Small-Grand-Grandiose: Why Complex Change Has Its Own Logic

The Question That Comes First

Picture a leadership team that has carefully thought through the change — there's clear direction, real commitment, and the resources to move. The first experiments begin, energy is high, and then, somewhere in the months that follow, things quietly shift. Results don't materialize, people drift back to familiar patterns, and the initiative gradually shrinks into something that runs alongside the real work, until eventually that stops too.

What went wrong is rarely the quality of the intention. The problem lies in an assumption almost no one says out loud: that complex change follows the same logic as ordinary change.

It doesn't.

Two Kinds of Uncertainty

Organizations deal with change all the time — systems get replaced, processes optimized, structures redesigned. This kind of change is genuinely hard and demands real discipline, but it has a recognizable logic. You analyze the current situation, design the desired state, and implement the difference. Cause and effect are connected, expertise helps, and approaches that worked elsewhere are a reasonable starting point here, too.

Complex change works differently. There's a picture of the future — a direction that feels right — but exactly what it looks like and how you'll get there, you don't yet know, because you're doing something you've never done before. The causes of current patterns are tangled together, and what worked somewhere else might be precisely what gets in the way here. Complexity science draws this distinction sharply: in a complicated environment, you can analyze and then act, because the answer exists and can be found, whereas in a complex environment, the answer only exists after you've acted — the movement itself reveals the path.

This has significant consequences for how you organize change, because an approach designed to implement a known answer is fundamentally unsuited to discovering an unknown one.

Small-Grand-Grandiose is our approach to complex change — for organizations that want to move without waiting for all the answers. The method works in three consecutive phases spanning six to twelve months: experimenting at a small scale, scaling what works, and integrating what carries the Organization forward. Each phase builds on the previous one and produces tangible results, so that change grows from practice itself rather than from a plan.

What Experiments Actually Do

Small-Grand-Grandiose starts with experimenting — the method for discovering what actually works in your specific context, with your people, for your clients.

John Kotter's work on the eight accelerators connects directly here. The first four — making urgency felt around a genuine opportunity, building a coalition, shaping a vision, and getting people moving voluntarily — emerge from beginning, which is why the first move matters so much. Setting up an experiment around a real challenge makes urgency tangible for everyone involved, and inviting people to experiment alongside you reveals who is genuinely motivated — the real change agents, visible through action.

One of the most underappreciated insights in change practice is that the coalition you need for complex change can only form around real movement — it cannot be put together in a meeting room.

The Three Thresholds

Between experimenting and lasting change lie three thresholds, each requiring its own response.

Courage. Experimenting asks people to try something with an open outcome in an environment that naturally rewards certainty and penalizes visible failure. Research by Detert and Brun identified 35 behaviors across dozens of organizations that people experience as requiring courage — admitting mistakes, questioning established expertise, naming uncomfortable truths — and what they have in common is that they all require letting go of something your professional identity rests on. Carol Dweck's work on the growth mindset shows what changes when people treat outcomes primarily as a source of learning: in a growth mindset, a failed experiment becomes information about what the next step requires, which conditions are missing, and what you don't yet understand. That's precisely the stance complex change calls for — the willingness to begin without the answer and to stay open to what unfolds.

Persuasion. Good ideas that miss the transition to scaling often stall on their way to resources — the idea is sound, but the ability to make a compelling case for investment is underdeveloped. The more novel an idea, the higher the threshold, while you need evidence to be persuasive and resources to generate that evidence in the first place. Small-Grand-Grandiose breaks that cycle by bringing stakeholders into the experiments themselves early on, so that someone who witnesses an experiment and sees what emerges builds the case for the next step alongside you and becomes a natural advocate. This is also what Kotter's sixth accelerator describes: visible wins in the early phase generate the credibility needed for scaling.

Visible and invisible barriers. Once the transition to scaling is underway, a different challenge appears. Kotter's fifth accelerator — clearing the path for the movement that has emerged — is about removing the barriers to that movement, and in practice, the most stubborn barriers are rarely the visible ones like structures, budget processes, and KPIs that don't accommodate new ways of working. Equally significant are the softer barriers: the taken-for-granted assumptions about how things are done here, role perceptions that define what someone does and doesn't do, client relationships built around ways of working that are now changing, and a culture that implicitly discourages new behaviors without anyone consciously intending it. These barriers become visible when you actively look for them, and leaders who guide the third phase well start asking that question in the second.

Learning as Organizational Capacity

Every experiment is an investment. The question is whether that investment pays off once — for the team that ran it — or cumulatively, for everyone who comes after.

Two decades of McKinsey research across hundreds of organizations identifies two approaches that consistently show up in high-magnitude change. The first — masterful change — works with clear direction from leadership, combined with formal networks that spread learning across the organization. The second — emergent change — works with a loose direction, room for experimentation, and learning through rapid feedback loops: step by step, alert to what the context calls for. Masterful is particularly associated with successful long-term change, emergent with change at pace. What both have in common is that learning is systematically organized. Individual insight becomes collective capital.

That is precisely where the greatest leverage lies: the infrastructure to learn. Pilots run, insights emerge, and three months later another team runs the same experiment somewhere else — while the knowledge from the first group could already have been available. A growth mindset and a growth system reinforce each other, and it is organizations that develop both that get the most out of every experiment.

Small-Grand-Grandiose works with a simple but consistent mechanism: three questions after every experiment. What did we do? What did we learn? What will we do differently next time? Those answers are made collectively visible, patterns are recognized across experiments, and the most significant insights become shared memory that endures even as people move on. Each experiment becomes richer for what has already been discovered, and each phase makes the next one possible.

It is this cumulative learning that connects the three thresholds — courage, persuasion, visible and invisible barriers. What gets learned in the small phase about courage makes it easier to build a compelling case in the scaling phase. What gets learned in the scaling phase about barriers makes integration in the third phase possible. The phases are sequential, but the learning is continuous.

What This Asks of Leadership

Leaders guiding complex change face a specific tension: their position rests on the ability to set direction, make decisions, and have answers, but complex change asks for something different — the capacity to hold space for what is still unknown, to lead without knowing the endpoint, and to model courage by experimenting themselves. This is what Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey describe as the move from a technical problem-solver to an adaptive leader, someone who not only solves problems but builds the capacity to meet an ever-changing set of new ones.

Small-Grand-Grandiose is designed to develop that capacity while the change is underway, so that what gets learned in the small phase about courage and persuasion makes the next phase lighter, and what gets learned in the scaling phase about barriers and growth makes integration possible. Organizations that take this path report something that initially sounds surprising: the second change is lighter than the first, the third lighter than the second, and the capacity to change grows as they change.

That is what it means to lead complex change on its own terms.