In 2025, Leanscape conducted one of its largest surveys to date, gathering insight from nearly 700 professionals across industries, geographies, and organisational roles. Organisational change capability is a dynamic, multidimensional meta-capability woven into the fabric of the business. The aim of the research was not only to understand how organisations are actually experiencing leadership, change, and Lean, but also to identify strategic objectives and focus areas for building resilience and capturing opportunities. This research contributes to the broader understanding of organisational change capability and leadership trends, adding empirical evidence to the field.
This article is intended for business leaders, change managers, and professionals seeking to enhance their organization’s ability to manage change. Understanding and building organisational change capability is critical for long-term business success in today’s rapidly evolving environment.
Organisational change capability is the ability of an organization to effectively plan, implement, and sustain changes on an ongoing basis to adapt to its environment. It is a dynamic, multidimensional meta-capability woven into the fabric of the business. It enables organisations to adapt, manage risk, and seize new opportunities in an ever-changing environment.
Why Organisational Change Capability Matters
A strong change capability builds organizational resilience, enabling businesses to withstand disruptions and recover quickly from setbacks. A strong organizational change capability is crucial for survival and success in a fast-paced, unpredictable business environment.
The findings are revealing. Not because they point to a lack of ambition — but because they expose a growing execution gap between intent and capability.
Introduction to Organisational Change
Organisational change is an essential driver of long-term business success, enabling companies to adapt to shifting market dynamics, embrace new technologies, and continuously improve efficiency. In a world where external forces and customer expectations evolve rapidly, the ability to manage change effectively is a key differentiator. Change management provides the structured approach needed to guide individuals, teams, and entire organizations from their current state to a desired future state, minimizing disruption and maximizing positive outcomes.
Understanding Organisational Culture and Leadership
Effective change management starts with a clear understanding of the organization’s culture, leadership style, and existing processes. By identifying areas where targeted improvements are needed, leaders can align change initiatives with strategic planning goals and ensure that every step contributes to the organization’s overall capability and performance. This proactive approach not only helps to achieve specific business objectives but also builds a resilient culture that is ready to embrace future challenges.
Building a Resilient Organisation
Ultimately, developing strong organizational change capability empowers teams to deliver effective change, drive measurable results, and sustain improvements over time. By embedding change management into the fabric of the organization, businesses can create a culture of continuous improvement and position themselves for ongoing success.
1. Leadership Is Driving Change — But Not Always in the Right Way
When asked to describe the prevailing leadership style in their organisation, responses clustered around two dominant models:
- Transformational leadership (driving innovation and change)
- Autocratic leadership (centralised control and decision-making)
- Servant
- Democratic
- Laissez-Faire
This duality is telling. Many organisations aspire to transformation, yet rely heavily on top-down control to deliver it. Democratic and servant leadership styles were present, but significantly less common.
Business leaders play a pivotal role in driving and managing organisational change, but they often face significant challenges in securing buy-in from stakeholders at all levels. Leaders are responsible for setting and communicating the change agenda to align teams and drive collective efforts towards shared goals. Achieving successful transformation requires not only vision but also the ability to align leadership and build organisational buy-in across teams.
Leaders also encounter practical challenges in executing change, especially when balancing their vision with the realities of implementation, such as legal, bureaucratic, and stakeholder-related constraints. This tension shows up repeatedly in Leanscape’s client work: leaders want empowered teams, but default to command-and-control when pressure rises. Transformation becomes something done to the organisation rather than built with it. Survey findings and client engagements consistently show that aligning leadership and building organisational buy-in are critical for the success of change programs.
2. Change Capability Sits Uncomfortably in the Middle
Assessing Team Readiness
When respondents rated how well-equipped their teams are to manage and sustain change, the majority clustered around 3 out of 5. Only a minority felt truly confident.
This “moderate readiness” is one of the most consistent patterns Leanscape has seen in 2025. Organisations are no longer change-naïve — but they are not change-competent either. Change initiatives often fail due to a lack of relevant change capabilities within the organization.
The Predictable Result
The result is predictable:
- Initiatives launch well
- Energy fades
- Improvements plateau
- People quietly revert to old ways of working
Without robust change management, organizations risk having their change efforts fall short of expectations, leaving gaps in execution, safety, and efficiency. This pattern highlights the need for robust change management practices and tracking progress to ensure that organizational change delivers sustained outcomes. Without managing change effectively throughout the change process, improvements often plateau and organizations revert to old habits. Measuring progress and success in change initiatives is essential for ensuring that the desired outcomes are achieved and sustained, leading to successful change.
