Recovering Judgment: A Series on Practitioner Judgment in Change Management – Article 1

Change management doesn’t suffer from a shortage of frameworks. If anything, we may have the opposite problem. We have more models, methods, playbooks, templates, certifications, maturity assessments, toolkits, dashboards, and branded approaches than ever before. The field has been busy for decades producing ways to structure the work, organize the conversation, and make change feel more manageable.

Some of that has been useful. I’m not interested in the lazy argument that frameworks are worthless or that methods have no place in the work. They do. A good framework can help a practitioner slow down, ask better questions, consider what might otherwise be missed, and create enough structure to move through ambiguity with some discipline. But somewhere along the way, I think we started asking frameworks to do more than they can do. We started treating them not just as supports for judgment, but as substitutes for it.

A framework can tell you to identify stakeholders. It can’t tell you which relationships are strained, which leaders have credibility, which middle managers are quietly translating the change in ways that matter, or which groups have already learned from experience that “engagement” usually means they will be informed after the important decisions have been made.

A template can ask for impacts. It can’t tell you whether the impacts people named are the real ones, the safe ones, the politically acceptable ones, or the ones they understood well enough to articulate at the time. A readiness assessment can produce a score. It can’t tell you whether that score reflects confidence, compliance, fatigue, caution, optimism, fear, or the simple fact that people have learned how to answer survey questions without creating trouble for themselves. A communication plan can show that messages were sent. It can’t tell you whether people understood what is changing in their work, what will be expected of them, what tradeoffs they will face, or whether the message made sense inside the operational reality they live in every day.

This is where change practice gets into trouble. Not because the tools are inherently bad, but because the presence of the tool can create the illusion that the thinking has happened. The artifact looks complete. The methodology has been followed. The workshop was conducted. The boxes were filled in. The dashboard is green. The program can point to evidence of activity.

But activity is not the same as understanding. And understanding is not the same as change. That is the tension I keep coming back to in my own work. The best change practitioners I know are not the ones who can recite a model with the most confidence. They are the ones who can read the situation in front of them. They notice when the formal story and the lived reality do not match. They can sense when a stakeholder is agreeing too quickly, when a team is confused but unwilling to say so, when resistance is actually information, and when progress is being performed more than produced.

That kind of work requires judgment. It requires the practitioner to interpret, not just execute. To inquire, not just assess. To adapt, not just apply. To understand the organization as a living system of relationships, habits, incentives, constraints, memories, and competing pressures, not merely as a population moving through a prescribed sequence of change activities.

This does not mean we abandon frameworks. That would be too easy, and frankly, not very useful. The better question is whether we are using frameworks in the right way. A framework should help us think. It should not protect us from having to think. It should give us a disciplined starting point, not a pre-approved answer. It should create better inquiry, not premature certainty. It should make our judgment sharper, not less necessary.

The future of change practice, at least as I see it, is not about finding the next model that finally solves the problem. We have been waiting for that model for a long time. If the answer were simply a better methodology, we would probably know by now. The harder and more important work may be recovering something we should never have allowed ourselves to outsource in the first place.

Practitioner judgment. That is the work underneath the methodology. And it may be the work change management most needs to recover.