Smart Change Preparation: Why It’s Still the Missing Clarity

Monika Zvinklyte. Unique Blend: 15 Years Leading Change | Certified Change Manager | Top Universities Executive Education

Every leader nods when they hear “prepare before you act.” And yet, preparation is still the phase most often cut — and most often regretted.

The numbers are stubborn:

• 70% of change initiatives fail or fall short (McKinsey, Prosci).
• Projects with strong preparation are 5× more likely to succeed.
• Employees: 74% are willing to change, 64% have the skills — but only ~25% adapt successfully when prep is weak.

The paradox: everyone knows preparation matters, but few pursue it with clarity.

The Preparation Paradox

Why do executives neglect the one step that protects them most?

1. The Visibility Trap — Prep is invisible. Boards see launches, not stakeholder maps. Cutting prep creates the illusion of speed. Early applause, late regret.
2. Clarity Over Knowledge — Leaders know what to do; the challenge is having the sharpness to do it under pressure.
3. Maturity Blindness — Startups pivot too fast, corporates overestimate capacity. Both stumble without preparation anchored in clarity.

👉 Preparation is not about intelligence. It’s about executive muscle: doing the unglamorous, invisible work before the spotlight comes on.

Preparation Is Executive Muscle

Why muscle? Because preparation requires repetition, consistency, and clarity — the qualities that separate intent from execution. Intelligence can design a strategy; only muscle sustains the grind of aligning leaders, clarifying risks, and staging adoption.

But muscle alone is not enough. Preparation without vision and purpose is wasted effort.

• Vision defines where we are going — the destination worth the effort.
• Purpose explains why it matters — the story that sustains energy when projects drag.
• Preparation builds the pathway — the routines, maps, and rehearsals that make the vision real.

👉 Without vision, preparation becomes bureaucracy. 👉 Without preparation, vision stays rhetoric.

Smart change requires both: a compelling “why” and the clarity to make it live day by day.

What Preparation Really Means

Preparation is the hidden architecture of change:

• Strategic alignment: Are leaders telling the same story?
• Organizational readiness: Do people have bandwidth, or are they already overloaded?
• Stakeholder dynamics: Who will support, who will quietly block?
• Risk and pacing: Where must we slow down to protect trust, and where can we accelerate?

Without this groundwork, “go live” is guesswork.

The Business Case for Clarity

Do you always need a 50-page ROI model? No. But you always need clarity:

• Why this change, why now?
• What exact result will it bring?
• What risks must be solved — and who owns them?
• Do we need dedicated people, or can we rely on the current team?
• Do we have the budget — and what happens if costs grow during the change?
• Where are the boundaries? What’s in scope, what’s not?
• When do we stop — and how will we know if it costs too much?

👉 Example: An Eastern European manufacturer paused an ERP rollout mid-flight when leaders realized they had never defined “what success looks like.” Costs had already doubled. Restarting with a one-page prep case — including scope, ownership, and budget guardrails — cut waste and delivered under budget.

The C-Level Lenses That Matter

1. Cost of Delay

Skipping prep looks like saving time, but it is the costliest mistake.

• For every €1 not invested in readiness, rework can cost €4–7 later.
• Errors compound: missed adoption, wasted training, lost trust.
• Speed without readiness is fake speed — you arrive at the wrong place, late and over budget.

👉 Prep is not delay — it is the cheapest acceleration you have.

2. Leadership Credibility

Change is not just operational. It is a test of leadership trust.

• When executives launch without alignment, employees see it instantly: conflicting messages, shifting priorities, or visible disagreement at the top.
• Once credibility cracks, it spreads. Employees disengage not because they oppose change, but because they don’t believe leadership can deliver it.
• Rebuilding trust after a failed launch takes years — often longer than the initiative itself.

👉 Prep is not just operational insurance — it is leadership reputation insurance.

3. Absorptive Capacity

Even the strongest organizations have a finite ability to absorb change.

• Every initiative consumes attention, energy, and political capital. Stack too many, and even good changes collapse under overload.
• Preparation forces executives to ask: what will we pause or stop to make room? Without this, leaders keep adding, assuming the system can stretch endlessly.
• Ignoring capacity doesn’t just risk failure of one initiative — it breeds cynicism across the whole organization: “Another big program? We’ll wait until it dies like the last one.”

👉 Prep is the clarity of saying no — so the one change that matters can actually succeed.

Final Thought

Change doesn’t fail because people resist. It fails because leaders overestimate readiness.

Clarity in preparation is not about bureaucracy or rigidity. It is about confidence and perspective:

• I know why we are doing this.
• I know what result we want to achieve.
• I know what resources, risks, and boundaries matter most.
• I know how we will measure if it’s working — and when to stop if it isn’t.

This kind of clarity is liberating. It turns change from guesswork into deliberate leadership. It shifts the tone from “hoping it works” to “knowing how we’ll make it work.”

Smart preparation is the simplest, cheapest, and most reliable form of protection — and the most empowering clarity a leader can bring.

👉 Sunday Reflection: In your current portfolio of priorities, do you have the clarity and confidence to see where this change fits in the bigger journey — not just as a project, but as part of where your organization is going?

© Monika Zvinklyte

Sources & Further Reading

• Prosci — The Correlation Between Change Management and Project Success
• McKinsey & Company — Why 70% of Transformations Fail
• WalkMe — Change Management Statistics 2023
• AIM Business School — Why 70% of Change Initiatives Fail
• Changing Point — The Cost of Poor Preparation in Change
• PwC — The True Cost of Project Rework
• Financial Times — Case coverage of failed and restarted ERP projects in Eastern Europe