Change becomes episodic, not systemic. Organizational change capability is the ability of an organization to effectively plan, implement, and sustain changes on an ongoing basis to adapt to its environment.
3. Lean Is Known — But Rarely Embedded
Lean is not an unknown concept. In fact:
- The largest group described themselves as somewhat familiar with Lean
- A smaller but meaningful group actively applies it
- A significant minority remains unfamiliar or only tentatively interested
This “familiar but inconsistent” pattern is critical. It explains why many organisations run Lean projects yet fail to see sustained performance improvement. Delivering change becomes even more challenging when external disruptions and industry-specific challenges complicate the process, requiring resilience, adaptability, and strategic planning to achieve successful organisational change capability.
Lean as a Management System
Lean is often treated as the different types of Lean wastes:
- A toolkit
- A training programme
- A short-term productivity initiative
To achieve sustained improvement, it is essential to identify the key elements within processes, analyze how these processes currently operate, and target inefficiencies for improvement. For example, by mapping out a client onboarding process, an organization can pinpoint redundant steps and standardize workflows, leading to faster onboarding times and improved client satisfaction.
Rather than what it truly is: a management system that shapes decision-making, leadership behaviour, and daily work.
The Importance of Standardization in Change
Standardization is a cornerstone of effective change management, providing the consistency and clarity needed to manage change across complex organizations. By establishing standardized processes and procedures, businesses create a common language for managing change, making it easier for teams to collaborate, share best practices, and respond quickly to new challenges.
Benefits of Standardization
A standardized approach to change management helps organizations identify and address serious issues—such as resistance to change or inconsistent implementation—before they escalate. It also reduces the risks associated with change, ensuring that new initiatives are implemented in a controlled, predictable manner that safeguards business operations. Standardization enables leaders to monitor progress, measure outcomes, and make data-driven decisions that support continuous improvement.
Embedding Standardization
By embedding standardization into their change management practices, organizations can improve efficiency, reduce errors, and increase the likelihood of achieving their desired outcomes. This structured approach not only streamlines the change process but also empowers teams to manage and sustain effective change, driving long-term value for the business and its stakeholders.
4. The Real Barriers Are Not Technical
Across open responses, the same obstacles surfaced repeatedly:
- Lack of clear communication
- Resistance from leadership or teams
- Limited time and capacity
- Insufficient capability to sustain change
Navigating Organisational Complexity
Managing change within organizations is inherently complex, requiring attention to both the content of the change and the process by which it is implemented. Addressing change within means navigating strategic planning, stakeholder management, and overcoming bureaucratic inertia, all of which influence the success of organisational change capability.
Overcoming Resistance
Resistance to change can be a natural part of the change process, and it is important to embrace engagement and discuss concerns.
These are not technical problems. They are leadership and system design problems. Overcoming these barriers requires involving people at all levels, encouraging them to contribute ideas and efforts, and creating a supportive environment to support change. Creating a supportive environment for change involves engaging employees as stakeholders in the change process to foster ownership and support.
This reinforces a core belief behind Leanscape’s work in 2025: operational excellence fails not because people don’t understand the tools — but because organisations do not design the conditions for those tools to work.
Measuring Change Success
Measuring change success is at the heart of effective change management. For organizations aiming to reach their desired future state, it’s not enough to simply launch change initiatives—leaders must also assess whether those initiatives are delivering real, measurable outcomes. Performance management frameworks play a critical role here, translating strategic ambitions into measurable outcomes and ensuring that change programmes deliver tangible, sustainable results through regular monitoring and disciplined progress tracking.
Setting KPIs
This requires a structured approach:
- Setting clear goals
- Defining key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Regularly tracking progress against benchmarks
Using Maturity Models
After defining KPIs and tracking progress, organizations can leverage the Prosci Change Management Maturity Model as a tool for measuring their organizational change management progress. This model evaluates maturity across five capability areas:
- Leadership
- Application
- Competencies
- Standardization
- Socialization
By assessing these areas, organizations gain a comprehensive view of their change management maturity and can identify targeted opportunities for improvement.
Feedback Loops
Organizational change management is most effective when it includes feedback loops from stakeholders at every level. By gathering input from those impacted by change, organizations can identify areas where the change process is working well and where targeted improvements are needed. This data-driven approach enables management to make informed decisions, refine processes, and ensure that change initiatives are not just implemented, but are truly effective.
