How OrgAcuity Can Strengthen Your Change Management Strategy?
Across my career, I stumbled into two disciplines that proved essential, even without formal training: Organization Design and Change Management. This piece talks more about the latter, Change Management. When you understand how individuals and groups move through change and build that insight into your strategy, you gain a skill that pays for itself many times over. Change management sets you up for success in the moment and over time. How well it works in your organization often comes down to a few basics:
How much you invest in building change management capabilities across your people.
How consistently you prioritize change management as its own discipline.
How well your tools and technology surface the data you need to guide effective change.
This list is not exhaustive, but the point is simple. If we ask people to do something today that they were not doing yesterday, we need to understand the science of change and build capabilities in people, processes, and systems. If change matters, it needs to be incorporated into your business strategy. Organizations with highly effective executive sponsors of change are roughly three times more likely to meet objectives than those with ineffective executive sponsors [1].
Change is also accelerating. Much like the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, AI is transforming work at a pace that is hard to process. Take software development. Over just the past two years, many developers have had to navigate daily uncertainty about tools, workflows, and roles. In 2024, approximately 76% were using AI to do their work. That number has climbed in 2025 to approximately 84%, with roughly half of those developers using AI on a daily basis [2][3].
Our current systems often are not designed to keep up at this speed. That means all of us share responsibility for preparing people and organizations to adapt. We need proven practices for enabling change and smart choices about the conditions that make change easier, faster, and more agile.
So why are we talking about this? Because providers of tools and systems that guide strategy have an obligation to support better decisions about people. Employee listening captures the voice of employees and uses it to assess, refine, and build better workplaces. Work takes up a large share of our lives and shapes who we are. As Viktor Frankl pointed out, one of the ways we find meaning and purpose is through our work. If that is true, then investing in how we listen to our people in the workplace and enable their capacity to effectively navigate change is not optional. Additionally, meta-analyses link higher engagement to better performance outcomes [4], further emphasizing the case that listening is not just a moral imperative, it is material as well.
A Network-Based Lens on Listening
We use a network-based approach to employee listening. “Network-based listening is a next-generation approach to employee listening that integrates feedback with network analysis, uncovering the influencers, hidden communities, and collaboration patterns that shape experience, culture, change, and performance.” That means we do not only see the formal structures and reporting lines. We also illuminate the informal networks where work actually happens.
Every organization runs on two structures at once. The formal hierarchy shows titles, roles, locations, and other data you might store in your HRIS. The informal structure shows the everyday flow of advice, problem solving, influence, and trust. Most of us can feel that second network in meetings and chats, but it rarely has a label or a system of record. Organizational network analysis (ONA) measures the real collaboration patterns across teams, revealing influence pathways that org charts miss [5].
Bringing those hidden connections into view changes how you manage change. It helps you understand dynamics that are otherwise hard to see and gives you more precise levers to pull, both for changes underway and for the changes you know are coming.
Change Now: Build the Right Coalition Faster
At the system level, network-based listening helps you map informal networks and identify the people who are uniquely positioned within the organization to help accelerate a change. Relative to traditional practices, you can quickly identify individuals that could play an integral role in your change coalition or sponsor network, rather than guessing or only drawing from the circle you already know. Having a more objective perspective can serve as a good litmus test for some of your intuitive selections and hunches.
Executive support is often the strongest predictor of change success. That makes sense. Executives secure resources, set priorities, and send clear signals. But beyond executive sponsorship, you also need the information brokers, bridge builders, and deeply embedded connectors who move messages, shape norms, and help teams act. You might have a hunch about who they are. To be confident, you need data.
Network-based listening can help mitigate individual bias and speed up selection. It helps ensure you have the right mix of influencers and reach in your coalition, so you can launch with structure and momentum. Even if your intention for your next employee listening survey is not focused specifically on change, one of the advantages of a network-based approach is that the insights can be leveraged to strengthen any change initiative if needed.
Change Next: Do Better Pre-Mortems and Risk Assessments
The same network-based approach can help you mitigate avoidable risks and points of failure. Before you roll out a change that you know has a specific impact on a particular community or role group, you can look at current engagement, cohesion, and connection patterns. You can spot potential friction points and areas of likely resistance, as well as other causes of failure. Another good way to surface this kind of information is to conduct a pre-mortem. The pre-mortem, a “prospective hindsight” method popularized by Gary Klein, helps teams surface risks early and counter overconfidence [6]. You can incorporate this information and context into your next employee listening survey.
Incorporating the context around which types of influencers will help you successfully navigate an upcoming change will surface important insights that help you plan targeted support, sequence communications, and set expectations early with the right people. If you know in advance that there are big changes on the horizon, you can add that essential context into your ONA, which will help you hone in on and surface the influencers best suited to support what you are looking to accomplish.
Resistance is a natural part of how people experience change. A structured, data-informed pre-mortem does not eliminate resistance. It helps you mitigate it. You identify risks before they grow, act where it matters most, and learn faster from early signals. At the time of Prosci’s last benchmarking survey conducted in 2023, the most significant challenge facing the change management discipline over the next five years was resistance to change [7]. Having this foresight and incorporating this context into your ONA to surface influencers who can help you overcome and better prepare to navigate resistance is an invaluable insight that will help position your organization.
Bring It Together
The goal here is not to create a comprehensive diagnostic in one article. It is to focus attention on two practical capabilities that your systems and tools should support:
Change today: Build the right coalitions and sponsor networks quickly by identifying the real influencers, brokers, and connectors.
Change tomorrow: Strengthen pre-mortems and initial risk assessments using accurate network and community data to anticipate resistance and reduce friction.
If you want to explore how OrgAcuity applies network-based listening to change management in your context, we are happy to talk.
Questions to reflect on and discuss
When you think about your last major change, how did you identify the informal leaders who actually moved the work?
Where might hidden networks be helping or hindering your current initiatives?
If you could see one new data point about connections before your next rollout, what would it be and why?
References
[1] Prosci — 12 Change Management Principles and Best Practices. Overview of foundational change principles and practices. https://www.prosci.com/blog/change-management-principles
[2] Stack Overflow — 2024 Developer Survey: AI. Evidence on AI adoption and sentiment among developers. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024
[3] Stack Overflow — 2025 Developer Survey: AI. Year-over-year updates on usage and daily reliance. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025
[4] Gallup — Q12 Meta-Analysis Report. Research linking employee engagement to performance outcomes. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/321725/gallup-q12-meta-analysis-report.aspx
[5] Rob Cross — What is Organizational Network Analysis (ONA)? Primer on networks, brokers, and collaboration patterns. https://www.robcross.org/what-is-organizational-network-analysis/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
[6] Harvard Business Review — Gary Klein (2007). Performing a Project Premortem. Method for surfacing risks before launch. https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem
[7] Prosci — Best Practices in Change Management, 12th Edition: Executive Summary. Benchmarks on sponsorship and change outcomes. https://empower.prosci.com/best-practices-change-management-executive-summary
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