Perfect change management, still no adoption? The Change Activation Maturity Model diagnoses the real blockers across five dimensions.Â
We are joined by Nellie Wartoff, tech entrepreneur and founder of Tigerhall, a platform transforming how global companies drive large scale change. Since launching in 2019, Tigerhall has supported Fortune 500 organisations across 32 countries, and Nellie is a sought after speaker on transformation across the US, Europe and Asia.
Today she guides us through the Change Activation Maturity Model, a framework built to answer a question that has puzzled the profession for years. You can do change management absolutely perfectly, your impact assessments, stakeholder maps, plans and communication plans can all be flawless, and still not get adoption. So what actually makes change land?
The answer sits in what happens after launch. What drives adoption is the activation environment, the conditions that surround a change once it has gone live. This has been the determining factor of whether change lands or does not.
From change as a project to change as usual
The core difference between change management and change activation is that in change management, change is still very much a project and it is fairly episodic. You start an initiative, do all of the beautiful plans and assessments, launch, go live, then move on to the next project.
Change activation is about building change into an always on capability, because change today is always on. There is no such thing as business as usual any more, where you launch an initiative, get it done, shake hands and go back to normal. Today it is change as usual. Most organisations do not have one big initiative a year, they have a constantly overlapping pipeline of never ending change initiatives.
Change activation is really about making that shift from change as a project to change as an always on capability. The key pillars that make this activation environment happen are communication, capability building, feedback, measurement and sustainment.
What the research found
A little over 2,000 organisations have participated in this research over the past 13 months, with the first version published in November 2025 and continued iteration since. The organisations range from Fortune 500 firms of 100,000 to 200,000 employees down to companies of 300 or 400 people, with the majority between 10,000 and 50,000, primarily across the US and North America and spanning a wide range of industries.
The research keeps coming back to those five pillars, and this is what led to the framework now called CAM, the Change Activation Maturity Model. It lets you benchmark your current levels across the five dimensions, uncover where you are weaker and where hidden costs sit, and see the path to creating an always on activation environment.
Across each dimension there are five levels of maturity:
- Level one – reactive
- Level two – structured
- Level three – integrated
- Level four – scaled
- Level five – always on
No organisation is a five on everything, and no one is completely nailing it. Plenty are a one on everything, and there is nothing to be ashamed of in that. Most sit somewhere in between, perhaps a three or four in some dimensions and a one or two in others, and that is perfectly fine. Across the whole picture, around 42% of organisations are operating in reactive mode at level one.
The point is not to move everyone from level one to level five tomorrow. It is to find your weakest link and start optimising, moving the needle on these buckets one by one, level by level.
Communication, the myth of more
One of the biggest myths this research proved is that the more communication you do, the better, that there is no such thing as over communication. That is not true. The more targeted and action focused the communication, the better.
Adoption tends not to start until people can see themselves in the change and recognise what they should do. A broad awareness campaign leads 99% of people to think that is not for me, that is for someone else. Generic awareness actually creates more delays, because people start to ignore it, and it does not create alignment. Some read silence as agreement, when it can show up as resistance later.
What good looks like is communication that optimises based on who the person is, tailored to what they are doing, who they are and how they respond, and adapted to their context and timing, delivered in the moment of need. This is one area where AI is doing a fantastic job. The ability to truly personalise at scale is something the profession did not have before AI, so there are no excuses any more for mass communication.
Communication was the dimension where the largest share of organisations sat in the reactive stages, with almost 70% in level one or level two. Around 12.1% of organisations currently personalise communications. A separate survey found that 13% of employees strongly agree their leaders communicate effectively. The numbers are independent, but the parallel is hard to ignore. Getting the right message to the right person at the right time is the key to communication.
Capability building, meet people in the workflow
People still need to know what the map is and what they are supposed to do. The difference between organisations at level one and level five came down to how they embed new behaviours when those behaviours are harder than the old ones.
Treating training as a tick box, people attended the session, got the materials, done, is not a good way to do it. It produces errors and workarounds after launch. When capability building happens far from the workflow, it works in isolation. People go to the training, come back, and no longer know what was supposed to change, especially for tasks done under time pressure and stress, which are the hardest habits to shift.
The memorable example is an ERP rollout at a manufacturing organisation. Six months later, two plants were asked how the new system was going, and the answer was, ERP, what new system? They had done nothing for six months and were still working on pen and paper, but had said nothing because they were officially trained. That is what going back to old habits looks like, and it shows up in the adoption numbers much later.
This connects to a point raised in the session, that adoption can slow without any visible resistance. When you rely on training completed and attendance tracked, people simply do not do it, quietly, and you only notice later.
What good looks like is adaptive support that meets people where they are:
- Tailored to different personas, behaviours and workflows.
- Short and bite sized, not one or two hour trainings, delivered as prompts in the moment of need.
- Targeted to the specific part people struggle with, not just who struggles overall.
- Careful not to overwhelm the people who are already getting it right.
Being adaptive means adapting to both the type of person and the specific part of the change, since someone might nail one ERP module and struggle badly with another. Technology does this well, knowing what should be delivered and triggering it at the right time based on individual workflows.
