Change Is changing: How to lead radical shifts without losing your team

Dr. Stephan Meyer, also known as “Dr. Change,” has spent over 30 years guiding companies through complex transformation projects. From co-founding a private equity firm to modernising infrastructure for German Railways and contributing to the Berlin Airport launch, his work spans sectors and geographies. He holds a doctorate from the University of Gloucestershire, where his research focused on improving the effectiveness of change management.

His mission? Helping visionary leaders turn their ideas into reality faster and with more impact. Through services like Business Wargaming, the Vision to Reality Workshop, and organisational audits, Stephan equips teams to challenge assumptions, define their direction, and take decisive action.

As rapid shifts in technology and AI redefine how businesses operate, Stephan’s experience is more relevant than ever. This article is part of the Business Insights Series, where we speak with decision-makers about what’s working, what’s changing, and what needs rethinking.

In this conversation, we explored how leaders can approach transformation with a level of ambition that reaches beyond surface adjustments, toward shifts that fundamentally reorient the organisation. We looked at how long-term transformations exhaust teams, and how timeboxing, focus, and narrative can preserve momentum. We explored why leaders must become guides, and why real change depends as much on emotional closure as operational success.

The result? A practical, thought-provoking roadmap for anyone wondering how to lead in a time when even change itself is changing.

Leading in a time when change itself is shifting

Stephan Meyer’s work has reached millions of people, even if they never realised it. His work spans both the physical systems we rely on and the unseen processes that shape how services function day to day.

He began his career at Accenture, where psychologists were routinely placed in the change management division. That starting point set him on a decades-long exploration of how organisations evolve, or stall out, and what leaders can do to manage that.

“I’ve been doing change management for 30 years now, 3-0, and throughout any industry you could probably think of.”

This quote adds weight to the claim. Stephan’s career covers decades of applied change work across industries, rooted in hands-on experience with real-world challenges. It’s the accumulation of patterns, lessons, and adaptability honed through navigating the complex terrain of transformation. From banking to infrastructure, Stephan’s insights are drawn from complex environments where transformation takes shape through practical challenges, evolving decisions, and ongoing friction. His long view gives him something rare in this space: pattern recognition. The ability to spot where legacy systems clog progress, and where fresh thinking can create breakthroughs.

But despite all that experience, Stephan actively questions the usefulness of older models and speaks openly about where traditional frameworks fall short. The context in which organisations operate today, especially in 2025, demands something far more flexible, far more human-aware.

As he put it, “The change industry itself is currently in the phase of paradigm shift. Everyone is confused. Everyone is trying out new ways of doing things.”

That observation sits at the heart of what many experts are now recognising. The rules of change management that once guided entire industries are fraying at the edges. Caroline Kealey, a veteran change facilitator, argues that old “paint-by-numbers” models simply don’t work anymore, calling them “the equivalent of showing up to an AI-enabled nuclear assault equipped with a fly swatter”.

Industry research echoes this shift, noting that modern change management is now “moving toward a more human-centred approach”, one that focuses less on rigid systems and more on how people actually experience and adapt to change.

In response, Stephan has developed a non-linear, adaptive framework, less of a step-by-step manual and more of a responsive toolkit. Change rarely offers perfection, but it benefits from responsiveness, intention, and precision, especially in uncertain terrain.

Why radical change is often easier than incremental tweaks

When we think of change within organisations, the dominant image is often one of prolonged, carefully managed evolution, consultants drawing Gantt charts, departments moving through phase gates, timelines stretching into years. This slow, methodical model has become the default. Yet Stephan Meyer argues that in many cases, it’s not the best approach. In fact, it can do more harm than good.

“Radical change is easier than incremental change. Why? Because you don’t have to keep in your mind all these exceptions. This department already works with a new process, but those departments still work with the old process. That is confusing.”

The logic is simple, but often overlooked: partial transformation fragments an organisation. When half the business is working with new tools, and the other half is still operating under legacy systems, inefficiency increases and frustration spreads. Coordination becomes harder, errors multiply, and leadership spends more time patching over cracks than moving forward.

To explain what effective radical change looks like, Stephan uses Sweden’s 1967 overnight transition to driving on the right side of the road. It was not done in phases, nor trialled regionally. It was swift, total, and above all, clear.

“One Sunday morning, 5 a.m., everyone, new procedure. That’s how it’s much more promising.”

Maybe it sounds dramatic, but Sweden’s famous “H-Day” changeover is a real example of how a single decisive switch can work. With years of preparation behind them, Swedes saw it “all came together in 10 minutes of organized chaos” at 5:00 a.m. on 3 September 1967.

The country was prepared, and in that brief window it became safer to drive across borders; over time accident rates actually dropped, the change was embraced, and life went on.

The principle holds across industries: sometimes simplicity and speed serve better than caution and consensus. When the message is simple and everyone moves together, teams often feel more secure, even amid uncertainty. What really rattles people are ambiguity, indecision, and prolonged disruption, conditions that blur priorities and wear down motivation.

Stephan recommends limiting major change efforts to no more than 18 months. Beyond that, motivation erodes. Stakeholders lose confidence. Prolonged change efforts often lead to more than fatigue, they drain engagement, leaving teams disconnected from purpose and progress. And disengaged teams don’t adapt, they resist. So if you’re planning a transformation, ask yourself: are you trying to ease people in, or are you unintentionally stretching the pain? A shorter, sharper effort, done with focus, might achieve more than a drawn-out attempt to please everyone at once.

