If You Want People on the Transformation Bus, It’s Your Job to Hand Them the Ticket
Think back to a time you worked with a great leader or team — there was flow, genuine curiosity, a shared purpose, creativity, and innovation. People accepted that it was hard at times, but they stepped up anyway. You didn’t walk away from meetings drained and frustrated — you left feeling inspired.
In those teams, you learned:
It’s about safety to try, not comfort to sit.
It’s about following intuition, even when it doesn’t quite make sense yet.
It’s about being creative in what you’re trying to do, not just how you’re doing it.
And yet, if we’ve been lucky enough to have this experience, many of us treat it as a mirage – something rare, to be stumbled upon once or twice in a career. In the meantime, we battle with mediocrity: overpaid, over-complicating, under-performing team members who block progress at any cost – including the cost to their own teams.
But here’s the thing: it’s rarely laziness or malice. More often, it’s fear. Fear of being left behind. Fear of being found out. Fear of getting it wrong. And where fear takes hold, role confusion is never far behind. Suddenly people don’t know what decisions they can make, which responsibilities they own, or how their work connects to the bigger picture.
Together, fear and confusion act as the silent saboteurs of transformation.
Fear-Based Decision Making
When people are afraid — afraid of getting it wrong, looking foolish, or losing their relevance — they resist change. This shows up as:
Sticking with old routines (“it’s just easier this way”)
Saying “no” to new ideas
Doing things because they’ve always been done that way
Prioritising activity over impact
Avoiding ownership of decisions
Fear festers in silence, slows decision-making (people seem busy but it feels like you are walking through wet cement), and kills agility.
Role Confusion
Change moves fast, but role clarity rarely does. People get stuck because:
They don’t know who owns what
Accountability is fuzzy
Success metrics aren’t aligned to outcomes
Processes shift and nobody updates the playbook
Even the best-planned rollouts can stall if people don’t know where they stand.
Three Real-World Wake-Up Calls
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, introduced a “no bureaucracy” email alias to let anyone flag red tape directly to him. He received over 1,000 emails — and proactively changed 375 processes. That’s handing out tickets to transformation in real time.
The cargo-cult mentality: people repeat rituals in the hope “today it will be different.” They cling to empty routines instead of asking whether those behaviours still serve progress.
A sobering reality: 31% of employees admit to actively sabotaging their organisation’s AI initiatives — and that jumps to 41% among Millennials and Gen-Z. This isn’t tech failure; it’s human resistance born of fear, fatigue, or confusion.
Leaders: How to Hand Out the Bus Tickets
Build Psychological Safety – make it okay to fail, to question, to challenge.Amazon have a two way decision door policy - if you walk through the door and it's the wrong decision, it's ok to walk back through the door.
Clarify Roles & Responsibilities – show who owns what and how decisions are prioritised and made.This prioritisation is super important for cross functional teams who will need to hold the competing tensions of their own functions and core teams.
Shift from Output to Impact – measure trust, collaboration, and customer value, not just tasks.
Enable Decision-Making at All Levels – empower teams to pause, pivot, or redirect when the path no longer serves the purpose. So often I have seen projects signed off and executed even when staff know it's the wrong thing half way through - why do they keep going? Often because they are afraid if they kill the project, it will be classed as a failure and it wont get future funding!
Be the Jassy Effect – create real feedback loops that cut through bureaucracy — and here’s the kicker - act on them.
Why This Matters
Transformation rarely fails because of bad technology — it fails because of lack of creativity, purpose,trust, and a true desire to achieve the end result. Instead of preaching about ‘ its up to the people if they want to get on the bus with us or not’, figure out who you want to give tickets to, where their stop is and what the timetable looks like;
Tickets look like clarity: why this change, why now, what’s expected, and how will we know we’re succeeding?
Tickets look like trust: are leaders genuinely listening, or just broadcasting?
Tickets look like readiness: have we mapped frustrations, skills gaps, and decision bottlenecks before we push into execution?
Because transformation isn’t about forcing people onto the bus — it’s about making them want to ride with you.
Ready to see what this could look like for your organisation?
If you are curious to learn more about leading transformation differently, click here to request a download of the Human - First Transformation Readiness Framework. I’d love to connect with you!