LaMarsh Insights

Understanding how people truly feel about change is the key to reducing risk and driving adoption. This article explores how the Managed Change™ Methodology helps practitioners go beyond leadership assumptions to uncover authentic feedback through curiosity, respect, and continuous reflection. Featuring insights — and quotes — that remind us listening is both an art and a strategy.

Your sponsor and project team show up to meetings—but their minds don’t. They're multitasking, checking emails, or on Slack. When change conversations compete with distractions, you lose focus, momentum, and trust. This article outlines how to re-engage key players and reclaim the room.

When time is limited and the pressure to deliver is high, focusing on what matters most can make or break a change project. This article highlights the three essential steps from the Managed Change™ Methodology—Identify the Change, Analyze the Risk, and Mitigate the Risk—and shows how even a simple, “cocktail napkin” plan can reduce resistance, build alignment, and drive adoption.

When a portion of your workforce adopts the change while others lag, it's tempting to think it’s time to get tough. But using punitive measures to force change can backfire—damaging trust, increasing resistance, and harming long-term adoption. Here's why a more strategic approach pays off.

For change to succeed, the people most affected—the Targets—need to be informed, involved, and supported from the start. From the LaMarsh Managed Change™ perspective, that means communicating early, giving people a voice, helping them see themselves in the Future State, and providing realistic training and reinforcement. When organizations deliver change with people instead of to them, adoption accelerates and results last.

Strong sponsorship is the cornerstone of successful change. Yet, organizations often overlook the importance of recognizing leaders who do it well. When great sponsorship goes unacknowledged, momentum fades—and so does motivation.

Neuroscience reveals that resistance to change isn’t stubbornness—it’s biology. Four key brain regions—the amygdala, entorhinal cortex, basal ganglia, and habenula—all react to change as a potential threat by triggering fear, disorientation, habit disruption, and fear of failure. When leaders understand these brain responses, they can design change strategies that calm threat responses, rebuild confidence, and support lasting adaptation.

Strong sponsorship is the cornerstone of successful change. Yet, organizations often overlook the importance of recognizing leaders who do it well. When great sponsorship goes unacknowledged, momentum fades—and so does motivation.

Leaders don’t want to hear about the noise of change—they want to see progress. During implementation, they care most about what affects time, cost, and results. The key to gaining their attention is blending data with story—presenting facts that quantify risk and pairing them with context that shows impact. When leaders see risk framed in business terms, they act decisively to keep the change on track.

A well-designed change initiative can still fail if it’s under-resourced. Whether it's time, people, tools, or budget, insufficient support creates friction and signals that the change isn’t truly a priority. This article outlines how to resource change realistically and strategically using the LaMarsh Managed Change™ Model.