Feedback loops, speed not feelings
Feedback loops are often completely missing, which leads to a lot of slowness. There is a common misunderstanding that feedback loops are about sitting around the fire, holding hands and taking care of feelings. They are not about feelings, they are about speed of execution.
The point of a feedback loop is how quickly you find out what is going wrong, because you will find out eventually. The question is whether you find out in real time, or in the adoption numbers 90 days later, or in the annual employee survey a year on when people may already have decided to leave. Speed is the number one outcome of feedback loops, and delayed adoption is very expensive, because every day, week and month of running two systems or two processes carries a real dollar cost.
Silence does not mean acceptance. It creates false confidence and can simply mean people have given up. When people have feedback that is not captured and feel unheard, resistance can grow tenfold over a short period, when the issue might have been small and easily answered.
A key misconception is that if you gather feedback you must act on it. The research does not support that. You can simply show that you listened, and that alone makes a difference, because people want to feel heard.
What good looks like is continuous feedback that captures both types of signal:
- Explicit feedback, what people tell you in comments, meetings, chats and surveys.
- Implicit feedback, what people actually do, the behaviours and signals such as returning to guidance, sharing it with colleagues or quietly not adopting at all.
These two often contrast. Some people say they love a change but never open the communication, while others stay silent yet keep returning to the reference documents and follow every step. Keep it real time and short, embedded where people are. Smaller, shorter and more frequent always beats long and infrequent, and avoids survey fatigue.
Measurement, the antidote to the loudest voice
We always need to measure where behaviours are changing and what actually moves the needle, so we can bring ROI and have data driven conversations. At level one, measurement is lagging and manual, so it arrives too late. It also has a hidden effect, the less data you have, the more political the organisation becomes.
Without data, leaders rely on anecdotes and it becomes the loudest voice, my team thinks this, my team thinks it is crap, everyone debating from their own perspective. Execution turns into an argument about interpretation. Change leaders hear all the time that a leader’s team is not adopting something and no one knows why, so they do more communication, more training, more enablement, without being able to pinpoint where adoption is breaking down or where to make a targeted intervention.
Organisations with data can be far more targeted, have better decision making conversations and move faster. What good looks like is always linking measurement to business outcomes, never driving behaviour change for its own sake. The strongest organisations worked backwards from the business outcome, usually through four or five if this then that steps, connecting each percentage point of adoption to the outcome it drives.
Measurement also drives resource allocation. Change and transformation teams are usually small, two or three people, sometimes up to seven, so they cannot peanut butter their effort across everyone. Measurement shows exactly where to intervene and where resources are best used. Almost 10% of organisations had automated dashboards feeding data in real time, connected to data lakes. Measurement is a good place to start, because it links to everything else, the executive conversations that drive decisions, pivots, budgets and investment in change management.
Sustainment, why change fades rather than fails
Sustainment is usually the phase abandoned the fastest. Project goes live, hands are shaken, on to the next one, and people assume that adoption at day 30, 60 or 90 will last for the next year. It will not. You do not get value if people use an ERP system for 30 days, you get value if they use it for 30 months or more.
The familiar figure is that 70% of change fails. It might be more accurate to say 70% of change fades. It does not fail dramatically, it fades out, goes into the shadows and declines very quietly.
Many organisations rely on leaders and champion networks to drive sustainment, which leads to uneven adoption. It is fragile, especially in transformation scenarios such as mergers, acquisitions, restructuring and operating model changes, where leaders move around and change happens fast. Managers also have very different skill sets, some are great at reinforcing discipline and others are not, so a systematic approach beats a people reliant one. The lowest performers relied on posters and slogans in the coffee room, and saw the fastest adoption drop.
What good looks like is planning reinforcement before go live and setting it up to run largely on its own afterwards, since few organisations will dedicate people to it. It should trigger on real time signals, so the moment someone drops out, for example no activity for 30 days when driving AI adoption, reinforcement kicks in with a prompt or guidance. The same system can target champions and managers so they are reminded too. Around 77% of organisations rely on just leaders and champions, which is great for credibility and reach but makes sustainment fragile and inconsistent.
What the model really measures
Taken as a whole, only about 2% of organisations reached the always on level, able to sustain activation at scale across multiple initiatives with a continuous change activation environment. Many sit in stages one and two.
You rarely sit in a single stage across all five dimensions, and the overall picture is really a measure of how predictable your change execution is. You might get great adoption on one initiative because of who is involved, the right people, champions and managers, and then have it fall apart on the next when those people are not there. The maturity model is about how predictably you can say we are going to get adoption, we are going to drive this behaviour change.
When you reach always on, that is when you have alignment, adoption and outcomes, at speed and at scale, moving from reactive to structured, integrated, scaled and eventually always on.
When taking this to an executive team, do not anchor on increasing a maturity score, because nobody cares about that. Anchor it on the ROI the change will deliver, focus on the weakest one or two dimensions, and frame your request for time, budget and tools as protecting that ROI. CAM is a living benchmark you can use over and over to see how you improve, so it becomes continuous improvement, not only of change but of how you drive change.
Watch the full session
The full webinar walks through each of the five dimensions in depth, the live polls comparing this audience to the research, the reactive to always on levels for every dimension, and the practical guidance on where to start and how to take it to your executive team.
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