Don't Set the Bone While It's Still Swollen

I recently worked with a leadership team that was tackling some tough challenges they had uncovered through hard work. Like many organizations, they struggled with inconsistent processes, unclear ownership, and a tendency to solve problems as they came up instead of making lasting improvements.

That's when talk about changing the culture began. In the past, they had tried similar plans, but none had really worked out. Because of this, employees who had been through it before felt a bit bruised and skeptical. Some doubters figured they could just wait until the changes passed before deciding whether to get on board.

The drive to "get it done" led leadership to push forward regardless of internal cultural challenges and external forces, including the risk to much-needed funding. I understood the instinct. The leaders were incentivized to deliver at all costs. I didn't share the conclusion.

Stability after a hard stretch isn't the same as preparedness for the next hard stretch. A bone that's stopped hurting hasn't necessarily finished healing. It just means the swelling went down. Ask that leg to bear weight too soon, and you don't get progress — you get a second injury layered on top of the first one, except now there's less trust that it'll heal right the next time.

What the timing actually costs

This wasn't a case for slowing down out of caution. It was a case for reading the organization accurately before recommending what it could realistically absorb. A few things pointed in the same direction:

• Change builds up over time; it doesn't reset with the seasons. Prosci's Best Practices in Change Management research shows that most organizations are already close to or past the point where people can handle any more change. If an organization just spent a year working on clarifying roles, updating contract procedures, and reorganizing how teams work together, it hasn't earned a fresh start. It's earned a break.
• Sponsorship had already been spent. Prosci's research is consistent on this point: active, visible executive sponsorship is the single biggest predictor of whether a change effort succeeds. If you don't have sponsorship, you are already at risk. The leaders in this room had just poured that same currency into stabilizing the section. Asking a sponsor to role-model and serve as something bigger immediately meant asking from an account that hadn't been refilled.
• Credibility doesn't automatically reset over time. Prosci's research on resistance to change points to the same pattern: the top driver of resistance isn't fear of the change itself, but a lack of trust in the reasons given for it — often shaped by past negative experience with change. Staff who have been through years of turnover and reorganization don't hear the words "culture change" without thinking about what happened before. If you start too soon, people won't judge the effort on its own; they'll compare it to the last few changes that didn't last.

I recommended pausing not giving up on culture work but planning it in stages. The organization needed time to let stability become something people could really trust before asking them to change again. This advice wasn't popular at the time, but good consultants don't focus on being liked. Even a little progress can be tempting, and telling people to wait rarely feels like a real strategy, especially when they've been waiting a long time for things to settle down.

Timing isn't just a minor detail in change management, it's what holds everything up. You can have the right ideas, the right plan, and the best intentions, but if you act while things are still unsettled, you risk making things worse. The hardest part of my work wasn't figuring out what the organization needed. It was convincing good people that the right time to move forward wasn't while they were still healing.