Leading Successful Change
8 Keys to Making Change Work
By Gregory P. Shea & Cassie A. Solomon
Category: Personal Development | Reading Duration: 20 min | Rating: 4.2/5 (12 ratings)
About the Book
Leading Successful Change (2013) argues that sustainable change comes from designing environments that make the right behaviors the easy, default choice. It introduces the Work Systems Model and eight levers – organization, workplace design, task, people, rewards, measurement, information distribution, and decision allocation – and shows how combining these levers makes new ways of working stick. It offers pragmatic steps to diagnose current systems, map desired behaviors, and orchestrate coordinated interventions.
Who Should Read This?
- Results-driven managers leading organizational transformations
- Cross-functional team leaders tackling entrenched habits
- Curious people seeking actionable change frameworks
What’s in it for me? Design behavior-driven change using eight proven levers.
Change has become the baseline, not the exception. New tools arrive before the old ones are fully absorbed, competitors rewrite playbooks overnight, and customers expect more speed, clarity, and care with every interaction. Yet inside most organizations, the real friction isn’t a lack of ideas; it’s the gap between a big announcement and what actually happens at someone’s desk, on a shop floor, or in a clinic tomorrow morning. That’s where grand intentions meet email threads, handoffs, and habits. You may have watched the pattern repeat: a burst of enthusiasm, a few pilot wins, then drift – because daily cues kept pointing people back to the way things were.In this Blink, you’ll learn to pinpoint the behaviors that matter, sketch clear scenes of a better workday, and align eight levers that shape everyday choices. You’ll get a practical preview of how those levers work together to remove mixed signals and make the right actions the easy ones – consistently, across roles and locations.Let’s begin with a straightforward premise: real change shows up as behavior.
Chapter 1: Real change happens when the work environment makes the right behaviors the easy choice
If you want people to act differently tomorrow, design the world they’ll step into when they arrive at work. Big announcements and road shows can spark attention, but day-to-day conditions decide whether new habits stick. Consider Halloran, a specialty chemical company that tried to tame a sprawling global supply chain by outsourcing logistics to an independent contractor. The plan promised regional warehouses, centralized purchasing largely in China, and a steady three-month pipeline managed by consultants. Eighteen months later, operations leaders saw rising friction, and by month 36 the program was shut down as competitors moved ahead.The breakdown wasn’t a bad idea; it was the absence of a clear behavioral target for plant and operations teams. Costs were charged to each plant’s profit-and-loss statement – local P&Ls – while the savings were credited to the corporate P&Ls, so the people paying the bill weren’t the ones getting the benefit. Local buyers were expected to abandon long-standing supplier relationships, and consultants were viewed as expensive outsiders. Without a precise picture of who needed to do what differently – and an environment that made those actions workable – the concept sat on slides while familiar routines carried the day.That misalignment points to a broader rule: people adapt to the setting they face each day. Humans adjust quickly to wherever they are, especially their social setting, so the fastest route to new conduct is to redesign that setting. Leadership modeling and speeches help, yet once the spotlight moves on, people test whether the surrounding conditions have changed. If the same cues and incentives remain, so do the old behaviors. Work behavior is overdetermined; multiple forces shape it, so change arrives when several of those forces shift together. Think of starting an exercise habit. Proximity, prompts, tracking, rewards, social support, and basic skills all matter; willpower alone is a poor bet. One-third of New Year’s resolutions are dropped by the end of January, and more than half by July.The practical takeaway is twofold. First, specify the exact behaviors that will signal progress, in language concrete enough to guide action rather than soothe with generalities about communication or collaboration. Second, design the system around those behaviors so it pulls people toward them in the flow of real work.With that clarity in hand, the next section lays out a framework for constructing scenes that help you pinpoint the behaviors you want and build the environment that will make them routine.
