Change Signal: Modern Change Management that Works

Three key insights from Anne Gotte: change management is as outdated as "personnel" organizations must diagnose their change allergies before attempting transformation; and leaders need to embrace clumsy imperfection while providing clear direction.

Anne Gotte is SVP Global Talent & Organization Effectiveness at Mondelēz and she brings refreshing honesty to the messy reality of organizational transformation. She's worked at Bumble, Ecolab, and General Mills, collecting scars and wisdom along the way.

This conversation challenges the traditional playbook. Anne argues that "decree change" — where executives design solutions in isolation, announce them broadly, then expect magic — as well and truly reached its expiration date.

Instead, she advocates for building ongoing change capacity rather than managing episodic projects. Her approach starts with uncomfortable questions: Who are we today? What makes any change difficult for us? How do our systems contradict our change story?

The discussion explores why change feels clumsy (spoiler: it's supposed to), how to honour uncertainty while providing clarity, and why slow can actually be fast. Anne's insights about getting comfortable being uncomfortable offer a different path forward for change leaders tired of pretending transformation should feel orderly and predictable.

This is change leadership for grown-ups who've learned that the mess is actually the work.

Change Signal. Cut through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works in change and transformation.

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Here are three big insights that emerge from this Change Signal conversation with Hahrie Han:

Are you creating value or just convenience?;

Does belonging come before belief in your organization?; and

Are you building agency or just compliance?

Hahrie Han, political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and author of How Organizations Develop Activists and Undivided, has spent her career studying how people build power that lasts. She brings a sharp, human perspective on what drives genuine participation and why small, intentional acts often change systems more than sweeping plans.

The conversation explores why engagement depends less on ease and more on meaning, how “radical belonging” can transform even divided communities, and how leaders can use small, safe failures to build confidence and agency across teams.

You’ll also hear practical tools for turning involvement into influence — designing scaffolding that helps people learn from risk and own their results.

If you’re leading transformation, culture, or change projects in a big organization, this conversation offers fresh, grounded insight into how participation turns into durable power.

Change Signal. Cut through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works in change. This is the podcast for transformational leaders seeking modern change mastery.

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🎧 A new episode every week (and sometimes two!)

The Change Signal newsletter. Short, practical, weekly

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Here are three provocative questions that arise from this Change Signal conversation with Helen Bevan:

Is your belonging actually just assimilation?

Are your relationships stronger than your strategy?

And what fear is your system quietly running on?

Helen Bevan has spent decades leading large-scale transformation inside the NHS, and she brings that rare blend of deep experience and fresh thinking. She makes a compelling case that the real levers of change aren’t the ones we normally obsess over—plans, resources, or methodologies—but the relational fabric that holds a system together.

We talk about belonging as a core condition for change, and why the best leaders know how to help people both “belong” and “unbelong” as the system shifts. Helen also shares the surprising results of a major five-year transformation experiment, where social capital — not expertise or investment — predicted which organizations moved forward and which fell behind.

And we explore agency: why you can’t give it, why people have to build it themselves, and how leaders can create the routines that make that possible. If you’re navigating complexity, leading transformation, or trying to spark change in a large organization, this conversation offers practical insight into how change actually travels through a system.

Change Signal. Where transformational change leaders seek and find modern change wisdom. Cut through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works.

***

WHEN YOU’RE READY

🎧 A new episode every week (and sometimes two!)

The Change Signal newsletter. Short, practical, weekly

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Here are three questions this Change Signal conversation asks:

What freedom are you not seeing yet?

Where can you safely loosen control?

When does agency become dangerous?

In this episode, I talk with Cate Hall about agency — what it is, why it matters, and why it’s more complicated than simply telling people to “take ownership.” Cate defines agency as the ability to see and act on degrees of freedom other people overlook, which is a powerful idea for anyone leading change, transformation, or large-scale organizational work.

We get into how leaders can become more agentic without becoming reckless, especially inside complex organizations where not everything can be an experiment. Cate offers the idea of “selective agency”: finding the places where iteration, risk, and movement are actually possible.

And then things get especially interesting. If you want more agency from your people, you have to tolerate them doing things imperfectly. And if you want more agency in the system, you also have to ask: agency in service of what?

Change Signal. Cut through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works in change. If you’re a transformational leader seeking modern change mastery, you’re in exactly the right place.

***

WHEN YOU’RE READY

🎧 A new episode every week (and sometimes two!)

The Change Signal newsletter. Short, practical, weekly

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CONNECT

💼Connect on LinkedIn

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SAY THANKS

💜Leave a review on Apple Podcasts

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Here are three questions from this Change Signal conversation:

Are we chasing AI, or value?

What future are we actually building?

What would have to be true to get there?

In this episode, I talk with Brian Evergreen, author of Autonomous Transformation, about what change leadership looks like when AI is moving faster than most organizations can think.

Brian makes a wonderfully useful distinction: your job is probably not to become an AI expert. Your job is to understand value — for your customers, your organization, and the wider system — and then partner with the right expertise to create it.

We explore why “AI-first” can be as silly as saying “hammer-first,” and why autonomous transformation needs a different playbook from digital transformation. The work starts with vision, not tools.

Brian also shares a practical way to map change: put the vision at the top, ask “what would have to be true?”, and make the strategy visible enough for people to move with it.

For senior leaders working on change, transformation, AI strategy, or large-scale organizational change, this is a grounded, clarifying conversation about building the future without drowning in the noise.

Change Signal. Cut through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works in change. If you’re a transformational leader seeking modern change mastery, you’re in exactly the right place.

***

WHEN YOU’RE READY

🎧 A new episode every week (and sometimes two!)

The Change Signal newsletter. Short, practical, weekly

***

CONNECT

💼Connect on LinkedIn

***

SAY THANKS

💜Leave a review on Apple Podcasts

💚Leave a review on Spotify