Change Management in 2025: Lead Yourself and Your Business Through Change

Here’s the key: your AI strategy is your business strategy, and your life strategy should reflect this. Upgrading tools without changing behaviours, incentives, and routines won’t work. HBR highlights that executives shouldn't rely on a single hero for AI transformation. They must promote shared leadership and demonstrate new behaviours. Change management at work and home means aligning goals, rituals, and feedback loops to new realities. Harvard Business Review

McKinsey’s 2025 research shows that companies benefiting from AI are changing how they work. They are redesigning processes. Senior leaders are now in charge of AI governance. Teams are being trained to see AI as a daily co-worker. In essence, change management is about crafting systems, not adding new tools. McKinsey & Company

I used to start Monday with a heroic to-do list. By Friday, the most strategic tasks were still untouched. Sound familiar? Here’s the switch I made (and coach clients to make) for practical change management:

1. Systems List (changes to how I work): e.g., “All creative drafting starts with an AI outline; all decisions logged in one doc; 30-minute daily review.”

2. Signals List (triggers that derail me): e.g., “Vague tasks,” “late approvals,” “context switching after lunch.”

Each morning, I run two micro-moves:

• If a task is fuzzy, I force clarity with a 1-sentence “Definition of Done.”

• If a trigger appears, I apply a pre-decided counter: block 20 minutes, draft with AI, then decide.

It’s simple, human, and it sticks— because change management lives or dies in the tiny moments where we either drift or decide.

1) Make AI everyone's job, not one person's title.

HBR states that CEOs can’t outsource AI leadership. Build distributed ownership—product, ops, finance, and HR each own specific AI outcomes. That’s modern change management. Harvard Business Review

Try this: appoint process stewards in each team who:

• Document one workflow to “rewire” with AI each quarter.

• measure cycle time and quality changes, and

• Share insights in a monthly demonstration.

2) Design for Continuous Change, Not One-and-Done

HBR points out change fatigue. It urges leaders to build change resilience. This includes regular check-ins, flexible systems, and learning loops. Treat change management like fitness: practice, rest, and progress. Harvard Business Review

Try this cycle: 6-week periods → plan (week 1), run (weeks 2–5), reflect (week 6). Prepare a one-page “what changed / what worked / what we learned.”

3) Rewire workflows, not tools.

McKinsey’s 2025 AI survey shows that value comes from redesigning workflows. It also highlights the need for senior accountability in AI governance. Change management must alter how people make decisions, not who clicks which button. McKinsey & Company

Try this: choose one high-volume process (support tickets, purchase orders, content production). Define the current baseline. Co-design a human + AI process. Launch a pilot with 10% of the volume. Share metrics each week.

4) Shift culture by changing systems (not slogans)

HBR warns that you can't change culture through town halls. You change it by adjusting systems like hiring, incentives, and reviews. Link recognition and rewards to experimenting with AI and documenting results. That’s operationalised culture—core change management. Harvard Business Review

5) Treat AI as a co-worker you train.

McKinsey frames gen-AI adoption as moving people from experimenters to accelerators. Provide playbooks for prompts, clear paths for errors, and regular “office hours.” Change management means upskilling + trust + guardrails. McKinsey & Company