Efficiency

A powerful shift is happening in the world of organisational change.

Increasingly, leading thinkers are arguing that change should not sit solely with specialist teams. Instead, organisations are being encouraged to become change-seeking – places where everyone naturally asks, “What can we improve? What’s next? What should we do differently?”

Gartner captured this perfectly in their recent guidance, calling for change to become a standard, instinctive part of every role, rather than something that is “rolled out” by a central function.

At May Business Consulting (MBC), this shift resonates deeply with our philosophy.

We have long believed that the most successful organisations are not the ones with the thickest change handbooks, but the ones where change runs through the veins of the business – where people don’t “wait for change”, they live it.

The Tension: When Experts Feel Threatened

As this movement grows, we have seen understandable pushback from traditional change professionals. Common concerns include:

• “We’re already overstretched – now we have to train everyone too?”
• “People won’t even attend design workshops – how will they find time to learn change skills?”
• “If they don’t engage with their own change, why would they learn how to lead it?”
• And most tellingly: “This devalues what we do.”

That last point matters. Many experienced practitioners fear that complex behavioural change will be trivialised if “everyone becomes a change manager”.

At MBC, we take a very different view.

This is not a threat to expertise. It is an opportunity to amplify it.

Harmony, Not Replacement: The MBC Perspective

We don’t believe in turning every employee into a change expert. Instead, we believe in harmony between two powerful forces:

• Change Experts – who bring depth, structure, psychology, and experience.
• Enthusiastic Amateurs – people across the business who have energy, context, and real-world influence.

When these two groups work together, something powerful happens:

• Experts stop being “process police” and become enablers and coaches.
• The business stops being “recipients of change” and becomes owners of it.
• Change stops being an event and becomes a habit.

This is the culture MBC helps organisations build.

We don’t just apply methodologies or install governance.

We leave behind mindsets, muscle memory and confidence.

Our goal is not dependency on us.

Our goal is a business that no longer needs us to drive every change.

Turning Capability Building into Strategic Advantage

Rather than fighting the normalisation of change, MBC encourages organisations to lean into it intelligently:

• Embed practical change skills into leadership development.
• Partner with Learning & Development to scale capability without exhausting change teams.
• Use specialist change professionals as coaches and architects, not bottlenecks.
• Upskill leaders in behavioural science, neuroscience and decision-making so change becomes safer, not scarier.

In this model, specialists are not diluted – they are elevated.

Their value increases because their influence expands beyond the projects they directly touch.

Isn’t this a pipe dream? 

No, we’ve been helping Organisations implement change methodologies and mindsets for years – and in the process, pretty much know all the objections, have experienced many of the mistakes people make and developed strategies to ensure there isn’t an elastic band effect (snaps straight back once we let go).

If you’ve got big growth ambitions, change is the world you’ll be living in. Isn’t it easier to get all your teams skilled in making it happen?