When the Plan Meets Reality: What Really Happens When Organisations Change

There’s a moment in almost every significant organizational change when a leader looks up from the implementation plan and notices something unexpected. The change is technically underway. The announcements made, the new structure is on paper, the rollout is proceeding and yet something else is happening, something that wasn’t in the plan, or designed by anyone, and is increasingly difficult to ignore.

Maybe it’s a WhatsApp group that started as a way for three colleagues to make sense of  new reporting lines and has somehow become the place where forty people go to find out what’s actually going on. Maybe it’s a middle manager who was officially made redundant six months ago but whose informal advice is still shaping decisions at the highest level. Maybe it’s a quiet coalition of frontline staff who have developed their own way of doing things, one that works far better than the official process and are now, without quite intending to, pulling the whole organization in a different direction. None of this was planned. All of it is real. And it matters far more than most change frameworks give it credit for.

The Illusion of the Neat Transition

When we design organizational change, we tend to think in straight lines. There’s a current state, a future state, and a plan for getting from one to the other. We draw diagrams, set milestones, communicate the vision. The underlying assumption is that if we get the design right and execute it well, the organization will move from here to there in something resembling an orderly fashion.

What we consistently underestimate is that an organization is not a machine. It’s a living system made up of people with histories, loyalties, fears, relationships, and an extraordinary capacity for self-organization. When you introduce change into a living system, you don’t just shift what already exists. You create conditions in which entirely new things can form.

Think about what happened at a major UK retailer during a restructuring several years ago. The company had brought in external consultants, redesigned its regional management structure, and was three months into rollout when something unexpected emerged. A group of store managers, frustrated with the gap between what was being communicated centrally and what was actually happening on the ground, started holding their own informal calls every Tuesday morning. No agenda, no minutes, no senior sponsorship. Just a group of people trying to make sense of what was happening and support each other through it.

Within four months, those Tuesday calls were the most reliable source of operational intelligence in the company. Senior leaders started quietly listening in. Decisions were being shaped by what came out of them. An informal network, born from uncertainty and frustration, had become one of the most influential structures in the organization, more trusted than the official communication channels, more responsive than the formal feedback mechanisms, and entirely unplanned. This is what we call emergence in the Living Systems Practice and it is happening in your organization right now, whether you’re looking for it or not.

What Forms When Things Change

Emergence during transition takes many shapes, and not all of them are as generative as a helpful Tuesday morning call. Consider a hospital system that introduced a new electronic records platform across its network of sites. The implementation team was thorough producing training, facilitating change management and go-live support but the platform was noticeably slower than the old system, and in high-pressure clinical environments, speed matters. Within weeks, staff at several sites developed workarounds. In response, a consultant created a shared spreadsheet that captured the key information in a more accessible format. A ward clerk had figured out a sequence of steps that cut documentation time by half.

These workarounds spread quickly through informal channels. They were shared over coffee, passed on during handovers, and refined by each person who adopted them.

By the time the implementation team became aware of what was happening, the workarounds constituted the de facto system at three sites. The official platform was being used to satisfy audit requirements. The real work was happening somewhere else entirely.

This is the kind of emergence that makes change leaders nervous and this is understandable. The more useful response is not to shut it down and insist on the official process. It is to seek to understand what the pattern is communicating. In this case, it was telling the organization that the platform had real usability problems that needed to be addressed, that frontline clinical employees were excluded from the design process in ways that were now costing everyone, and that the informal networks through which information travels in a hospital are faster and more trusted than any official channel.

Formal Structure and Real Influence Are Not the Same Thing

One of the most persistent myths in organizational life is that influence lives where authority lives. We draw organizational charts and assume that what’s on them reflects where things actually get decided. This assumption does not capture the complexity of the situation. In most organisations, there are people with very little formal authority who shape the direction of things enormously. They can show up as a long-serving executive assistant who controls access and filters information or a technical specialist whose approval nobody officially needs but everyone quietly seeks before moving forward. It can be a former leader who left the organization two years ago but whose mental model of how things should work still lives within the culture, reproduced faithfully by the people who learned from them.

During transitions, this gap between formal structure and real influence becomes especially visible and consequential. A professional services firm going through a leadership transition discovered this the hard way. The outgoing managing partner built the firm over twenty years and was leaving on good terms. Succession had been thoughtfully managed so the incoming leader was capable, well-prepared, and genuinely supported by the partnership. Yet, eighteen months in, it was clear that something was wrong.

The new leader was making decisions but the firm was not moving in the direction those decisions implied. Proposals would be approved in formal meetings and then quietly not implemented. New client relationships would be initiated and then somehow never quite get off the ground. There was no visible resistance, just a persistent, invisible gravitational pull toward the old way of doing things.

