Why Your Organisation Can’t Move

The Hidden Cost of Change Theatre

By Kenneth Pennington, Chief Reality Officer, It’s Just a Fish

There’s a pattern most HR and operations leaders will recognise immediately.

Someone proposes a straightforward change such as moving a manager between teams, adjusting a non-functional process, or modifying a role that needs attention.

Six weeks later, the request remains “in progress” whilst a steering committee builds change management plans and governance structures designed for work ten times its size. The original request becomes buried under process architecture that bears no relationship to the actual risk or complexity of what was proposed.

The employee who needed that move has already updated their LinkedIn profile and begun looking elsewhere. This isn’t organisational rigour. This is performance art masquerading as change management.

The Maths That Should Keep You Up at Night

Only about 20% of organisational change actually constitutes transformation in the genuine sense. These are fundamental shifts to business models, operating structures, or strategic direction that genuinely require heavy governance and executive oversight.

The remaining 80% consists of transactional and transitional work that could be moving forward right now. Instead, it remains paralysed because organisations have wrapped it in the same process architecture used for everything else.

We treat routine manager swaps with the same governance we would apply to complete business model overhauls, then wonder why nothing moves at speed.

The 3T Model: A Different Way to Look at Change

After 25 years of watching organisations struggle with change initiatives, I’ve observed that the ones who execute well don’t necessarily have better change management processes than those who struggle.

What they have is better categorisation.

They ask one fundamental question before mobilising resources or building governance structures. What kind of change is this, really?

Transaction represents low-risk, low-impact changes that sit squarely with manager responsibility. These are the everyday adjustments that keep organisations functioning. Team moves. Role tweaks. Process corrections. They don’t require committee oversight or transformation governance. They need a conversation between competent adults followed by execution.

Transition captures low-risk but medium-impact changes that require coordination across boundaries. These shifts affect how the organisation works rather than what it does. How teams interact. How goals connect. How information flows. They need communication and alignment, but applying transformation-level governance to transitional work is like using a sledgehammer to hang a picture.

Transformation describes high-risk, high-impact changes that demand executive responsibility and comprehensive governance. This is the genuine article. New business models. Complete operational overhauls. Strategic pivots. If you’re genuinely in transformation territory, something is probably already burning and you know it.

The critical skill is distinguishing between these three categories, and most organisations have lost this ability entirely.

What Employment Law Has to Say About This

Transaction, transition, and transformation aren’t merely convenient HR labels. They represent legal categories with real consequences. Moving someone without proper consultation creates potential grievance grounds.

Reorganising teams without following TUPE obligations generates tribunal claims. Launching transformation without appropriate Board sign-off constitutes governance failure.

The 3T Model provides managers with permission to act decisively on appropriate changes. Employment law defines the boundaries within which that permission operates.

Both frameworks are necessary and neither negates the other.

What This Actually Solves

The 80/20 Problem emerges when organisations hold back 80% of their potential change capacity whilst perfecting elaborate plans for changes that don’t require them. Stopping this pattern means accepting that not everything needs transformation governance.

The Speed Problem manifests when low-risk changes wait in queue behind high-impact work, creating artificial bottlenecks that have nothing to do with actual risk or complexity. Solving this means letting appropriate changes move at their natural pace whilst focusing resources on work that genuinely needs intensive support.

The Tolerance Problem reflects the reality that changes have windows. Miss the window and you’re not merely late. You’re solving yesterday’s problem with yesterday’s solution whilst today’s problem grows larger. Speed to execution matters, but only when matched to appropriate governance.

The It’s Just a Fish Approach

Some organisational changes are fish. They smell if you leave them sitting around, but they’re not going to fundamentally alter your business model. Cook them and get on with your day.

Others represent genuine transformation that requires time, attention, and significant resource investment. The failure mode isn’t treating transformation casually.

The failure mode is treating routine changes as if they were transformational.

Want the Full Framework?

The complete 3T Change Management whitepaper includes detailed categorisation criteria and decision matrices, the Line Manager Group coordination model for transitional work, and skills assessment frameworks focused on capability rather than training hours.

It also covers employment law checkpoints for each category, SteerCo charter templates for transformation governance, and implementation tools with workshop guides. The framework is available on request.

How It’s Just a Fish Can Help

If your organisation remains stuck in change theatre, we can help you break the pattern. Over-engineering simple changes whilst under-preparing complex ones exhausts people with constant “transformation” that never transforms anything.

Our fractional CHRO support provides strategic HR leadership without the full-time overhead. Interim leadership services deliver hands-on execution when you need someone to actually move things rather than simply manage the process.

Change diagnostics determine what’s genuinely stuck and why, cutting through the noise to identify the actual barriers. Executive coaching supports leaders who are navigating genuine transformation and need someone who understands the difference between theatre and progress.