I’ve been thinking about the evolution of change management sentiment over the last few decades, and I keep coming back to the same conclusion: the field changes its language more readily than it changes its thinking.

We like to tell a neat story about ourselves. We imagine that change management has progressed in some orderly way, with each decade correcting the mistakes of the last and bringing us closer to a more enlightened view of organizations, people, and change. I don’t think that’s what happened.

What I see is a field that keeps layering new language over old assumptions. We rarely discard anything. We just rename it, soften it, sharpen it, or dress it up in the vocabulary of the moment. So now we have grief language, buy-in language, adoption language, evidence language, and reinvention language all sitting in the same room, pretending not to know one another. It’s hard not to find that a little ridiculous.

In the 1990s, a good deal of change management sentiment was shaped by the idea that change was something people had to emotionally endure. Change was disruptive. People were afraid. Resistance was to be expected. Practitioners borrowed heavily, and often clumsily, from grief-based framings and treated organizational change as though it were a kind of bereavement process. Kotter was ascendant. Bridges resonated. Kübler-Ross was dragged into organizational life, whether it belonged there or not.

The result was a field that often sounded oddly therapeutic and more than a little paternalistic. People were upset, so the task was to help them through it. Resistance became something to diagnose. Acceptance became the destination. On one level, this at least acknowledged that change has an emotional dimension. On another, it reduced people to subjects moving through a predictable valley of feeling on their way to compliance. A lot of that thinking should have been retired. Much of it was not.

By the 2000s, the field had shifted into a more managerial register. This was the era of communication plans, sponsor roadmaps, stakeholder matrices, cascades, manager toolkits, alignment sessions, and all the familiar machinery of implementation. Structured models gave practitioners something they could point to and sell internally. The work became cleaner, more digestible, more operational. It also became more comfortable with itself. Too comfortable, in my view.

Because beneath all the talk of alignment and engagement was often a much simpler proposition: the decision has already been made, and now we need to get people on board. That’s not quite the same thing as involvement. It is certainly not the same thing as shared shaping of the future. It is closer to persuasion, though the field preferred more flattering language. We called it awareness. We called it desire. We called it sponsorship. We called it buy-in. Often, we were just selling the change.

The 2010s brought a different mood. The field became more self-conscious and more eager to sound evidence-based. There was more attention to adoption, readiness, engagement, behavior, and outcomes. Researchers examined openness to change, trust in leadership, communication quality, and the conditions that seem to support implementation success. Practitioners, in turn, became more interested in sustained uptake than in simple message delivery. This wasn’t a bad development. In many ways it was badly needed. The field has long had a weakness for plausible-sounding assertions delivered with great confidence. A little more seriousness about evidence was welcome.

But the 2010s also exposed something less flattering. The more closely people looked, the more obvious it became that the evidence base was uneven, fragmented, and often overstated. The field had no shortage of models, but model proliferation is not the same thing as explanatory power. There were plenty of frameworks, plenty of claims, and more than enough certainty. There was less coherence than advertised. So even in its more empirical phase, change management still had a habit of overselling itself.

Now, in the 2020s, we seem to have entered the era of self-interrogation. Or perhaps self-dramatization. On the one hand, the pressures are real enough. Organizations are dealing with continuous transformation, digital acceleration, AI, hybrid work, fractured attention, economic instability, and change saturation. The old episodic model, where change is a bounded initiative with a beginning, middle, and end, looks increasingly thin against that backdrop.

On the other hand, the field’s response has taken on a familiar tone. Once again, we are told that the old models are dead. Once again, we are informed that the future requires an entirely new mindset. Once again, the language of reinvention arrives with a sense of revelation, as though nobody has ever before noticed that organizations are complex, that people do not move in straight lines, or that change does not happen neatly.

Hence the latest refrain: change must change.

Some of that critique is fair. Some of it is overdue. Some of it names real weaknesses in the field. But some of it also feels performative. It has the quality of a field trying to prove its own relevance by denouncing its previous form. There is a kind of fashionable dissatisfaction in the air, and like most fashionable dissatisfaction, it often says less than it thinks it does.

That’s the part that makes me a little crazy. Not because I think the old models should be defended as sacred texts. Far from it. Some deserve to be challenged. Some deserve to be discarded. Some should have been questioned a long time ago. What bothers me is the field’s recurring habit of acting as though each new turn is a breakthrough rather than what it often is: a correction, an overcorrection, or a relabeling exercise with better branding.

• The grief era had its distortions.
• The buy-in era had its manipulations.
• The evidence era had its inflated claims.
• And the current “change must change” era has its own performative tendencies.

So yes, the field has evolved. But not in the triumphant way it sometimes imagines. If I had to describe the arc more honestly, I would say this: change management has moved from coping, to persuading, to measuring, to interrogating itself. That is a real shift. It matters. But it is not a straight line toward enlightenment. It is a sequence of overlays and overcorrections, each phase reacting to the excesses of the last while introducing new excesses of its own.

That strikes me as a much more believable story than the one the field usually tells about itself. Maybe the task now is not to reinvent change management yet again in search of novelty. Maybe it is to become more disciplined about what it is actually for, what assumptions sit underneath it, what it can legitimately claim, and where it genuinely helps.

That would be a more useful evolution than the next slogan.