This week’s episode argues that the work has moved. For a decade the question was whether you could fund the next phase. Now it’s whether your organisation can absorb what the last one already bought. If you’ve watched or listened, you have that argument. I won’t repeat it here.
This issue does two things the episode doesn’t. It takes on the best objection I hear to the whole idea. And it gives you a test you can run on your own organisation this week, in about twenty minutes.
The objection
The fair challenge goes like this. Isn’t absorption just change management with a better name? Organisations have run change programmes for decades. Comms, training, champions, adoption plans. What’s new?
I don’t think it’s the same thing, and the difference decides what you fund.
Change management usually arrives after the decision. The tool is bought, the date is set, and a workstream is stood up to bring people along. Its job is to help a decision that’s already been taken land as smoothly as possible. Done well, that’s valuable work.
Absorption is a question you ask before the decision. Can this organisation hold this, now, on top of everything else it’s carrying? Who will be allowed to change how the work runs? Who owns it landing, and what will they stop doing to make room?
One is a workstream. The other is a constraint. A workstream gets a budget line. A constraint changes what you agree to buy.
You can run excellent change management on something the organisation had no room to absorb. Everyone attends the training. The champions are keen. The comms are clear. Six months later, well-trained people are back doing the work the old way, because nothing about their decisions, their incentives or their week has changed. That isn’t a failure of change management. It’s what happens when you ask it to fix a problem that was created before it started.
So if you’ve seen change management really work, check when it started. I’d bet it was before the purchase, not after it. At that point it had stopped being change management and become absorption.
The test: twenty minutes with your calendar
Strategy documents tell you which phase an organisation wants to be in. Calendars tell you which one it’s actually in.
Open the last four weeks of your leadership team’s diary. Put every recurring meeting into one of two piles.
Pile one decides what to do. Strategy reviews. Investment committees. Approvals. Launch planning. These are the meetings that choose, fund and buy.
Pile two makes what was decided work. Look for meetings like these:
The adoption review, where someone looks at who is actually using the new thing and who has quietly gone back.
The blocker meeting, where the decisions holding a team up get made that week, not escalated to next month.
The check-in ninety days after go-live, when the launch glow has gone and the real usage is visible.
Time spent sitting with the teams doing the work, not hearing about it in a deck.
Count both piles. In most leadership diaries I’ve seen, pile one wins by a distance. That made sense when the job was to fund and buy.
If you do find pile two, test it with three questions:
Is anyone in the room from below the top two layers?
Does it end in named decisions, or in updates?
When did it last stop or change something?
A pile two meeting that only hears updates from senior people is pile one in different clothes.
Then do the same with your targets. How many measure money spent or things launched? How many measure something actually being used, by the people it was bought for?
Last, your decision forums. When the new way of working collides with the old rules, where does a team take it? If the answer is up the chain, to a meeting that sits once a month, the decision rights haven’t moved, whatever the org chart says.
If your calendar, your targets and your forums look the way they did three years ago, the slides have changed. The organisation hasn’t.
The line to remember
Money moved at the speed of a memo. Capability moves at the speed of learning.
Watch or listen
The full episode is at the top of this post. It opens with a reorganisation I ran that worked perfectly on paper, and what it taught me about the gap between changing a structure and changing a company.
You can also listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or watch on YouTube.
If you run the calendar test, reply and tell me your split.
Built to Absorb. One problem, one fix, every week.
