With nearly 75% of organisations expecting to undergo an increased number of change initiatives over the next 3 years (Gartner, 2025), it is clear that change is an inevitable part of business. Change management sees this as an opportunity, minimising disruption and enabling the intended growth.
To help you understand what Change Management is and why it isn’t just helpful but essential, we sat down with Richard, one of our Directors at Pointer. Over the course of his career, Richard has been involved in multibillion pound Change Programmes, putting him in a good position to explain how growing businesses can approach change before problems arise.
“… applying structure helps minimise disruption and enable change. You can waste a lot of time and resource otherwise.”
Q) Can you share your broad definition of change management and explain why you feel it's important in business?
Richard: Change Management, at its simplest, is helping an organisation move from its current state to a more desirable future state. What makes it Change Management, rather than just change, is applying a structured approach. That approach can be relatively light or quite detailed and formalised, depending on the nature of the change, size of the organisation, and other factors. Why is it important? Well, if you’ve decided you want to get somewhere better and you're not there yet, applying some structure helps minimise disruption and enable the change. You can waste a lot of time and resource otherwise. Change is often poorly managed because it involves people, and people can be odd, awkward, and difficult. Managing human behaviour, perception, and interaction is a huge part of successful change management.
Q) Are there particular moments in a business’ development when change management is especially needed?
Richard: It’s often needed at inflection points. There are some obvious ones; mergers, acquisitions, downsizing due to poor performance, or a strategic shift from the board. These usually warrant formal change management as there’s significant change incoming, whether that is increasing or reducing headcount, altering what you deliver, or changing how you do things.
But there are also more subtle inflection points. You might move from an analogue system to a digital one, shift office or factory location, or update your production line. It can be anything that alters your ways of working, structure, or team makeup.
For SMEs, inflection points are often maturity gates - how a 10-person business operates may work for 20 people but probably not for 50. There’s an efficiency curve: things work well until they don’t. At some point, you realise profitability or output is suffering. Maybe communication issues arise, or your processes can’t scale. Somewhere between 50 and 150 people, depending on location and type of business, you stop knowing everyone. Communication becomes harder, and informal systems stop working. Between all these are inflection points that need managing.
"Understanding and planning for those people-side impacts is essential and gives your company resilience by identifying risks up front."
Q) How can poorly managed change affect a company? And conversely, how can well-managed change improve things?
Richard: Poorly managed change, even if well-intentioned, can demotivate staff, reduce efficiency, and create divisions, for example if people think others in the team got a better deal. In worst cases, bad change programmes can lead to failure in delivering core functions.
Good change management addresses all of that, combining the technical change with the people’s behaviour and perception. Relocating a factory, for example, is often well executed but the people side gets neglected. Someone commuting 30 minutes may suddenly be expected to commute for 90 minutes, a change that crosses both practical and psychological limits and needs consideration and conversation. Understanding and planning for those people-side impacts is essential and gives your company resilience by identifying risks up front.
For an SME, change can be easier to manage because SMEs are more agile. But change can also have a bigger impact on individuals. If one key person leaves or is burned out, the consequences can be severe.
Q) Are there any trends in Change Management that have caught your eye?
Richard: There are a few trends I’ve noticed, although people don’t change that much. People usually dislike change unless it is clearly good for them, and even then, they are often sceptical and need active management to create buy-in.
There are generational shifts that affect how we approach change. For example, businesses have noticed that Gen Z is a lot more open to job-hopping, which means you different assumptions around loyalty. If you manage change badly, people leave, and that puts pressure on getting things right sooner rather than later.
Change fatigue is also real. Organisations today change faster and more often than they used to and have to keep doing so to keep up with the market. That constant churn can exhaust people – and how you manage that matters.
"Many programmes fail not because they didn’t implement the change, but because people revert to old habits."
Q) Are there any key principles and tools you base your change management on?
Richard: Firstly, change is always different, and Change Management is heavily experience-driven. You apply principles, not rules, because even implementing the same software differs between organisations. There’s no substitute for having been through it and that’s where we at Pointer add value. We have delivered shop-floor improvements and billion-pound transformations. That spectrum of experience makes a real difference in anticipating issues and designing systems that stick. Managing change within organisations differs depending on culture, skills, and attitudes.
One key principle is recognising that change doesn’t stop when the change event ends. Many programmes fail not because they didn’t implement the change, but because people revert to old habits. Real change means embedding and reinforcing new behaviour, often 6–12 months beyond the visible change.
We often use Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) as a framework and emphasise benefits-led change: not just “What’s the outcome?” but “What’s the benefit?”. For those looking to learn, the APM offers useful change management guidance and the ADKAR and Kotter models are also good starting points. From there it’s about choosing the right KPI’s for the project to honestly assess what is and isn’t working.
Q) What advice would you give a company considering change?
Richard: When you anticipate change in your organisation, engage with Change Management early. Get small bits of advice early – it’s less costly and far more effective than fixing things later.
Change expertise is often brought in after the problems have realised. We once had a client engage with us six months into a change. It would’ve been a different conversation with far better outcomes if they’d come to us at the beginning.
If your organisation is going through a period of change and wants help to managing it, email us at info@pointerconsultancygroup.co.uk. Want to know more about our service? Visit our change management service page here.