From Strategy to Impact: How to Build a Change Strategy that Works

Change is inevitable, but how you prepare for it is the difference between mature, proactive, positive change that drives business growth and reactive, panicked projects that impact morale, retention and revenue.

A well-defined change management strategy provides the guide for leading people through transformation smoothly and successfully.

In this Insight, you’ll discover the typical stages of the change lifecycle your strategy needs to cover, with practical activities each needs to contain, including a real-life case study that will showcase each stage in action.

I’ll also provide some personal advice on how to move each stage beyond strategy, because a change management strategy is only as good as its execution. It needs to translate vision into action, plans into behaviours and resistance into commitment. It requires honest assessment of readiness, creative thinking about engagement and sustained effort long after the initial implementation.

Remember, your role as a leader is to create that strategy, certainly, but also to listen, adapt and remain focused on the human experience of change.

Because ultimately, change doesn’t happen to organisations. It happens to people. When you get that right, everything else follows.

An effective change management strategy should cover four key stages. Each builds on the previous one, supporting sustainable transformation.

The four-stage lifecycle can be applied whether you’re managing technology transformation, organisational restructuring, market expansion or process improvement. What changes is how you look at the bespoke vision, outcomes, needs, resistance and, most importantly, the people; these are the things that take you from strategy to impact.

You first need to articulate a clear vision and objective for change. It starts with a people focus on how they operate currently and will operate in the future state. People will ultimately lead, adopt and sustain change, forming the bedrock of the future organisation, so their needs must be balanced with process, systems and data.

To shape your change strategy, you need to:

From strategy to impact

Shaping and embedding change are the phases where organisations struggle most. They’re like bread in a sandwich; the meat has no meaning without them! If shaping isn’t done properly, you can’t capture what’s changing  or quantify the sought value. No matter how strong your change management strategy is, this lack of foundation will prevent you from executing it effectively, which will surface later as resistance, poor adoption or outright failure.

Case study

I’ve been supporting a multi-year programme at a communications company with ambitious growth plans to strengthen their competitive edge. After a major acquisition, they launched a large-scale business transformation programme with a clear vision to retire their old systems and leverage a single global ERP platform. This was a key enabler of their business strategy: simplification and accelerated growth.  We framed this as a human story of cultural unity rather than merely a systems upgrade and explicitly shaped the change management strategy around compelling big shifts, which laddered from the organisational-level down to the role-level.

Failure to prepare a change management strategy means a shared purpose is not created and desired outcomes are not realised. Change readiness is about understanding where your change maturity is now and how to accelerate the change and make it stick.

Change readiness involves:

From strategy to impact

People often jump straight into impact assessments and solutionising without conducting proper business readiness assessments first. Impact assessments assume the change is happening and you’re moving ahead. Readiness is the step before. When readiness assessments happen after impact assessments, it leads to forced change and retrofitting the plan. Change needs to be led by the people, and readiness tools help you understand whether your organisation is receptive to change or sceptical so you can bring your change management strategy to life and not leave it on the shelf.

Case study

We conducted business readiness assessments for the communications company, framed as the organisation’s listening system, especially important post-acquisition. These were run across IT and business functions, informing the kinds of interventions that would be required for their varying levels of readiness. Results provided the evidence necessary to help the technically-minded programme team understand the importance of balancing people’s readiness with critical milestones.

Put people at the heart of what’s changing while increasing change capability. Do this by telling a compelling story of your organisation, the change and the future through strategic engagement and communications. This creates emotional buy-in from stakeholders and a sense of involvement and belonging.

Key delivery activities include:

From strategy to impact

Traditional communications aren’t always enough. Creative interventions can reframe mindsets and drive behavioural change in unexpected ways.

One outside-the-box approach I’ve used for sceptical senior leaders is reverse mentoring; pairing them with someone more junior but fluent in how the change will transform their working life. This helps leaders consider numbers and perspectives they hadn’t previously examined.

Other creative interventions that have proven effective include:

These interventions work because they disrupt patterns and create memorable moments that shift thinking.

