See on Linkedin

There have been quite a few articles on change floating around LinkedIn recently. All of them excellent, all offering a fresh perspective. So, here's mine — served with a side of humour, a block of metaphorical cheese, and the occasional flightless bird.

Change. It’s a bit like your office kettle — always bubbling, occasionally exploding, and somehow never where you left it.

From mergers and acquisitions to those infamous “strategic pivots” (read: nobody knows what’s happening but we’re changing everything anyway), change has become the workplace version of Game of Thrones. And as every seasoned employee knows, winter is always coming — and it usually brings a shiny new org chart.

Over the past 40 years, I’ve been steeped in change — sometimes as the bewildered bystander, sometimes as the poor soul tasked with managing it. I’ve sat through slick presentations, attended workshops, and heard consultants quote whole books — but none of them ever truly made you feel like you were part of the ride.

So, for this piece, I thought I’d lean on some ‘experts’ — namely, some highly opinionated mice and a few emotionally intelligent penguins. 😊

Cheese, Penguins & Existential Dread

Who Moved My Cheese? (a book that really ought to be taught in primary schools) gave us a simple yet enduring truth: the cheese will move (Johnson, 1998). It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been nibbling away at it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve laminated your name on the wedge. One day — poof — it’s gone. The question isn’t if you’ll adapt, it’s when.

Meanwhile, over in Our Iceberg is Melting, Kotter and Rathgeber (2006) introduce us to a penguin colony experiencing a very soggy existential crisis. A curious bird named Fred (of course it’s Fred) puts together a PowerPoint to tell his leadership team that, in short, their iceberg is now a water feature. Drama ensues. One penguin probably forms a “Change Resistance” subcommittee.

My old pun, “change is inevitable — except from a vending machine”, has also had to evolve. Vending machines take contactless these days. No change required.

Change Happens — So Now What?

Here’s the good news: change doesn’t have to be a tragedy. It can be an adventure. A slightly stressful, occasionally caffeine-fuelled, mostly messy adventure — but an adventure, nonetheless.

Here’s how to channel your inner Haw (or Fred) and lead the charge, instead of hiding behind the flipchart:

Sniff the cheese regularly.
As Johnson puts it — stay alert. If every change takes you by surprise, you’re not paying attention. You’re snoozing in the maze.

Don’t build your nest on a melting iceberg.
If your strategy’s based on assumptions from 2014, don’t just “pivot”. Grab your metaphorical feathers and move. Or at least waddle purposefully in a new direction.

Bring others along.
People don’t hate change — they hate being blindsided. Or worse, being handed a Comic Sans slide deck called “Change Strategy: Phase 17”. We all like predictability. We enjoy a clear trajectory. What we don’t like is when our company sat nav suddenly says, “Recalculating… please make a U-turn.”

Expect resistance. Love them anyway.
Hem isn’t evil — he’s just terrified. Most resistance is rooted in fear, not malice. Empathy isn’t just something fluffy HR departments go on about. It’s genuinely useful.

Move with the cheese — or invent your own dairy.
Not all cheese is cheddar. Sometimes it’s halloumi. Sometimes it’s vegan. Sometimes it’s a whole new opportunity disguised as a cost-saving restructure.

If you’re steering the ship (either by job title or because everyone else accidentally left the meeting), remember you don’t need all the answers. What you do need is to create an environment where people feel safe enough to explore the unknown, speak up, and start building a shared vision of what comes next.

Be clear. Be kind. Be ready to laugh when it all goes sideways — because it will.

And if in doubt, channel your inner Fred and ask: “Is our iceberg melting?”

If it is — you’d best move. Preferably before the mice eat all the cheese.

References:

Johnson, S. (1998) Who Moved My Cheese? London: Vermilion.
Kotter, J.P. and Rathgeber, H. (2006) Our Iceberg is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions. London: Macmillan.