Why Your Change Program Is Too Fragile

Building organisations that gain from disorder

Maria Sievers | Bespoke Change

Most change programs are designed to fail.

Not intentionally, of course. They're built with the best intentions: detailed plans, risk registers, communication strategies, and governance frameworks. They're designed to manage uncertainty, minimise disruption, and control outcomes.

And that's precisely the problem. They're designed to be robust — to withstand shock. But robustness isn't enough. In complex systems, robustness eventually breaks.

The Fragility Trap

Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduced the concept of antifragility to describe systems that don't just resist shock — they actually improve because of it. Think of how muscles grow stronger through stress, or how immune systems develop through exposure to pathogens. These systems need volatility to thrive.

Most organisational change sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. We build fragile systems: centralised decision-making that creates single points of failure; rigid timelines that shatter when reality intervenes; top-down communications that collapse when the message doesn't land.

We then try to make these systems robust through additional controls, more detailed planning, tighter governance. But we're solving the wrong problem. The goal shouldn't be to withstand disruption. It should be to benefit from it.

Lessons from 65,000 Years

Taleb argues that time is the ultimate test of antifragility. Things that have survived a long time have proven their adaptive capacity; they're more likely to continue surviving.

By this measure, we have remarkable examples of antifragile systems right here. First Nations knowledge systems represent over 65,000 years of continuous adaptation — knowledge that has been tested against ice ages, dramatic climate shifts, and catastrophic disruption. These aren't rigid structures that survived despite change. They're dynamic systems that evolved

through it.

Consider the architecture: knowledge wasn't centralised in a single repository or held by one authority. It was distributed — embedded in Country, in story, in ceremony, across communities and kinship networks. You couldn't destroy the system by removing one node. Fire management practices didn't try to eliminate volatility; they worked with it, using controlled disorder to prevent catastrophic disorder.

There's wisdom here for how we think about organisational change.

What Antifragile Change Looks Like

If we took antifragility seriously, we'd design change programs differently.

We'd distribute ownership rather than centralise it. When change depends on a single leader, a single team, or a single narrative, it's fragile. When ownership is distributed — when people across the organisation carry the change forward because they've shaped it — the program gains resilience. The loss of any single node doesn't collapse the system.

We'd embrace small stressors deliberately. Taleb talks about hormesis: the phenomenon where small doses of stress strengthen a system. Pilot programs, iterative rollouts, and rapid feedback loops aren't just risk mitigation — they're opportunities for the organisation to build adaptive muscle. The organisation that has navigated ten small disruptions is stronger than one that's avoided disruption entirely.

We'd build for optionality, not optimisation. Fragile systems are optimised: every element serves a specific purpose, with no redundancy. Antifragile systems maintain options. They preserve the capacity to pivot when conditions change. This means resisting the urge to lock everything down in detailed project plans, and instead maintaining strategic flexibility.

We'd learn from what endures. The temptation in change management is always toward the new: new frameworks, new technologies, new best practices. But antifragility invites us to ask different questions. What has worked over time? What principles have proven their worth across contexts? What can we learn from systems that have survived volatility, rather than just theorised about it?

The Collaborative Imperative

This reframing has implications for how we engage people through change. Traditional approaches often position staff as recipients of change — people to be communicated to, trained, and supported through transition. This creates fragility: the change depends on the quality of the broadcast from the centre.

An antifragile approach recognises that the people closest to the work often have the clearest view of what needs to shift and what will actually work. Collaboration isn't just good practice — it's a structural advantage. It distributes intelligence across the system and creates multiple pathways for the change to succeed.

This is why I frame change work around together we rather than we will deliver to you. It's not just a warmer sentiment. It's antifragile architecture.

A Different Question

The next time you're designing a change program, resist the urge to ask: How do we minimise risk? That question leads to fragility.

Instead, ask: How do we build the organisation's capacity to grow stronger through disruption?

That's a harder question. It requires letting go of the illusion of control. It means accepting that volatility isn't the enemy — brittleness is. It invites us to learn from systems that have proven their adaptive capacity over deep time, rather than defaulting to whatever framework was published last year.

The organisations that will thrive in an increasingly uncertain environment won't be the ones with the best risk registers. They'll be the ones that have learned to gain from disorder.

Maria Sievers is the Managing Director of Bespoke Change, an Indigenous-owned strategic consultancy specialising in organisational change, executive coaching, and facilitation. She brings nearly 25 years of experience across the Australian Public Service and has developed the ART framework for collaborative change.