Case study

The client set up a central hub as a single source of truth for all programme information in addition to a Business Advisory Council and responsive feedback loops. These worked together to generate insights and input from all levels of the organisation and feed these directly to leaders. As a result, they delivered their first phase effectively, measuring adoption and sentiment for the small community that received it. The infrastructure for effective delivery was in place early, allowing them to iterate based on real-time feedback and maintain engagement momentum with regular updates and milestones.

Many people think delivery is the end of the journey. It isn’t. Embedding is where you close the gap between your best-case objectives and reality. It’s also where you build organisational change muscle for future initiatives.

Embedding activities include:

From strategy to impact

Monitor and measure the impact of engagement and communications throughout your initiative to ensure it’s working and will deliver sustainable change and business improvements. Look for increases in engagement scores, higher participation and positive feedback. Conduct evaluations and pulse checks to unlock valuable insights, and actually apply these (not just pay lip service to them) to contribute to a continuous improvement cycle.

Case study

The communications company isn’t at full embedding yet, but they have measures in place and know what to do. A big focus is building understanding of change effectiveness within the core team and leadership, which we’ve started by coaching 90+ programme team members to use the change toolkit, hub and narrative to drive awareness and desire. The plan is to reinforce the transformation identity through sustained measurement, recognition and cultural rituals.

Keep people at the heart throughout

People will make or break your change. Involve and consider them at every stage of the journey. My one piece of advice for organisations designing a change management strategy for the first time: know your people. That’s it.

Build agility into your plan

Initiatives can take months or years, and people, priorities and markets can also change in that time. Your change management strategy needs to adapt, flex and pivot if you’ve identified something isn’t working. Don’t leave your strategy on the shelf once  you set off; revisit and review it regularly.

Include short, mid and long-term goals

Keep everything anchored to your vision, but set and celebrate smaller wins too. These keep excitement and momentum going throughout the whole journey. Milestones also create natural pivot points to review and adjust as necessary.

Be transparent

This builds trust and helps communications stay consistent and on-message. It could include being honest about when leaders don’t have all the answers and encouraging input and feedback from those impacted.

Be creative

Creative change interventions are more engaging and compelling. They help bring your change to life and stand out from other competing noise and initiatives. A creative brand for your change gives it consistency and familiarity throughout the journey, helping stakeholders form an emotional connection.

Early warning signs

Pay attention to a reduction in questions or chatter about the change. When you stop hearing about it, apathy sets in. Resistance above ground is preferable to nothing; at least you know people care enough to push back. Silence means disengagement, and disengaged people won’t adopt your change, no matter how brilliant the strategy.

Lack of executive sponsorship

Without visible leadership support, change initiatives lack credibility and momentum. Engage leaders early and make them visible advocates who consistently model the desired behaviours.

Change fatigue

When organisations run too many initiatives simultaneously, people become overwhelmed and cynical. Prioritise and sequence initiatives strategically. Not everything needs to happen at once.

Poor communication alignment

Mixed messages from different parts of the organisation create confusion and erode trust. Create a unified message framework that everyone uses consistently.

Underestimating cultural impact

Nearly half of IT leaders see culture as the main obstacle to change success. Treat every change like a cultural change, because every change contributes to the culture of your organisation, which determines how your people think and work. It’s never just a system or reporting line change.

The operationalisation gap

As I said at the start of this Insight, having a solid strategy doesn’t guarantee success; execution matters as much as planning. Your strategy needs to translate into tangible actions, clear accountabilities and visible results that resonate with impacted people. This is something our SIMPLE^TM methodology can help address, unblocking and accelerating your transformation by operationalising your change strategy in six critical steps.

The next wave of business change won’t be led by frameworks alone. At Afiniti, we’re already seeing it driven by the ability to read signals in real-time, accelerate readiness where it lags and embed change into your organisational DNA. This requires moving faster between the lifecycle stages, or even collapsing the traditional timeline by treating these phases as continuous loops rather than linear stages, an ambition reflected in our new value proposition.

Leaders will have to build change muscle that doesn’t just respond to initiatives but anticipates them and create listening systems that surface resistance early enough to address it. They will also have to recognise that while the strategy provides the roadmap, the journey itself will be shaped by the people who live through it.

For support with any element of creating and executing your change management strategy, get in touch with our expert team today.