Four decades of change management: lessons in courage, sponsorship and trust with Richard Smith
We are joined by Richard Smith, an international management consultant, educator and author with a career spanning over four decades. Richard held senior roles at major corporations including Dixon Group, United Biscuits and Lloyds Bank before founding his own consultancy, and has since advised organisations such as Unilever, Nestlé, Mars and Harvard Business School across more than 40 countries.
Richard is best known as the co-author and lead editor of The Effective Change Manager’s Handbook, and was Chief Examiner for APMG’s Change Management products. At the 2026 Change Awards, he was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award, recognising four decades of influence as a practitioner, educator, author and mentor.
In conversation with Steffi Jackson, CEO of the Change Management Institute, Richard reflects on an early mistake that taught him about courage, a culture change that delivered an order of magnitude improvement, the teams that shaped his thinking, what organisations consistently underestimate, and the one piece of wisdom he offers the next generation of Change Professionals.
One little decision at a time
Asked about a career recognised with a Lifetime Achievement Award, Richard keeps it simple:
“The truth is that it comes one little decision at a time, and you don’t see the end from the beginning, you just take the next step.”
Before it was called Change Management
Richard’s first change project was in 1977, close to 50 years ago. It wasn’t called Change Management. It was called something like trying to make things better for the organisation and the people who work for it.
Although much of that work would now be labelled the management of change, his heart has always been in using whatever skills, knowledge and experience he has built along the way to make things better for the organisation and for the people who work for it.
His background is in organisational development, one of the major threads within the Change Management community. Many of his colleagues come from project and programme management and a whole range of other disciplines, bringing their skills and expertise into the community.
An early lesson in courage
The mistake Richard remembers most strongly, and thinks of with some sadness, comes from his time on the management team of a significant manufacturing site. It was not a happy management team. The preferred means of management communication was personal attack, and it was a very conflict-ridden place.
When a little crisis came in the life of the plant, Richard was able to do some cultural work with the senior team, of which he was a member. He talked explicitly with the CEO about the fact that he might come under some criticism in the process. The CEO acknowledged it, but did not internalise it. After an initial discussion, the series of management meetings that were supposed to follow it through faded away. Things came up that meant they couldn’t happen.
What went wrong
- Not taking the opportunity to involve somebody outside
- Not getting explicit agreement in the meeting, amongst the people involved
- Being intimidated by the environment, and not asserting strongly enough the importance of keeping dates in the diary to follow it through
The lessons Richard takes away
- Courage: sometimes you have to put yourself out there to make something happen
- Public commitment: seek the widest possible commitment within a community to the follow-through process
A thought from Peter Block, which Richard read much later, made a lot of sense to him: the best internal consultants are the ones with a good job offer in their back pocket, because they have less to lose.
Shifting an IT culture towards the customer
The client story Richard shares is a significant culture change in the IT area of a financial organisation in the UK. This was an IT division of around 1,500 people serving a very large financial institution.
The starting point
The environment was fairly hierarchical, fairly rigid and, in Richard’s words, fairly arrogant. The view was that the people in the financial end of the business don’t really understand IT, so they don’t really understand what they want, and IT would give them what it knew they needed. It was certainly not customer-focused. Richard got his wrist slapped for describing people internally as customers. “Users” was the culture.
The challenge was to shift to something much more internally customer-centric and much more agile, not only in the contemporary sense, but able to respond more fluidly to the needs of internal, and ultimately external, customers. Five years in, the CEO of the division had failed in one of his five goals: he had not delivered what he described as quality.
The senior executive appointed to drive quality came to Richard suggesting training, with groups brought together for half a day to hear about the importance of alignment and quality. Richard’s response was that he didn’t think it was going to work.
A multi-pronged approach
- A lived-through business simulation: not computer-based, run over a day or two, helping people live through the change of an organisation from internally focused and systems-rigid to one that is fluid, customer-focused and responsive to need downstream
- Everyone takes part: from the Chief Executive down to junior supervisors, in mixed groups of about 30 at a time, putting around 1,200 people through the process over 18 months
- A cohort of facilitators from every department: each department identified two or three of its most respected and best people, “not the dregs”, and committed 10% of their time, half a day a week or the equivalent, to continue the transformation
- Credibility through the simulation: the facilitators ran teams within the simulation, which showed they understood the tools for improving customer alignment and total quality, what we would now call Lean Six Sigma
- Embedded locally: as momentum grew, the facilitators were there in their departments, ready to facilitate people’s ideas locally and act as a resource amongst their peers
It was, effectively, a network of change agents, although it wasn’t labelled that way.
