said. Now her approach is different. “I just go where the energy is.”
The practical payoff, both said, is that early adopters help shape and refine a new approach, and their visible engagement creates pressure on skeptics without HR having to manufacture it. When Wieden+Kennedy introduced growth chats in one department, word spread organically to others. Leaders who had initially shown no interest started asking why they were being left out.
Adams described the counterintuitive tactic of telling resistors directly that a new initiative is not for them. “They hate it,” she said, because they’re used to being like the “problem children that get all the attention.”
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Stop building mandatory training programs
The logic behind large-scale training rollouts is understandable. A change is coming and people need to understand it, so organizations train them. The problem, Adams said, is that people forget 80% of what they learn in a training program, and the ask to block time and retain information runs against how managers actually function under workload.
“People don’t want to get training, and then three months down the line, they have an issue,” she said. “They want it in the moment.”
Van Oene applied the same logic at Wieden+Kennedy when leaders needed to update job descriptions, a task everyone acknowledges is important and almost no one wants to do. Rather than training sessions, her team created a prompting guide for Gemini, walking leaders through how to use the tool to generate a first draft. “It made lots of leaders give AI a try,” she said. “They have a jumping off point to start from because it’s easier to edit than to start from scratch.”
Stop calling top-down sessions change management
When people feel a change is being imposed on them, resistance typically follows automatically. Adams recalled a leadership session she ran for international bureau heads at the BBC. The room was visibly hostile. At the coffee break, she asked one of the instigators what was happening.
“We have to be here,” he told her.
The psychological dynamic is well-documented, she said. Anything that feels forced produces a reflexive push back, regardless of the content. The fix does not require abandoning enterprise-wide priorities but should instead build in choice, even limited choice, within those priorities.
Wieden+Kennedy co-designed its growth chat model with department heads, offering template choices and letting leaders present the program to their own teams. “Because they had influence in what it looked like, they were excited about it,” Van Oene said.
Change programs that ignore how people actually respond to pressure, time demands and loss of agency will continue to produce the results HR has always gotten. Adams closed with a note on what she sees as HR’s most durable advantage. “In a world where AI feels like it’s taking over,” she said, “that’s the only thing that’s left. And that’s us, and that’s you, and that’s wonderful.”
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