What is Pragmatic Change?
If you have led any significant programme of work in the last five years, you already know something is off.
You can feel it in the steering committee meetings where the programme status says “green” and the corridor conversations say something else. You see it most clearly in the gap between what the programme promised and what the organisation actually does once the project team disbands.
The dominant model of organisational change — the one embedded in consulting playbooks for the last two decades — was built for a world that no longer exists. Stable hierarchies. Predictable timelines. Compliant workforces. That world ran on what I call the 2005 playbook: appoint a sponsor, hire a change manager, do a complicated assessment, run some comms, deliver some training, go live, declare success, move on.
It still gets sold. It rarely lands. And the people leading complex change (we’re talking multi-jurisdiction programmes, AI-era restructures, genuinely transformational work etc.) are the ones struggling to embrace the notion that change is a constant.
Pragmatic change is the alternative
The word pragma is Greek for action. Pragmatic change is the discipline of designing organisational change around what works in practice, not what looks good on paper. It draws on a 150-year tradition that runs from the American pragmatist philosophers — Peirce, James, Dewey — through Deming and Toyota and into the modern Agile and Lean movements. The thread connecting them: truth is in action, not in the plan.
Where the 2005 playbook says plan first, execute later, pragmatic change says act, observe, adapt, repeat.
Where the playbook treats people as stakeholders to be managed, pragmatic change treats them as the source of the very intelligence the programme needs to succeed.
This is an argument against confusing the plan for the change. The plan is a hypothesis built in conditions of maximum optimism and minimum information. The change is what you learn on the way.
Change management for executives, made specific
Most change management for executives has been written for change practitioners — the certified change managers, the consultants, the programme leads. It uses their language and assumes their disciplinary frame. That is largely useless for the senior executive who has to decide whether to back a programme, how to sponsor it, and how to explain to the board why the original plan is now an outdated picture of the work.
Pragmatic change is built for the leader at the head of the table. The MD whose AI strategy is producing less than the model promised. The COO running an integration across legacy business units. The Programme Director navigating a multi-jurisdiction systems change.
For these leaders, the question is not what change methodology should we use? The question is what kind of attention does this change actually require?
The Seven Principles
Pragmatic change is structured around seven principles, distilled from twenty years of practice across mining, education, utilities, financial services, government and national not-for-profits.
Align change with what matters — people resist change that doesn’t make sense.
Meet people where they are — bin the readiness assessment.
Empower everyone to contribute appropriately — you are not the conductor; the work is.
Learn together through experimentation — every plan is a hypothesis until reality tests it.
With better information, change the plan — and explain why — the change in the plan is the most important signal you can send.
Make decisions visibly — illuminate the rationale, not just the outcome.
Measure progress with both numbers and stories — either alone is misleading.
All seven run concurrently. Not a sequence. Not a checklist. A complete way of attending — carried into every conversation, every governance review, every meeting where the plan is being held against what the programme is actually teaching you.
Where this leads
If any of this sounds familiar — if you have had the corridor conversation that did not match the dashboard, or watched a beautifully constructed plan meet a messier reality — the work of pragmatic change starts with a different question.
Not how do we make people more willing to change? But what conditions would let the change capability that is already in our organisation come forward?
That is the work you need to undertake with both your senior colleagues and your own team(s). The Seven Principles, the tools that ride on top of them, and the forthcoming book Pragmatic Change are the practical answer.
If you want a place to start, Pragma is the AI change advisor built on these principles — available at pragmaticchange.com.au. It is, in effect, a version of the same thinking you can take to the eleven o’clock crisis meeting in Manila or the nine o’clock with the German plant manager, when the conversation matters and there is no time to read a chapter.