What the firm eventually uncovered was that the outgoing partner, despite having left, was still the primary anchor for how the culture made and interpreted decisions. Not because he was interfering but because the informal networks through which real work happened were still organized around his values, preferences, and his way of reading situations. People weren’t consciously resisting the new leader. They were simply continuing to operate within a field of influence that the previous leader had shaped over two decades and that hadn’t dissolved when he walked out the door. Formal transitions don’t automatically reconfigure the invisible architecture of influence. Understanding what that architecture looks like, and taking it seriously, is not a soft add-on to change management. It is a deep part of the work.

The Emergence You Didn’t Want Is Still Telling You Something

Not everything that emerges during transition is helpful. When a large public sector organization restructured its adult social care services, the intention was to create more integrated, person-centered support. What emerged instead, at least initially, was a parallel bureaucracy. Teams that had been asked to work collaboratively across boundaries were, in practice, spending enormous energy negotiating territory, protecting headcount, and managing relationships with each other rather than with the people they were supposed to be serving.

It would be tempting to label this as failure, poor change management, resistant culture, or inadequate leadership, and there were real problems in all those areas. But there was also something more instructive happening. The turf protection that emerged wasn’t irrational. It was a coherent response to a situation in which the new integrated model had been announced but the incentive structures, budget allocations, and performance frameworks hadn’t changed. People were being asked to collaborate while everything around them was still rewarding them for competing.

The unhelpful emergence was pointing directly at the gap between the stated intention and the actual conditions. The question was whether the organization had the capacity to read that signal honestly, or whether it would interpret the resistance as a culture problem to be managed rather than a design problem to be fixed.

Living systems always respond to the actual conditions they’re in, not the ones leaders wish they were in. When what emerges looks like resistance or dysfunction, it’s worth understanding which conditions people are actually responding to because the answer to this question is almost always more useful than any effort spent trying to push the emergent behaviour away.

The Change Starts Changing the Change

Here is the thing that most surprises people when they first encounter living systems: the change and what emerges from it are not separate phenomena. They are continuously reshaping each other. The Tuesday morning calls at the retailer didn’t just respond to the restructuring. They changed what the restructuring became. Once senior leaders started listening in, the information coming out of those calls influenced decisions. Those decisions shaped how the restructuring unfolded. The network that formed in response to uncertainty became part of the system that was navigating that uncertainty, not as a bystander, but as an active participant.

This is what makes transitions so genuinely complex, and why managing them as though they were linear processes is always going to produce surprises. You cannot fully predict what will emerge. You cannot control it, but you can develop the capacity to notice it, engage with it honestly, and let what you find update your understanding of what’s actually happening.

A technology company going through rapid scaling learned to do this well. Every quarter, the leadership team would spend half a day doing what they called a pattern review, not looking at metrics or milestones, but asking questions like. What conversations are happening that aren’t in any meeting room? Where are people getting their real information? What’s emerging that we didn’t design? What’s forming that we haven’t officially acknowledged? They treated these questions not as a threat to the plan but as essential intelligence about the living organization they were actually leading.

The questions don’t eliminate uncertainty, nothing does, but answering these questions and others like them meant they were rarely caught completely off guard by what emerged. When something unexpected did form, as it always does, they applied the discipline of asking what it was telling them rather than reflexively trying to shut it down.

What Paying Attention Looks Like

None of this requires complex methodology or specialist frameworks. It requires a shift in what you’re paying attention to. It means noticing where energy is going in your organization, not just where it’s supposed to go. It means asking who people actually turn to when they’re uncertain, not just who they’re formally supposed to consult. It means being curious about what’s forming in the informal spaces, the conversations over coffee, the group chats, the relationships that cut across the official structure and asking what those formations are telling you about the health of the change. It means, above all, resisting the comfortable assumption that the plan and reality are the same thing. They never are. The gap between them is not a problem to be closed. It’s the place where the most important information about your organization lives.

Transitions will always generate more than they intended. Organisations that navigate them most effectively are not necessarily the ones with the best plans. They’re the ones with enough self-awareness and observation skills to perceive what’s forming around the plan and enough honesty to let it change their understanding of what they’re actually doing.

When Conventional Approaches Are Not Enough

Stuck with a complex organizational challenge that doesn't seem to respond to conventional solutions? Our work takes you deeper, looking at organizations as living systems and exploring the relationships, patterns, tensions, values, and dynamics that may be producing the challenges you experience.

This approach is particularly relevant when organizations are struggling with persistent cultural problems, declining trust, leadership challenges, resistance to change, misalignment between values and behavior, siloed or fragmented systems, competing priorities, recurring conflict, organizational stagnation, or the need to regenerate rather than simply improve performance.

Our evolving research explores living systems, organizational alignment, trust, leadership, culture, organizational economics, degeneration, and regeneration, providing new ways to understand challenges that resist conventional interventions. Developed through more than 40 years of Fortune 500 and international consulting experience, the proprietary IFB and Living Systems Models provide the foundation for this work. More articles like this at www.orgsoul.com.