Navigating Change: Valuable Lessons from Research on Effective Change Management

Change has a strange way of arriving uninvited. Sometimes it creeps in silently, almost politely. Other times it barges through the door with the subtlety of a jet engine spool‑up. Senior leaders in heavy-industries know this better than most. Regulations change, supply chains wobble, technologies mature or stall and entire programmes hinge on decisions made under pressure.

Yet for all the noise around change, the fundamentals of how people respond to it haven’t evolved as quickly as the systems we build. That’s why research still matters. It gives us a clearer view of the human currents beneath organisational turbulence. And when you look closely, a few landmark studies continue to shape how leaders think about change today.

What follows isn’t a technical manual or a checklist. It’s more of a guided walk through three influential pieces of research (with a few reflections along the way) the kind leaders often share in informal conversations between meetings or during those rare moments when the hangar floor finally falls silent.

Why change efforts stumble (and what that tells us)

Let’s start with John Kotter’s classic 1995 Harvard Business Review article, Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. Even after three decades, it still reads like a mirror held up to many modern programmes.

Kotter’s central point is simple enough: organisations don’t fail at change because people are incapable. They fail because the conditions for change were never truly created. He talks about urgency, vision, communication and momentum, which are words that can sound abstract until you’ve lived through a programme where one of them was missing.

You know what? The idea of “urgency” is often misunderstood. Leaders sometimes interpret it as pressure or speed. But Kotter meant something more subtle: a shared recognition that staying still is riskier than moving forward. In aerospace or energy, that resonates deeply. When a certification deadline looms or a new emissions standard approaches, urgency is a survival instinct, not a motivational tactic.

Kotter’s work eventually inspired the well‑known 8‑Step Change Model. Many leaders use it without even realising its origins. But the real value of the research isn’t the model itself, it’s the reminder that change is also a sequence of human experiences, not just a sequence of tasks.

The human side of change (and why it’s harder than it looks)

A few years after Kotter, Jeff Hiatt published The Perfect Change (1999), which later gave rise to the ADKAR model: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement. If Kotter zoomed out to the organisational level, Hiatt zoomed in to the individual.

ADKAR’s popularity isn’t accidental. It gives leaders a way to talk about change without drifting into corporate abstraction. It’s grounded in a simple truth: organisations don’t change, people do.

In engineering‑heavy environments, this matters. You can redesign a process, upgrade a turbine control system or introduce a new digital workflow, but if the people who operate, maintain or certify those systems don’t alter their behaviour, the change remains theoretical. It’s like installing a new avionics suite and never updating the pilot training syllabus.

Hiatt’s research also highlights something leaders often feel intuitively but rarely articulate: people don’t resist change because they’re stubborn. They resist because something essential (clarity, capability, confidence, or sometimes just time) is missing. And when one of those elements is absent, even the most elegant transformation plan can stall.

Sixty years of reactions to change (and the patterns that keep repeating)

Fast forward to 2011, when Shaul Oreg, Maria Vakola and Achilles Armenakis published a sweeping review of 60 years of quantitative studies on how employees react to organisational change. It’s one of those papers that reshapes the conversation, especially among leaders who’ve seen multiple waves of transformation.

Their findings confirm what many seasoned programme directors already suspect: reactions to change vary widely and those variations matter. People respond differently based on involvement, communication quality and perceived benefit. None of this is surprising, but the scale of the evidence gives it weight.

One insight stands out: participation consistently reduces resistance. Not because participation is a feel‑good exercise, but because it creates competence, control and trust. Three ingredients that engineers, technicians and operators value deeply. When people understand the “why” and have a hand in shaping the “how”, they’re far more likely to support the outcome.

It also reminds me of something Peter Drucker once said: “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” In change programmes, the unsaid often carries more weight than the official plan.

Connecting the dots across the research

When you place these three bodies of work side by side, a pattern emerges that senior leaders in complex industries will recognise instantly.

• Kotter shows that change collapses without shared urgency and clear direction

• Hiatt shows that individuals need specific conditions to adopt new behaviours

• Oreg, Vakola and Armenakis show that reactions to change are shaped by involvement and trust

Together they form a kind of triangulation. Not a methodology, not a framework, but a way of seeing. And once you see it, you start noticing the same dynamics everywhere: in programme reviews, in engineering stand‑ups, in supplier negotiations, even in the informal conversations that happen after a long shift.

Change isn’t a technical problem. It’s a human one that happens to play out in technical environments.

A brief digression (because real change is never linear)

If you’ve ever worked on a major aerospace or energy programme, you’ll know that change rarely follows the neat arc described in textbooks. It arrives in waves. It pauses. It accelerates. It gets tangled in certification cycles, procurement constraints or operational realities. Sometimes it even gets derailed by something as mundane as a missing part number or a misinterpreted requirement.

And yet, despite all that, the human patterns remain remarkably consistent. People want clarity. They want to feel capable. They want to know the change won’t undermine their identity or expertise. They want to trust the people leading it.

This is why research still matters. It gives leaders a language for what they’re already observing. It helps them avoid repeating the same mistakes under different programme names. And it reminds them that even in highly technical sectors, the emotional landscape of change is just as real as the engineering one.

So what does this mean for leaders today?

If you’re leading change in aerospace, energy, manufacturing or engineering, the research points to a few enduring truths:

• Urgency must be shared, not imposed

• People adopt change when they understand it and feel part of it

• Communication isn’t a broadcast; it’s a dialogue

• Short‑term wins matter because momentum is fragile

• Trust is the currency of every transformation

These aren’t slogans. They’re observations drawn from decades of evidence and thousands of lived experiences across industries.

And perhaps the most important lesson is this: change doesn’t need to be dramatic to be meaningful. Sometimes the quiet but steady changes (the ones that don’t make the headlines) are the ones that reshape an organisation’s future.

Final reflection

Change management research doesn’t give leaders a script. It gives them a compass. And in sectors where the stakes are high and the margins for error are thin, a compass is often more valuable than a map.

As leaders, we’re not just guiding organisations through change. We’re guiding people with their histories, their expertise, their doubts and their hopes. When we understand that, the research stops feeling academic and starts feeling deeply practical.

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About the Author

Nikos Apergis is the Founder and Principal Consultant at Alphacron, specialising in complex programmes and organisational change across aerospace, energy, engineering and manufacturing. His work focuses on working with organisations to steady major programmes during periods of change.