Why Organisational Change Causes Harm

This is part 2 of our series of three articles celebrating International Peace Day 2025.

Click to read Part 1: Why Organisations Feel Like They’re in Conflict

Once again, please consider joining us in making a donation this week to WarChild and help them protect, educate and stand up for the rights of children living through conflict.

Why Does Change Hurt So Much?

If you’ve lived through a big transformation programme, you’ve likely seen the pattern: top‑down plans, upbeat roadshows, and then the slow leak of trust as the real impacts land. We’ve experienced it first‑hand and watched it repeat across sectors. Projects miss their promises, morale dips, good people leave, and the organisation spends months (or years) nursing the cultural bruises and repairing the talent leaks.

Change = Conflicts of Good

Why does this happen? Because change is conflict resolution. Not interpersonal drama, but conflicts between legitimate, desirable things that can’t all be true at once. Do we preserve the intimacy of long‑standing client relationships or standardise into a scaled model that improves coverage and consistency? Do we introduce rigorous training and accreditation for a role or retain a cohort of highly experienced practitioners who’d rather retire than retrain? Real choices mean real trade‑offs, and pretending otherwise just stores up pain.

“Choose peaceful change. It’s not soft. It takes strength and resilience to look honestly at the past and the present.”

The Transaction Trap

You can spot when a change effort is dodging these conflicts. The language becomes abstract and the timelines aggressive. Teams are told to ‘trust the process’. Leaders insist there’s no alternative. That’s when organisations slip into the transaction trap: ‘It’s my way or the highway.’ It may move bodies on a chart, but it doesn’t move hearts, and hearts are where the everyday work of change actually happens. 

Marshall Ganz draws a helpful simple distinction in his book People Power Change: the difference between a transaction and a relationship is commitment. Commitment to each other and what you’re trying to achieve together. If, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really mean anything to you what happens to your colleagues, your staff, your customers as a result of changes that work best for you, then you are working transactionally. Now, you might do well out of a transaction. But your partners probably feel ‘owed’ or possibly even exploited. Maybe in the future your hand won’t be so strong. 

Choose Peaceful Change

If you value durability, sustainability and regeneration then choose peaceful change. It’s not soft. It takes strength and resilience to look honestly at the past and the present. It requires patience and perseverance to uncover true solutions that work for everyone that needs them.

 Peaceful, relational change is the only approach that earns the commitment you need and avoids the scars you’ll otherwise spend years tending and paying for through skills loss, high turn-over and low productivity. 

We’re here to help

We know. We know. This sounds great on paper but you’re thinking ‘aren’t you being idealistic or naïve’? Nope. We know this is hard work. It is urgent, essential, difficult work. Which is why we’re committed to helping values-led leadership teams do this work without selling out or burning out.

Along with Resolve Consultants, we’re cultivating a cohort of Peaceful Change Organisations. Supporting Leadership Teams through insight, accountability and restorative team coaching so that this time, your change process is built to last by the people it matters to most.

Book a time to talk with us about your best hopes for peace in your organisation and how we can help.

Read our third and final part now on Becoming a Peaceful Change Organisation.