The Pigeon Test:
Why Change Fails

Change fails, and implementation takes the blame. The problem starts earlier, with linear thinking applied to complex systems. This category error is shared by the consultants selling the work, the executives buying it and the practitioners delivering it in good faith.

For years Mark Eddleston was one of them. He sold New Ways of Working (the course, the playbook, the “patterns found in progressive organisations”) and facilitated hundreds of experiments. When he finally asked what had survived his leaving, the answer was not much. His university tutor had handed him the reason twenty years earlier.

Put a ball in a catapult and you can predict where it lands. Put in a pigeon and you can’t. Almost everything sold as transformation is calculated as a ball and launched as a pigeon. The successes everyone cites are rare birds, and a proof of concept is not a proof of scale. Meanwhile the demand the industry assumes is largely imaginary, and the leader you’re waiting on is held in place by a system that doesn’t care how much inner work they’ve done.

The book won’t hand you a new framework. It might stop you buying or selling the next one, and blaming yourself for the last.

Consultants, C-suites, bosses and boards, and anyone who has watched a change programme quietly stop working without being able to say why. It assumes you’ve tried. You might still run the workshops; you’ll just stop carrying the guilt when they don’t stick.