Lunch & Learn | Why Your Change Initiative Is Failing Before It Starts
Seventy percent of organizational change initiatives fail—and most project managers are taught to look at the plan, timeline, or budget when things go wrong.
The real culprit is almost always the human system no one mapped.
In this session, Chrissie Bettencourt draws on decades of “boots on the ground” experience leading complex change across organizations to introduce a Human Systems Architecture approach to project change management.
Before a single new tool is deployed or a process is redesigned, project leaders must first understand the:
- Informal power structures
- Emotional contracts
- Biological threat responses
already operating within their teams.
Attendees will learn how to conduct a rapid “human architecture” diagnostic before a change initiative launches, how to identify the hidden influencers and resistors that no org chart will show them, and how to use empathy and alignment — not authority — to build the conditions for genuine adoption.
Drawing on emerging applied behavioural neuroscience, the session will reveal why people resist change at a biological level and what project leaders can do before resistance becomes a project risk.
Participants will leave with a practical framework they can apply to their very next project.
