Traditional change management frameworks were built for a world of discrete, episodic change — a new ERP system, an office relocation, a merger. In the digital era, change is continuous, multi-threaded, and often invisible. Teams adopt new tools weekly; processes evolve in response to AI capabilities; organizational structures shift to accommodate new ways of working. The old frameworks strain under this new reality.
From Push to Pull
Traditional change management is push-based: communicate the change, train on the new system, monitor adoption. Modern approaches are pull-based: create conditions where people want to adopt new ways of working because they make their jobs easier and more meaningful. This requires deep investment in user experience (making new tools genuinely better than old ones), community-building (peer champions and internal social networks), and psychological safety (making it safe to experiment and fail).