Leaders Need To Stop Managing Change And Start Creating It

Forbes

23-07-2025

Leaders Need To Stop Managing Change And Start Creating It
Our language reveals our mindset. For decades, we've talked about "change management" and "change readiness"; terms that betray a fundamentally reactive stance. We manage what happens to us. We get ready for what's coming. But what if this entire framework is outdated?
New research suggests that organizations clinging to reactive change models are setting themselves up for obsolescence. The winners in today's AI-accelerated landscape won't be those who manage change well, they'll be those who actively seek it, create it, and move before disruption forces their hand.
The Persistence of Change Denial
A recent Leadership IQ AI Readiness study of 1,251 business leaders reveals a troubling paradox that perfectly illustrates why reactive approaches fail. While 79.5% of executives now personally use AI tools, (up from virtually no experience just two years ago), a shocking 46.2% still don't believe AI will significantly impact their own roles.
Even more concerning: 56.4% of leaders either don't expect AI to replace any employees in the next three years or remain uncertain about it. This represents virtually no shift in executive thinking since 2023, despite witnessing AI's explosive capabilities firsthand.
This "persistence gap" between personal AI adoption and strategic understanding reveals the fatal flaw in reactive change models. Leaders are using transformative technology daily yet failing to anticipate its implications. They're managing today's AI integration while remaining blind to tomorrow's disruption. If executives can't see massive change coming when they're literally holding it in their hands, how can they possibly position their organizations to thrive?
The Need For Change Proactivity
The landmark study on why CEOs get fired found that "mismanaging change" tops the list. But deeper analysis reveals the problem isn't just poor execution of change initiatives, it's the entire reactive framework used to think about change.
The most successful organizations studied don't wait for change to happen to them. They actively seek disruption, challenge their own assumptions, and move before external forces demand it. They've shifted from asking "How do we manage this change?" to "What change should we create next?"
This isn't just semantics. When organizations are proactive about change:
Building Proactive Change Capability
Research involving thousands of organizations and their change efforts has identified key strategies for shifting from reactive to proactive:
Leadership IQ studies show that only 15% of employees understand the rationale behind their organization's strategy. This catastrophic communication gap exists because leaders spend months analyzing markets, attending conferences, and studying disruptions, and then announce changes without sharing that intellectual journey.
Proactive leaders do something different. They make their thinking visible in real-time. They share what they're learning at industry events, what competitors are doing that's interesting, what customer behaviors are shifting. When change happens, it feels logical, not sudden.
Research demonstrates that employees who are always learning new things are ten times more likely to be inspired. But here's the key: proactive organizations don't wait for change to force learning. They make it constant.
Successful organizations implement weekly one-on-ones where managers ask:
This builds self-efficacy, the belief that employees can successfully meet future challenges. When change comes (or better yet, when the organization creates it), teams already believe they can handle it.
Every organization has influential employees (i.e., "Champions") that others naturally turn to for advice and perspective. Studies consistently show that starting change efforts with these Champions dramatically increases success rates.
But in proactive organizations, Champions don't just support change, they help spot opportunities for it. They become early warning systems for market shifts, customer needs, and competitive threats. Organizations must cultivate these relationships before they need them.
The test 'What Motivates You?' reveals that 48% of employees are primarily driven by Security (predictability, consistency) or Affiliation (relationships, belonging). These employees won't naturally seek change, they'll resist it.
Proactive leaders recognize this and design change approaches that address these motivational needs. They maintain team cohesion during transitions, create predictable processes for unpredictable changes, and help security-driven employees see change as a path to greater stability, not less.
Critical Change Warning Signs
Organizations shifting toward proactive change should watch for these failure predictors:
Data shows executives are 66% more likely to enjoy taking risks than frontline employees. In proactive organizations, leaders don't just push their risk tolerance onto others, instead, they build organizational risk capacity gradually and deliberately.
Relatedly, only 38% of people like leaving their comfort zone. But proactive change requires it constantly. Successful leaders make discomfort productive by connecting it to growth and opportunity, not just survival.
The AI persistence gap perfectly illustrates this: leaders can use transformative tools daily yet fail to grasp their implications. Proactive organizations build mechanisms to convert awareness into strategic action, like regular scenario planning and systematic opportunity scanning.
The Competitive Reality
The choice between reactive and proactive approaches to change isn't academic, it's existential. Change management research consistently shows that organizations stuck in reactive mode experience:
Meanwhile, proactive organizations report employees who actually seek out new challenges, suggest improvements unprompted, and view change as opportunity rather than threat.
Moving Forward
After years of studying why change efforts fail, evidence strongly suggests the entire change management paradigm needs disrupting. Organizations need to stop managing change and start creating it. Stop preparing for disruption and start being the disruptor. Stop building change-ready cultures and start building change-seeking ones.
The organizations that will dominate the next decade won't be those with the best change management processes. They'll be those that make proactive change-seeking part of their DNA. In a world where AI can transform industries overnight, waiting to react isn't just slow, it's fatal.