Change is hard because people are tired

One of Stephan’s main insights brings attention to the emotional toll of change, an aspect often overlooked when the emphasis stays solely on structure or strategy. Too often, leaders approach transformation as a purely technical exercise: a matter of timelines, milestones, and deliverables. But this perspective overlooks the human cost. People experience change on more than one level, it shapes their workload, expectations, routines, and sense of stability.

“If the change goes on for too long, people are exhausted. They get burned out. They leave the company. People cannot stand endless change.”

The warning here is clear. Transformation without boundaries drains people. It introduces uncertainty into daily routines, stretches decision-making across too many months, and keeps teams in a state of suspended understanding. Prolonged instability can wear people down, eroding energy and gradually diminishing trust.

Stephan suggests timeboxing change. This means defining a clear start and stop. The middle may shift, but the structure helps anchor people. It allows for moments of intensity and moments of rest. This structure serves as a psychological safeguard that helps teams manage the emotional strain of turbulence. A sense of finality can restore energy because people know there will be a return to rhythm.

“Change should not be endless. It should have an end.”

In our work with clients at Serenichron, we’ve seen this principle play out again and again. Teams can tolerate high stress if they believe there’s a finish line. But when the process becomes the norm, they disengage. Progress can lose its meaning over time, becoming repetitive and directionless, more like treading water than moving forward.

One useful tactic is to plan for the cooldown phase from the start. Leaders often over-plan the rollout of change but forget to design the recovery. Ask yourself: after the transformation, how will your team know it’s done? What rituals, meetings, or communications will signal, “This is the new normal”? Answering these questions can give people something essential, closure.

Leadership requires storytelling, not just structure

In the midst of change, processes are important, but stories are what people remember. Stephan emphasises that the most effective leaders combine structural thinking with storytelling. They are narrative architects who help people connect to change in a meaningful way.

“You must have a vision. You must know exactly in what way the company is going to be different after the change. And an important skill is… storytelling. You have to tell stories why it is worth the change and in what way the future will be much better than the present.”

Storytelling acts as a leadership skill that moves beyond communication, shaping how people make sense of change and their place in it. It offers people a reason to care, a role to play, and a picture of where they’re headed. When teams understand why the change matters, not just what is changing, they’re far more likely to commit emotionally. Otherwise, the transformation can feel like a cold sequence of instructions detached from meaning.

The most powerful stories connect to lived experience, rooted in consequences, everyday frustrations, and future hopes. And crucially, they cast the employees, not the leader, as the protagonists.

“I’m not the hero. I’m the guide helping the hero through their metamorphosis.”

That line from Stephan might sound theatrical, but it’s grounded in deep organisational truth. Leaders who position themselves as heroes tend to overshadow their teams. But leaders who act as guides empower people to step up, navigate the tension of change, and feel ownership of the outcome.

At Serenichron, we’ve seen this repeatedly. Clients usually come to us looking for someone who listens, simplifies the chaos, and helps them reframe their story in a way that makes sense to their team and customers alike. Clients often look for support that goes beyond tools, something that helps give their change a voice, a shape, and a future people can rally behind.

What business gets right that governments often miss

Toward the end of our conversation, Stephan raised an interesting question, what would happen if governments were held to the same standards as businesses? He has spent much of his career thinking about systems, outcomes, and public value, not just within corporations, but across society.

“In the world of business, there is a professional way of looking at quality. All of this does not exist at all in the world of politics. If a government doesn’t have quality, and a government doesn’t do any, isn’t of any use to the population, it’s redundant.”

Stephan’s critique taps into a larger issue: the difficulty of measuring performance in systems where accountability is diffuse and feedback loops are broken. In many governments, change is reactive, not designed. Departments lack shared KPIs. Incentives often reward stability rather than improvement. In contrast, businesses that ignore quality signals, customer complaints, churn, declining market share, face real consequences.

But this isn’t a blanket criticism of public institutions. Stephan’s point has relevance for business leaders, too. Any organisation, public or private, risks decay when it stops listening. When feedback is avoided or ignored, stagnation creeps in.

That’s why Stephan proposes borrowing frameworks from business to rethink how we structure public systems. One of his ideas is a freemium/premium model for government services, where levels of access and support could be transparently tied to tax contributions. It’s provocative, yes, but more importantly, it challenges us to think creatively about value exchange and the role of transparency in building trust.

Even if his suggestions aren’t directly actionable, they nudge us to ask better questions: How do we define usefulness? What systems in our organisations aren’t being held to account? And what happens when improvement is nobody’s job?

Final thoughts: don’t confuse activity with progress

The most useful insight from our conversation? When executed with intent and structure, radical change becomes a strategy that helps align teams, simplify complexity, and maintain coherence during disruption.

Repeated micro-pivots with unclear direction often exhaust teams more than transformation itself. When people are pulled in slightly new directions every few months without seeing tangible outcomes, it wears down trust and energy. It creates a sense of spinning wheels, not forward motion.

This is where strategic boldness matters. Leaders who take the time to clarify what will change, why it matters, and when it will be done, create psychological safety, even during disruption. Change becomes purposeful rather than perpetual.

Insight functions as a communication tool that supports alignment, helping teams stay coordinated during change. Storytelling, structure, and sensible timelines act as levers for performance, tools that shape how effectively teams adapt and deliver results.

If you’re leading through uncertainty, ask yourself this: Are your team’s struggles a result of too much change, or too little change happening in too many disjointed directions? Sometimes effective leadership means choosing a different pace or direction, one that brings vision and forward motion when the road ahead feels unclear.