Chapter 2: Specific future scenes make strategy actionable today
If you want people to pull in the same direction, give them a vivid picture of what winning looks like in their day. That’s the idea behind building scenes that show how work will run once the change is real. A good scene moves beyond abstract slogans by describing who is doing what, with which information, using what tools, and how decisions actually get made. Göran Carstedt, then president of IKEA North America, once did this by telling a simple story about a family’s morning and then anchoring a strategy around making that routine easier with useful, affordable products in accessible locations. The point wasn’t theatrics; it was clarity about purpose, audience, and action.Scenes work because stories carry meaning better than lists. Research on operating narratives shows that the stories people hold shape what they notice and how they act, and traditions like idealized design emphasize picturing the end state first. To make that concrete, jump ahead far enough to escape today’s constraints. Executives typically think five to ten years out, managers two to four. Then assume the desired world already exists and describe it in the present tense, which makes details easier to specify and test.Start by stating intent in one sentence so the destination is unmistakable. Identify the roles that matter most, including frontline jobs, and script interactions among them. Write from the point of view of a real role holder to surface triggers, handoffs, and choices. Sketch the steps in order, and bring props to life with sample dashboards, reports, or agendas so people can see the supports that make the behavior workable. Repeat this for other pivotal roles until you have a portfolio of scenes that together define the trajectory of change. Keep them as living documents and refine them with feedback.The hard part is resisting the urge to jump straight to implementation. Interviews help by turning stakeholders into co-authors of the future and exposing decision points and gaps. Effective scenes usually run one to four pages, may blend real and fictional roles, and always assume the presence of structures, tools, protocols, training, rewards, measures, information, and decision allocation, focusing on how they’re used rather than how they’re built. Aim for the vital slice that, if right, implies the rest.With those scenes in hand, the next step is to translate them into system changes, by using the eight levers of change. Let’s look at the first four of those levers in the next section.
Chapter 3: Four practical levers turn clear scenes into everyday behavior
You now have vivid scenes of the future; the next move is to shape the daily cues that will make those scenes routine. Begin with the first four of eight levers of change, all aimed at the environment people experience throughout the day, not at one-off speeches or model behavior that fades when the spotlight moves. The point is straightforward: people read their surroundings and act accordingly, so redesign the surroundings to send the right signals, consistently and everywhere the work happens.The first lever is Organization. Structure is more than boxes on a chart; it’s the pattern of vertical reporting lines, horizontal connections, matrices, project teams, and even the cadence and membership of meetings. Whether a company organizes by geography, function, product line, market segment, or information flow, those choices announce expectations and shape who collaborates, how fast decisions move, and which voices are in the room. Adjusting roles, reporting paths, integration points, and meeting charters is a direct way to cue new behavior.The next lever is Workplace design. The layout of physical and virtual space, plus access to tools and technology, strongly predicts interaction. Proximity matters; sharing a coffee machine, copier, or a video room increases contact, while richer media beat text for building understanding. Researchers even point to human vision cues as social accelerators, which explains why face-to-face time changes how teams read each other. Location choices, collaboration platforms, and practical tools are not décor decisions; they’re behavior switches.After that, tackle Task. Checklists, standard work, and methods like process reengineering, lean, Six Sigma, and TQM convert preferred methods into habit. Clear workflows enable better data capture and analysis, and create obvious insertion points for digital monitoring and, increasingly, AI, so teams can manage and learn in real time. Making the process explicit is what turns “the way we should work” into “the way we do work.”The fourth lever is to align People. Selection, skills, learning, and orientation matter, yet repeated individual failures often signal a system problem rather than a talent deficit. Swapping players without redesigning the game yields the same results. Hire, develop, and support capable people, but place them in an improved system or they’ll mirror the old one.With these four levers in play, the remaining four complete the environment by aligning reinforcement, tracking what matters, enabling the right information to reach the right hands, and clarifying who decides and when. Let’s look at those next.
Chapter 4: Rewards, measurement, information, and decisions lock in new behavior
You’ve already shaped structure, space, processes, and skills to match the scenes you wrote; now the remaining four levers make those scenes hard to ignore. Rewards is the first checkpoint. It covers what gets encouraged or penalized, from pay to recognition, access to resources, and the everyday feeling of succeeding at work. Align it to the behaviors in your scenes and watch for side effects, because people quickly learn how to win inside any reward system. When money pushes individual heroics and status flows to teams, the signals collide and the behavior you want stalls.Measurement is the next lever and functions as a running broadcast of priorities. Metrics and scorecards guide attention and tie straight back to the Rewards lever. Choose measures that help people judge their performance inside the future you described, decide whether you need process metrics, outcome metrics, or both, and compare them to what you measure today so you can close gaps. When measures point in the same direction as rewards, people understand what good looks like.Information distribution sets the tempo. Decision quality rises when the right people get the right information at the right time, and digitization determines whether information is pushed to people or pulled by them. Define what feedback different roles need, how quickly they should see it, and how easy it is to retrieve from digital stores. The closer that performance information is to real time, the faster behavior aligns.Decision allocation is the final lever to complete the set. Specify who participates, when, and in what way, including where data sits and what role AI plays. Map who leads, who advises, and who is informed across key moments, and if they help, use formal reviews such as RACI – a Responsibility Assignment Matrix that spells out who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. These choices must fit with the levers of Organization, Workplace design, and Task or you’ll create mixed messages and delay.Now bring it together with the Work Systems Model. Picture the Diagnostic Scene or Behavior at the center and the eight levers around it. Remember, the scenes define what you want to see; the levers are the environmental cues that make that behavior routine. Use the model to design and diagnose. From design, start with the scenes and specify which levers must move, aiming to meaningfully shift at least four so the new reality is unmistakable. From diagnosis, scan for clashes where measures, rewards, information flows, or decision rights fight each other. Treat this as iterative work, tuning the levers and refreshing scenes until the cues point in the same direction and the desired behavior reliably appears.Now that you have the Work Systems Model, the final section will look at when to apply it.
