Applied Change Ltd

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05/06/2026

Overrated vs Underrated: The leadership habits that actually move adoption.

03/06/2026

In the 1950s, American cake-mix makers had a problem.

The mix was too easy. Pour, water, oven. Done.

It wasn't selling.

Somebody worked out the issue. The women baking it felt like frauds when their friends came round. There was no effort. No ownership. No pride.

So the manufacturers took the powdered egg out. Now you had to crack a real one. That one small act of effort changed everything. Sales lifted. The cake felt earned.

The behavioural science people call it the IKEA Effect. You value what you build, even if all you did was follow the instructions.

Most CEOs miss this when they roll out strategy.

The plan is finished before the team sees it. Polished deck. Three off-site days. Board approval. Then the leadership team gets handed the result and asked to deliver it.

They nod. They agree. Nothing sticks.

Not because the strategy is wrong. Because nobody helped build it.

Adoption isn't a communication problem. It's an involvement problem. People defend what they helped shape. They walk away from what was handed to them.

The fix isn't another town hall. It isn't a better slide. It's letting your senior team crack the egg. Let them work on the trade-offs. Let them name what they'd cut. Let them argue for the version they'd defend on a hard Tuesday.

The strategy you build alone is the strategy you deliver alone.

Where in your business have you handed people a finished plan and wondered why nobody is carrying it?

01/06/2026

When your senior team stops pushing back in meetings, it's tempting to read it as a good sign. Everyone's on board. Finally, alignment.

It isn't.

When senior people go quiet, you don't have alignment. You have compliance. And compliance doesn't execute. People who are merely complying do the minimum, defend nothing, and revert to the old way the moment the pressure lifts.

The quiet is the warning, not the win.

In my experience the silence usually traces back to three causes.

The first is fear of speaking up. Somewhere along the way, challenge was punished. Maybe not by you, maybe by your predecessor, but the room learned that disagreement carries a cost. That's a learned behaviour, and it's on the leader to make it safe to unlearn.

The second is that they don't understand the strategy well enough to challenge it. You can't pressure-test what you can't fully see. Silence here isn't agreement. It's confusion wearing a polite face.

The third is that they've checked out. They've decided it's easier to wait and be told than to invest and be ignored. This is the most expensive of the three, because the talent is still in the room but the commitment has already left.

Notice none of these are solved by asking "are we all aligned?" That question only ever gets you more nodding.

Don't ask "are we aligned?" Ask "what concerns you about this?"

Then sit in the silence until someone fills it. The discomfort is the work. What surfaces in that pause is the real state of your team.

When was the last time someone on your senior team told you an approach wouldn't work, and was right?

Most first calls are too polite to be useful."Tell me about the business.""What are your goals?""How can I help?"All rea...
31/05/2026

Most first calls are too polite to be useful.

"Tell me about the business."
"What are your goals?"
"How can I help?"

All reasonable. All forgettable. None of them go anywhere near the thing that actually decides whether a year goes well or badly.

The friction.

A couple of hundred of these calls in, I've more or less stopped asking a CEO what they want to achieve. I ask what they'd be willing to give up to get it.

That's a very different conversation.

The first question makes them list. The second makes them choose. And the gap between what a leadership team says it's prioritising and what it would genuinely stake its name on is usually where the whole year quietly goes missing.

Three questions in the carousel. Ten minutes, if you're honest with yourself while you answer them.
They won't tell you what to do. They'll show you what you've been avoiding.

So before your next senior team meeting, one to sit with:

How many priorities is your team really carrying, and how many of them could anyone in the room defend out loud?

30/05/2026

Jack Dorsey just cut 4,000 people and said AI will replace middle management.

He's half right.

A large part of middle management has become information routing. Take the update from one layer, repackage it, pass it down. Take the question from below, repackage it, pass it up. AI does that quickly and tirelessly. That part of the role is genuinely exposed.

But treating this as a universal playbook is where the thinking breaks.

Because organisations are not org charts. They are people. And a restructure of this scale doesn't only affect the people who leave. It lands hardest on the people who stay.

The ones who remain are watching. They're quietly asking what it means for them, whether their job is next, whether loyalty counts for anything now. Survivor syndrome is real. Productivity drops, trust erodes, and the people you most wanted to keep start updating their CVs. The headcount line on the spreadsheet improved. The capability of the organisation quietly fell.

This is the part the announcements never mention. The cost of a cut isn't just the people who go. It's the belief of the people who stay.

So before you treat someone else's restructure as a template, ask the harder question.

Don't ask "what can AI replace?" Ask "what happens to the people we keep when we do?"

The technology decision is the easy half. The human consequence is the half that decides whether the change actually works.

If your organisation made a cut this scale tomorrow, what would the people who stayed believe about you afterwards?

28/05/2026

A conversation with Paul Russell on curiosity, courage and the questions we stop asking.

Most boardrooms reward the person with the answer. Rarely the person with the better question.

This conversation makes the case for the opposite. That the real work isn't solving the problem in front of you, it's being curious enough to ask whether it's even the right problem.

We talked about why senior leaders learn to perform rather than be honest. Why we cling to red, amber, green when the truth is messier than any traffic light. And why change is easy to chase but growth is the part we quietly skip.

