Ask a change leader what happened, and they will tell you many stories.
They will tell you about why they took the job and what they believed they could accomplish. They will recount in vivid detail the people who helped them, and the people who stood in their way. Inevitably, they will talk about the things they achieved, the compromises they made and the decisions they still question. Sometimes they remember a particular conversation, an unexpected ally, or a moment when they realized that the work was taking them somewhere they had never intended to go.
Some tell their stories with pride. Others tell them with regret, anger, or that painful clarity that comes from having had years to reconsider what happened. Sometimes the same person carries all of these things.
Over the past several months, I have been interviewing change leaders and sponsors across countries and sectors. I began with questions about authority, sponsorship, the unwritten rules of institutions, and what happens to people who move closer to power. I wanted to understand what makes institutional reform possible, what prevents it, and what people learn from attempting it.
What I found was that people rarely experienced these things as discrete problems to be solved; rather, they experienced them as events in a much longer story, one whose meaning often became clear only after they had left.
And although the circumstances differed, certain patterns began to emerge.
Four narrative arcs
The stories often begin with similar ambitions. Someone is recruited, appointed, or otherwise given the opportunity to change an institution. They believe the work matters. They accept the responsibility, along with risks they cannot yet fully appreciate.
What happens next is far less predictable.
In the first arc, the change leader finds a way to succeed. Sometimes the institution changes substantially. Sometimes the achievement is more modest, but no less meaningful. The change leader learns which battles are worth fighting, what can be accomplished, and when it is time to leave. Success may mean building something that lasts. It may also mean retaining the judgment and freedom to decide what comes next, rather than allowing the institution to make that decision for them.
In the second, the change leader stays, and over time becomes part of the institution they set out to change. Their influence may grow. Their work may continue. But the accommodations required to remain effective begin to change their understanding of what is possible, necessary, or worth pursuing. At some point, the distinction between exercising influence over an institution and being influenced by it becomes difficult to draw.
In the third, the change leader discovers that the institution’s commitment to change has limits that were not apparent at the beginning. The mission remains real to the person who accepted it, even as the institution’s willingness to honour that mission falters. The relationship deteriorates, and the consequences extend well beyond whatever happens to the work itself. The change leader leaves carrying a story profoundly different from the one they believed they were entering.
In the fourth, the change leader leaves before the institution is ready to change. The work may be unfinished, rejected, or only partially realized. Years later, circumstances force the institution to confront problems it had previously been unwilling to address. It may eventually undertake the very changes it once resisted. But belated institutional learning does not necessarily bring recognition, much less repair what happened to the person who tried to act earlier.
These are not fixed categories, nor are they necessarily mutually exclusive. A person may recognize themselves in more than one. The same career may contain several such stories.
What interests me is not simply where the stories end, but how people arrive at those endings, often without recognizing the direction in which they are travelling.
The cost of not knowing
It is tempting, after the fact, to identify the moment everything changed. Perhaps it was the meeting that should have gone differently or the appointment that altered the balance of power. Or maybe the concession that seemed inconsequential at the time. And even the warning someone offered but that the change leader did not yet know how to interpret, let alone the opportunity they failed to recognize until it had passed.
In retrospect, these moments acquire enormous significance. At the time, they may have seemed like another Tuesday.
People attempting institutional reform must make decisions without knowing how the story will end. They have work to do, often urgent work, and cannot spend every waking hour interpreting the motives of colleagues or calculating the political consequences of ordinary decisions. Nor should they have to, and yet much of what they need to know can only be learned through experience, relationships, mistakes, and sometimes through consequences that cannot be undone.
People who have been inside an institution for years possess knowledge that a newcomer cannot reasonably be expected to have. They know its history, its habits, the difference between what it says and what it does. They know which relationships matter, which commitments can be relied upon, and which apparent opportunities come with conditions nobody has thought to disclose. Some share that knowledge generously. Others may not even recognize how much of it they possess. Much of it remains invisible until someone unfamiliar with the institution discovers its importance the hard way.
The consequences are not confined to whether a reform succeeds or fails. People question their own judgment. They revisit decisions, relationships, and moments of apparent certainty. They wonder what they should have understood sooner, what they might have done differently, and whether another choice would have produced another ending. Some emerge with greater confidence in their judgment, while others take years to recover it. Some decide to attempt institutional change again in another setting, while others decide the price is too high.
But all of them have learned something that would have been useful to know at the beginning.
What a field guide might change
The knowledge change leaders carry is rarely the knowledge contained in official accounts of reform. Those accounts tend to describe strategies, structures, achievements, and lessons learned, usually from the institution’s point of view.
The stories people carry contain the decisions made under uncertainty, the relationships that mattered, the compromises that proved consequential, and the moments when an intervention might have changed the course of events. They reveal how people exercised judgment when the rules were incomplete, the stakes were personal, and the right course of action was anything but obvious.
This knowledge is expensive: acquired through years of work, difficult choices, damaged relationships, and sometimes the loss of a career or a sense of purpose. And too often, it leaves the institution with the person who acquired it. The next change leader arrives with their own ambitions, experience, and judgment. They may be exceptionally capable. They may even have been recruited precisely because they bring knowledge the institution lacks. But they will still have to learn much of the terrain for themselves.
What if some of that knowledge could be passed on?
The field guide is meant to help change leaders recognize situations they have not yet encountered. Ask questions they might not otherwise think to ask. Understand the choices available to them, and the possible consequences of each. It could help sponsors understand what it means to support someone through the difficult parts of change, not merely endorse the ambition behind it. It could help institutions recognize the ways their own arrangements make reform harder than it needs to be. Above all, it could make the experience of those who came before available to those who come next.
I am interested in those turning points. The decisions that could have altered the course of events. The interventions that might have produced another ending. The moments when someone could still have chosen differently, if only they had understood what was happening.
The people in these stories came to change their institutions. Some succeeded. Some were changed by them. Some left with work unfinished, only to see it taken up years later. Others paid a price that no eventual institutional achievement could repay.
Their stories deserve to be told for what they reveal, not only about institutions, but about the people who try to change them: what they risked, what they learned, and what their decisions cost them.