We’ve Been Solving the Wrong Problem

Why every change programme that focuses on process and ignores identity is already halfway to failing.

Here is a question I’ve been asking for years, in various forms, to various audiences:

Think of a significant change you’ve been through - professional, personal, organisational. What was the hardest part?

The answers are seldom about the practical stuff. They’re rarely about the new system, the new structure, the new reporting line, the new process. Those things are hard, yes. But they’re learnable. They’re finite. You can train for them, plan for them, resource for them.

The hardest part is almost always something else. Something quieter and more stubborn.

I didn’t know who I was in the new setup.

I felt like I’d lost my footing.

I couldn’t work out where I stood.

I kept waiting to feel like myself again.

Nobody says this out loud in a change readiness survey. But say it in a room of people who’ve been through something genuinely disruptive, and watch what happens. Heads nod. Eyes change. Something releases. Because finally someone named the actual thing.

The change management industry, and it is an industry, a substantial one, is built predominantly on process thinking. Which makes sense. Process thinking is reassuring. It’s plannable. It produces Gantt charts and RAG statuses and milestone reports that give the people commissioning change programmes something to hold onto.

The dominant frameworks are good. I use them. They help. But they were built to answer a particular question: how do we move people from state A to state B efficiently and with minimum disruption?

That’s a useful question. It’s just not the most important question.

The most important question is: who does someone have to become in order for this change to actually work?

Those are different questions. They require different answers. And most change programmes are spending almost all of their energy on the first question and almost none on the second.

Let me make this concrete.

Imagine an organisation going through a significant digital transformation. New platforms. New ways of working. New skill requirements. The programme team is excellent. The training is thorough. The communications are clear and consistent. The leadership is visibly committed. By every measurable standard, the change is being managed well.

And yet - six months in, a year in - something is stalling. Adoption is slower than projected. There’s a low-grade resistance that nobody can quite locate or name. The people who were expected to champion the new ways of working are doing so technically but not wholeheartedly. Something isn’t landing.

The instinct, almost universally, is to go back to the process. More training. Clearer messaging. Better stakeholder engagement. Stronger governance.

What’s rarely considered is that the stall might not be a process problem at all. It might be an identity problem.

Because the digital transformation didn’t just change how people work. It changed what expertise means. It changed who the authority figures are. It changed the informal status systems, who gets listened to in meetings, who people go to when they have a problem, whose experience is considered relevant. It changed, in ways that nobody made explicit and many people couldn’t even articulate, who these people are in this organisation.

That’s a rupture. And ruptures don’t respond to process interventions.

I’ve come to think that there are two distinct types of change, and conflating them is the source of most of the difficulty.

The first type I’d call transitional change, the process stuff. New systems, new structures, new ways of doing things. This is genuinely manageable with good project management, clear communication, and appropriate training. Most change frameworks handle this reasonably well.

The second type I’d call identity-level change: the shift that happens when a transition doesn’t just ask people to do things differently, but to be different. To hold a new relationship with their role, their authority, their sense of competence and belonging. This is not a process problem. This is a human problem. And it requires a fundamentally different kind of support.

The difficulty is that most significant organisational changes involve both types simultaneously. And the identity-level component is almost always underestimated, partly because it’s harder to measure, partly because people don’t have a language for it, and partly because naming it feels uncomfortably close to therapy and organisations are still largely uncomfortable with that territory.

What would it look like to take the identity dimension seriously?

It would mean building transition support that goes beyond skills training and information cascade. It would mean creating space for people to process the psychological disruption of change, not just the practical disruption. It would mean equipping leaders not just to manage the process but to hold the human experience of genuinely disoriented people.

It would mean recognising that when someone says I’m struggling with this change, they’re often not saying I need more training. They’re saying I don’t know who I am in this new version of things, and nobody seems to have noticed.

This isn’t soft. It isn’t optional. It isn’t the fluffy bit you do if there’s budget left over. It is, I’d argue, the load-bearing wall of any significant change effort. Get the identity work right, and the process work gets easier. Ignore it, and no amount of process excellence will get you where you need to go.

I’ve spent a long time developing a way of thinking about this, a framework that puts identity at the centre of transition rather than treating it as a side effect of process. I’ll write about that in more depth in future essays.

For now, the single point I want to leave you with is this:

The next time a change programme isn’t landing the way it should, before you go back to the process, ask a different question. What is this change asking people to give up about who they are, and have we done anything to help them with that?

The answer will tell you more than any RAG status report.

Daniel McGeechan is a Change and Transition Specialist based in Edinburgh. He spent over eleven years as a Senior NCO in the British military before moving into corporate change, where he now works with organisations navigating complex transitions. He is the author of Combat to Corporate: The Rewiring — Rebuilding Identity After the Uniform. –  Coming Soon.