Chapter 5: The Work Systems Model guides when to pursue and sustain change
You’ve learned how scenes define the behavior you want and how the eight levers shape the environment around that behavior; now the question is when to use the model and how to use it well. The core idea is discipline. Behavior at work reflects many forces acting at once, so the model asks you to describe the future in concrete scenes and then examine every lever for alignment. If the levers point in different directions, people read mixed signals and fall back to old habits. If you cannot move at least four levers in meaningful ways, pause and reconsider, because the environment won’t feel different enough for new behavior to take hold.That go or no-go test leads to a better conversation about resources and stakeholders. Mapping the lever shifts shows whose support matters most, from HR and IT to facilities and frontline operations, and clarifies the coalition you need to build. It also clarifies commitment. Human commitment is hard even with high stakes. Two years after bypass surgery, about 90 percent of patients haven’t changed their lifestyle, while a comprehensive program run by physician Dean Ornish reports 87 percent adherence and 96 percent reporting improvement in angina after one year. The lesson for organizations is straightforward: comprehensive, visible changes that quickly improve daily work accelerate commitment.Consider the turnaround of Viacom, a US media company spanning brands like MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, and Paramount. Facing debt, a struggling studio, and a steep stock drop, the new chief executive pulled the Organization lever by creating cross-brand task forces and network groups, backed by senior team meetings that brought brand presidents together. Rewards shifted through matrix reporting and bonuses that encouraged work across silos. Task and Decision Allocation changed as teams learned how to make joint calls on cobranded projects. Information Distribution ramped up through quarterly live sessions with the chief executive, weekly highlights across the company, and a video series that showcased work at all levels. Workplace Design tools such as the Viacom Brand Book and manager guides reinforced a shared identity, and a three-day global town hall engaged more than half the workforce and generated hundreds of millions of social impressions. Results followed, including ten straight quarters of operating income growth at the studio, renewal of more than 80 percent of distribution deals, and a 2019 plan to reunite with CBS under the same chief executive.The model connects strategy to daily reality: define the behavior, align the levers, and keep checking for consistency. When leaders change enough of the environment, new behavior becomes the sensible choice and change endures.
Final summary
The main takeaway of this Blink to Leading Successful Change by Gregory P. Shea and Cassie A. Solomon is that meaningful change happens when you define observable behaviors and redesign the everyday environment so those behaviors become the easy, default choice. Start by scripting concrete scenes of a better workday, then pull multiple levers – structure, space and tools, processes, skills, rewards, measures, information, and decision rights – in coordinated ways that point people in the same direction. If you can’t meaningfully shift at least four levers, don’t launch. Keep checking for alignment, remove mixed signals, and iterate as results appear. When leaders change enough of the system that people feel a new reality at work, commitment rises, performance improves, and progress sustains – giving you the confidence to tackle the next challenge with momentum.Okay, that’s it for this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next Blink.
About the Author
Gregory P. Shea, Ph.D. is an adjunct professor of management at Wharton and a senior fellow at Penn’s Leonard Davis Institute, known for advising senior leaders on complex, system-wide change. His other books include Your Job Survival Guide with Robert Gunther.
Cassie A. Solomon is an organizational development consultant, founder of The New Group Consulting and RACI Solutions, and an executive-education instructor with Wharton’s Aresty Institute. Her work focuses on cross-functional accountability and decision-making frameworks used by global teams.