Achieving Tangible Results
Ultimately, measuring change success helps organizations move beyond intentions to tangible results. It ensures that each initiative contributes to the overall effectiveness of the organization, supports continuous improvement, and brings the business closer to its strategic objectives.
Creating a Culture of Change
A culture of change is the foundation for managing change effectively and achieving successful change outcomes. In today’s fast-moving business environment, organizations must be able to adapt quickly to external forces—whether that’s new technology, shifting market demands, or regulatory changes. This adaptability starts with a culture that supports change at every level.
Leadership and Communication
To create such a culture, leadership must focus on open communication, active support, and empowering employees to contribute to change initiatives. Recognizing and rewarding those who embrace change helps reinforce positive behaviors and encourages the whole team to get involved. It’s also essential to foster an environment where taking calculated risks and learning from setbacks is not only accepted but encouraged.
Embedding Change Values
By embedding these values into the organization’s culture, leaders can ensure that change is not seen as a disruption, but as an opportunity for growth and improvement. This cultural shift enables organizations to manage change proactively, support business objectives, and maintain a competitive edge in the face of ongoing challenges.
Ensuring Sustainable Change
Sustainable change is the ultimate goal of organizational change management—change that endures, delivers ongoing value, and becomes part of the organization’s DNA. Achieving this requires more than a one-off project or a temporary push; it demands a strategic approach that embeds change into both culture and processes.
The Role of Leadership
Effective leadership plays a crucial role in ensuring that change initiatives are supported with the right resources, clear goals, and ongoing communication. Organizations must focus on continuous improvement, regularly reviewing and refining their approach to meet unique challenges as they arise. Providing training, coaching, and support helps teams adapt and thrive, making it easier to embed change and improve efficiency over the long term.
Commitment to Sustainability
By prioritizing sustainable change, organizations can achieve lasting success, enhance organizational performance, and create a resilient foundation for future transformation efforts. This commitment to sustainability ensures that the benefits of change are not only realized but maintained, driving ongoing value for the business and its stakeholders.
5. What This Means for Organisations in 2026
The survey points to a clear conclusion.
The next phase of transformation will not be driven by:
- More frameworks
- More certifications
- More technology alone
It will be driven by organisations that:
- Develop leaders who can enable change, not control it
- Build internal capability rather than relying on consultants
- Treat Lean as a way of running the business, not a side initiative
- Invest in coaching, reflection, and applied learning
- Embed change as a normal part of business operations to foster continuous learning and innovation
Building change capabilities from within through targeted training and coaching helps sustain the benefits of change initiatives. Successfully delivering change in the face of external disruptions and industry-specific challenges requires resilience, adaptability, and strategic planning.
This is precisely where Leanscape has focused its work throughout 2025 — helping organisations move from knowing to doing, and from isolated improvement to sustained performance.
The data does not suggest organisations are failing.
It suggests they are halfway through a transition — and need a different kind of support to finish it. Delivering value to both the organization and its clients is essential, and to achieve sustained change, organisations must focus on embedding change and considering client needs at every stage.
Organisational Change Capability in the Public Sector
Public sector organizations face unique challenges in delivering change, including complex regulatory environments, diverse stakeholder groups, and significant political influence. These factors necessitate a bespoke approach to assessing and building organisational change capability. Public organizations must be change-capable entities to meet the major issues of contemporary society.
To address these needs, public managers can utilize the organisational change capability (OCC) scale to assess and enhance change capabilities within their organizations. The OCC scale systematically evaluates a public sector organization’s ability to adapt across 15 distinct components, such as employee engagement, strategic planning, and stakeholder management, reflecting the unique challenges in public sector environments. With 77 items distributed across these 15 components, the OCC scale provides a comprehensive and multidimensional evaluation of how public organizations adapt to change, allowing for an overall assessment and pinpointing specific strengths and weaknesses.
The development of the OCC scale involved a comprehensive literature search, expert review, and empirical validation, ensuring its relevance and rigor. The OCC scale is designed to help public sector organizations identify areas for improvement and enhance their ability to deliver change effectively. The creation of such a measurement scale is essential for public organizations due to their distinct operational, regulatory, and political environments.
Get in Touch
Ready to take your organisational change capability to the next level in 2026? Connect with Leanscape to discover how our expert consultancy, tailored training programs, and hands-on coaching can support your transformation journey. Whether you’re aiming to build leadership skills, embed Lean thinking, or drive sustainable change, we’re here to help you achieve lasting success.
Contact us today to learn more and start building your organisation’s future with confidence.