It's about getting curious again, the thing most of us had as children and lost somewhere along the way.

Worth a watch if you've ever left a meeting wondering what was actually agreed.

What's the question you've been avoiding?

🔗 Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rg9K5cXuBg

26/05/2026

Most leaders are working hard on the wrong problem.

Not because they're careless. Because the problem they can see is rarely the one actually causing the pain.

Years ago I had a problem with my hip. The physio spent the session working halfway up my back. I asked him why. He showed me a model of how the whole body connects, and said the source of the pain wasn't where I was feeling it. The moment I understood that, I relaxed. He was treating the cause. I'd been guarding the symptom.

Business behaves the same way.

The missed deadline isn't a deadline problem. It's a decision-rights problem three steps upstream. The disengaged team isn't a motivation problem. It's an ownership problem nobody named. The stalled strategy isn't a strategy problem. It's friction in the system that no slide deck will fix.

Leaders treat what they can see, because what they can see is what hurts. So they add a process, run another offsite, rewrite the plan. The symptom quietens for a fortnight. Then it returns, because the source was never touched.

The discipline most leaders skip is the one that matters most. Before you fix anything, find where the problem actually lives.

Don't treat the symptom. Trace it back.

Ask a different question. Not "how do we fix this?" but "what is this a symptom of?" Then keep asking until the answer stops moving. That's the root. Everything before it was guesswork.

Think about the problem currently eating most of your leadership time. Be honest. Are you treating the source, or the place it happens to hurt?

*****on

22/05/2026

45% of CEOs fear losing their jobs.

I sit with CEOs every week and that statistic doesn't surprise me. The boardroom feels more like a Premier League dugout than it used to. Patience is shorter. The runway is shorter. The story can turn in a quarter.

What does surprise me is the place the fear comes from.

Most CEOs I sit with carry a quiet belief that it's all on them. That if the strategy lands, it's because they made it land. That if it doesn't, it's because they personally failed. That belief feels like ownership. It looks like accountability. But underneath, it isolates them.

And isolated CEOs make worse decisions. They hold things too close. They stop asking. The senior team senses it and goes quiet. Compliance, not alignment.

Look at the managers in football who lasted across generations. Ferguson is the obvious one. The thing that protected them wasn't their tactics. It was their ability to get the best out of the players in front of them. Different generations. Different talents. Same posture. Their job was to draw out the team, not to be the team.

That's the reframe.

If you're a CEO who fears the conversation with the board, the harder question to sit with isn't 'am I doing enough?' It's 'am I making this about me, or about the team I'm meant to be drawing out?'

The first version is exhausting. The second version is leadership.

Where have you been quietly carrying it alone this month?

21/05/2026

90% of strategy frameworks fail in ex*****on.
OKRs.
EOS.
Scaling Up.
The Rockefeller Habits.
You can pick any of them.

Most leadership teams I sit with assume the framework was the problem. So they swap it. New deck, new vocabulary, new dashboard. Eighteen months later, the same conversation, with a different acronym.

The framework isn't the problem.

In twenty-five years of doing this work, I've watched teams adopt three or four frameworks in a single decade. Each one started with energy. Each one quietly died. And what I've learned is that one framework is very much like another. They are guides. They are scaffolding. They are not the thing.

The thing is what happens day to day. Week to week. Meeting to meeting.

The discipline is to stay with one framework long enough to understand what's actually working and what isn't. Then fix the part that isn't working. Not replace the whole thing.

Think of it as improvement, not replacement.

And when you look honestly at what isn't working, it's almost always behavioural. People aren't using the framework the way it was designed. Meetings drift. Ownership blurs. The cadence slips. The framework didn't fail. The human system around it did.

Don't ask 'is this the right framework?' Ask 'what behaviour have we let slip that the framework was supposed to hold?'

That's the conversation that changes ex*****on.

How many frameworks has your organisation adopted in the last five years? Honestly.

18/05/2026

I sit with senior leadership teams every week who are exhausted by their own calendar. The all hands. The off-site. The QBR. The retreat.

And when I ask what's actually moving the needle, the room goes quiet.

Here's what I've noticed after twenty-five years of watching this play out. Most leadership rituals are overrated. Not because the format is wrong. Because the energy is concentrated in the wrong moment.

The all hands is overrated. Not because you shouldn't gather the company. Because most are theatre. A slide deck. A pep talk. Then everyone goes back to their inbox and nothing changes on Tuesday.

The company retreat is overrated. Not because time together doesn't matter. Because the work happens in the eleven months in between, not in the three days on the beach.

The quarterly business review is overrated. Same reason. The discipline is what happens between the QBRs, not inside them.

And AI-generated strategy is the most overrated of all. Strategy isn't a document. It's engagement. The picture in people's heads. The conversation in the corridor. No model writes that for you.

The underrated ones are quieter. Skip-level conversations. Fractional executives bringing capability you don't need full-time. The unglamorous one-to-ones where real disagreement surfaces.

The work is reallocating energy. Less ceremony at the moments everyone watches. More discipline in the weeks no one's watching.

What's the ritual in your business that takes the most preparation and changes the least behaviour?

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