changefy.org

A non-profit hub for change projects — process redesign, culture work and post-mortems worth reading.

A reference on organisational change practice — the planning and review rituals, the diagnostic concepts and the roles that shape real change projects.

changefy.org covers organisational change as a practice — the rituals, diagnostic concepts and roles that frame real change projects, drawn from case-study literature and from practitioner experience rather than from consultancy white papers. The angle is practitioner-facing: a primer on the vocabulary that change practitioners use among themselves, framed for middle managers and project leaders who live the work.

The discipline rests on a small number of high-leverage practices that travel surprisingly well between industries. Pre-mortems and blameless post-mortems bracket project execution at the front and back. An explicit theory of change distinguishes well-thought-through interventions from cargo-cult adoptions of best practices. Honest accounting of resistance — treating it as data about the change design rather than as obstruction by the resisters — separates effective practitioners from ones who burn political capital unproductively. And the sponsor role, more than any other variable, predicts whether the change actually lands.

The glossary above sets out those concepts — pre-mortem, blameless post-mortem, theory of change, resistance, sponsor — at the level the case-study literature actually uses. Each term carries a project-execution and an organisational-politics meaning that the page makes explicit. Readers approaching this topic from a project management, transformation consulting or middle-management background will find the terms here line up with how change practitioners and the case-study literature actually use them.

Key terms

Pre-mortem

A planning exercise in which a team imagines that a project has already failed and works backward to identify why.

How The facilitator declares the project a failure at a specified future date, participants independently list plausible causes, the lists are aggregated and prioritised, and the resulting risks feed planning explicitly.

Why Pre-mortems surface concerns that organisational politics suppress under conventional planning rituals, which makes them disproportionately useful for change projects.

Blameless post-mortem

A structured review of an incident or completed project that focuses on systemic causes rather than individual fault.

How Participants reconstruct the timeline from documented evidence, identify contributing factors at process and system level, and the written output explicitly avoids assigning personal blame.

Why Blameless framing increases the volume and honesty of post-mortem contributions, and the resulting documents are the primary mechanism by which organisations learn from change projects.

Theory of change

An explicit causal model linking inputs and activities to intended outcomes and impact.

How The model is documented as a chain of if-then statements with assumptions and evidence at each link, periodically reviewed against observed outcomes, and revised when evidence contradicts the chain.

Why Theories of change distinguish well-thought-through interventions from cargo-cult adoptions of best practices, and any honest change-project publication has to ask whether the theory was articulated up front.

Resistance

The aggregated behavioural and political pushback against a proposed change in an organisation.

How Resistance manifests through slow adoption, undocumented workarounds, escalation through skip-level channels and quiet sabotage, and is often as informative about the change design as about the resisters.

Why Treating resistance as data rather than as obstruction is one of the few practices that distinguishes effective change practitioners, and honest case studies have to surface it explicitly.

Sponsor

The senior leader who legitimises a change project, holds decision rights on scope and provides cover when resistance peaks.

How The sponsor signs off on scope and resources, surfaces in key project rituals at appropriate moments, holds direct authority over the political units affected by the change, and decommissions the project cleanly if it fails.

Why Sponsor presence and quality is the single most reliable predictor of change-project outcome in case-study literature, so any honest publication has to surface sponsor behaviour transparently.

Frequently asked

What is changefy.org?

changefy.org is the topic surface for organisational change practice — the planning rituals, diagnostic concepts and named roles that frame how serious change projects are designed, executed and reviewed in real organisations.

What does a pre-mortem actually involve?

A pre-mortem is a planning exercise in which the team is asked to imagine that the project has already failed at some specified future date, then work backward independently to list the plausible causes. The lists are aggregated and prioritised, and the resulting risks feed planning. The exercise surfaces concerns that conventional planning rituals tend to suppress for political reasons, which is why it travels well between change practitioners.

Why is the sponsor role so heavily weighted in the literature?

Sponsor presence and quality is the single most reliable predictor of change-project outcome in the case-study literature. The sponsor legitimises the project at senior level, holds decision rights on scope, provides political cover when resistance peaks, and decommissions cleanly if the project fails. Projects without a strong sponsor reliably stall, regardless of how well the underlying change is designed.

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