Every big organizational initiative starts with good intentions.
A cross-functional team. A strategy session. A roadmap. Excitement at the top.
And somewhere in the process, the people most affected by the change — the ones who will actually live inside it every day — never get asked a single question.
We call these secret projects. Kept close to protect competitive advantage, or to avoid premature speculation, or simply because that is how large decisions have always been made. Senior leaders and high-potential employees in a room, designing the future for people they are not in the room with.
The Gap Between Designing and Living.
The people in that room are often not doing the work that will be most disrupted. They are directing it, overseeing it, measuring it — but not doing it. And there is a fundamental gap between designing change for a process you understand conceptually and designing change for a day someone actually lives.
I think about the front-line employee. The one whose workflow shifts because a new system launches. The one who now has to navigate a tool that was built for efficiency metrics, not for the reality of their shift. Nobody asked them whether the change would make their work easier, faster, or more meaningful. Somebody ran the data. The data said it would.
"Data is not the same as people changing with a system."
The assumption embedded in most change initiatives is that rollout equals adoption. That if we communicate clearly and train adequately, people will adapt. What this misses is that adaptation requires buy-in and buy-in requires involvement. You cannot ask people to believe in a future they had no hand in imagining.
What Working Backwards Actually Looks Like.
Not revealing the project. Not bypassing strategy. But finding someone you trust at the front line — someone whose judgment you respect and whose day you want to understand — and asking: if something changed about this part of your work, what would make it better? What would make it harder? What do you know about this process that no one above you seems to understand?
You would be surprised what comes back. And more importantly, you would build the kind of insight that prevents the expensive, demoralizing experience of a rollout that fails not because the idea was wrong, but because nobody asked the right people.
"The executives in the planning room are not failing from bad intent.
They are failing from distance."
The solution is not to democratize every decision. It is to close the gap between where decisions get made and where decisions get lived.
Where Most Change Initiatives Quietly Die.
Big projects are also often given resources, people, and dollars — with little to no recognition for the teams doing the actual work behind the scenes. And when those projects impact areas of the business that were never consulted, the friction is not a surprise. It was designed in from the start.
The organizations that execute change well are not smarter than the ones that struggle. They are closer to the work.
That gap between the planning room and the front line is where most change initiatives quietly die.
Closing it does not require a structural overhaul. It requires the intentional decision to ask before deciding — and to actually listen to the answer.
This is human work.
Reflection
- In your last major change initiative, who was in the room? Who was not?
- If you worked backwards from the front line, what would you have learned earlier — and what might have gone differently?
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