The result
Over two to three years, the service delivery level moved from around 98 to 99%, which sounds quite good but isn’t in that industry, to 99.8 to 99.9%. That is an order of magnitude change in about three years.
The threads running through it are change agents, respect, and something that caught people’s imagination, engaged them, and gave them a lived experience of something different to their normal day-to-day, which in turn provided a very good analogue for the day-to-day.
Sponsorship that showed up
The principle had the backing of the CEO, who committed to attending every one of the two-day workshops, 30 or 40 over 18 months, for two or three hours to discuss, answer questions and debate the issues. On the four occasions he couldn’t make it, he sent his deputy to make sure the principles continued. With that level of senior commitment, Richard says, “I had it all, really, so it wasn’t that difficult.”
Never a solo act
At the awards, Richard noted that he has never been a solo act. Many people have coached and mentored him over the years, and the teams he has worked with have been seminal.
The team behind the Body of Knowledge
From joining the APMG exam panel at the beginning of its foundation exam in 2006, Richard built relationships with colleagues who became the core team that:
- Worked with the Change Management Institute to write the first edition of the Body of Knowledge
- Saw through a complete transformation of the APMG exams to align with the Body of Knowledge
- Wrote the Change Manager’s Handbook to support that
The team includes people with backgrounds in business analysis, change management training, and project and programme management, the more procedural aspects of change that were not Richard’s original “heart territory”. He values the freedom to work with and learn from them while contributing his own piece of the jigsaw. The boundaries have shifted over the years, but the culture of commitment to each other and to delivery has been sustained, and working with those people has been one of the joys of his life.
When the award was made, Richard found himself talking about the whole range of people in Change Management who work their socks off day after day, put themselves out there and make things happen. In a sense, he was accepting the award on their behalf.
What organisations consistently underestimate
On Lewin’s unfreeze, change, refreeze, Richard offers a useful perspective. At a big scale it is not true, yet it can be a helpful heuristic for seeing pieces of a much more fluid and larger change, as a mental tool.
“No model is the truth. They’re all maps of a territory, they’re not the territory.”
What organisations undervalue most is what Bridges called the difference between change and transition. It is very easy, from a senior place in an organisation, to have a plan with dates in it. It is desperately easy to miss that the transition for individuals, groups and teams won’t necessarily happen to plan. The activities might, but real engagement with the change happens one person, one team at a time.
The risk, particularly with today’s pace of change, is to keep driving date, date, date, and not fully acknowledge the need for human beings to engage with the change in order for it to embed and sustain.
Resistance, or simply time?
The change curve, which we all know and love or know and hate, sometimes gets a bit of a bad rap. Richard uses it to make an important point: what senior people sometimes see as resistance is actually a function of time.
- Senior people have usually already had time to digest the change and have been involved in helping to shape it
- They will have had their own wobbles on the way, but because they have been involved, those wobbles are probably relatively small
- By the time they make the announcement, they are at the end of engaging with the future, while others are only starting on the downswing of the curve
From that vantage point, it is easy to look back and ask, “aren’t they resistant?” They are not. They are being normal human beings, trying to process a change they now have to engage with. It is not a universal reality, but it is an illuminating way of recognising that people have to process a change internally to really make it work, so they can give it their energy, what used to be called discretionary energy.
Steffi adds that the word resistance can carry negative connotations, as if there is a deliberate move. It is more of a response to the process. Everyone moves through it at a different pace, and change means different things to different people.
One piece of wisdom: watch your character
For the next generation of Change Professionals, Richard’s belief is clear. The one thing you have to trade with, and cannot afford to lose, is the ability to elicit trust from the people you work with. That comes back to showing absolute integrity.
If people can’t quite trust you, they are going to feel the same about any change you are associated with.
“Watch your character. And make sure that people can trust you.”
That way you have the most influence, not only at senior level but in the body of the organisation, and you are able to act effectively as an agent for change.
Steffi closes on the same theme. Trust is one of the cornerstones of engaging with people and getting the real stories. Change is never a straight line, it is always a squiggly journey, and every Change Manager needs a level of resilience, to trust themselves, and sometimes to trust the process.
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