There is a meeting room on every floor of every organisation going through change. In that room, the change is going well. The governance is solid. The steering group is engaged. The sponsor is present. The programme board reviews the red-amber-green report and the traffic lights are mostly green. The project plan is on track.
And then the meeting ends.
People walk out of the room, down the corridor, back to their desks, and the change programme that looked so well-managed from inside the room becomes something different. The middle manager who was supportive in the meeting tells her team privately that they should keep doing it the old way for now, just to be safe. The senior director who approved the new process is seen visibly using the old one. The change champion who seemed energised in the workshop is asked in the corridor what she really thinks, and she hesitates.
The corridor is where change actually happens. And almost nobody designs for it.
Change management has become very good at managing meetings. It has become significantly less good at managing what happens when the meetings end.
The Room vs The Corridor
Change management as a discipline has, over the past thirty years, developed a sophisticated vocabulary for the room. Stakeholder registers. Communications plans. Change impact assessments. Steering groups and programme boards and governance frameworks. ADKAR and Kotter and Prosci and a hundred derivatives and adaptations.
All of this is valuable. None of it is where change is won or lost.
Change is won or lost in the corridor. In the conversation between two colleagues on the way to get coffee. In the team meeting on Monday morning where the line manager signals — through tone and body language and what she chooses to emphasise — whether this change is real or another initiative to be waited out. In the one-to-one between a manager and his team member where he says, quietly, that he understands it is a lot to ask and that people should use their judgement.
These moments are not captured on a stakeholder map. They do not appear in a pulse check. They are not discussed at the steering group. But they are the moments that determine whether the change holds.
We know this. Most change practitioners know this. Ask any experienced change lead where the real work happens and they will tell you: in the informal conversations, in the relationship between the line manager and the team, in the social dynamics of the group that is being asked to change.
And then they design a communications plan.
The line manager who is privately ambivalent about a change does more damage to adoption than any volume of resistance from below. They are the transmission point between the programme and the people it is asking to change.
The Architecture of the Corridor
The corridor is not one thing. It is a set of informal spaces and moments that exist in parallel with the formal programme. Understanding its architecture is the beginning of designing for it.
The manager 1:1
Research from Prosci and McKinsey consistently identifies the direct line manager as the most influential change agent in any organisation. Not the CEO. Not the programme team. Not the communications function. The person that an individual sees every week, who sets their objectives, who approves their leave, who writes their performance review.
When that person believes in the change, communicates it honestly, uses the new processes themselves, and addresses reversion in their team — adoption happens. When that person is ambivalent, absent from the subject in 1:1s, or quietly signals that the old way is still acceptable — adoption falters.
Most change programmes do not reach this person. They run briefing sessions for managers that cover what is changing, not how to manage through it. They send communications for managers to cascade that are written for a wider audience and land as impersonal. They treat manager engagement as a communications task rather than a capability development challenge.
The manager 1:1 is a corridor moment. Designing for it means equipping every manager — specifically, in language they can use, for the specific conversations they will actually have — before those conversations happen.
The team dynamic
Every team has an informal social system that operates underneath the formal one. There are people whose opinion determines what the group thinks. There are established norms about what is acceptable, what is valued, what signals competence. There are scar tissues from previous changes that shape how this one is received.
A change that works with this system — that finds the respected voices and gives them a genuine role, that acknowledges the history honestly, that makes the new thing feel consistent with what the group already values — will embed in ways that a change that works only through formal communication cannot achieve.
The informal leader in a team is often not the most senior person. They are the person who has been there the longest, or who has the strongest relationships, or whose technical judgement is most trusted. When they form a positive view of the change and share it in the corridor, it has a qualitatively different effect from any communication the programme team can produce. It is peer testimony from a credible source.
Designing for this means finding these people before go-live, building genuine relationships with them, and understanding what it would take for them to form a positive view — not manufacturing their advocacy, but creating the conditions in which honest advocacy becomes possible.
The Monday morning conversation
Every week, in most organisations, there is a moment when the team comes together — a stand-up, a team meeting, a brief check-in — and the business of the week is shaped. The signals that are sent here about what matters, what is prioritised, what is rewarded and what is accepted as normal are the strongest signals the organisation sends.
A change programme that is visible in Monday morning conversations — that the manager references naturally, that the team discusses as part of their normal working rhythm — is a change programme that is embedding. One that is never mentioned on Monday morning, that exists only in formal programme communications, is a change programme that is being waited out.
Designing for the Monday morning conversation means giving managers the language and the narrative to bring the change into their team's normal rhythm — not as a separate initiative but as part of how the team is working.
The corridor ambush
There is a specific type of corridor moment that change practitioners know well and rarely discuss openly: the moment when someone who was supportive in the formal setting says something quite different in an informal one.
The senior director who said the right things in the steering group and then was overheard in the corridor expressing serious doubts to a peer. The manager who completed the training and then told the team privately that she was not sure this was going to work. The champion who became less enthusiastic as the reality of the change became clearer.
These corridor ambush moments are the most damaging things that can happen in a change programme, because they carry the credibility of an honest private opinion rather than a managed official position. A sceptical view expressed informally by a credible person spreads faster and more persistently than any official communication.
Designing for this does not mean suppressing honest scepticism. It means surfacing it. The people who have doubts in the corridor should be having those doubts heard and addressed in the room — because managed doubts are less damaging than unmanaged ones.
The change programme that knows what is being said in the corridors, and responds to it, is the programme that holds. The one that only manages what is said in the room will be surprised at month six.
What Designing for the Corridor Looks Like
Designing for the corridor is not a methodology. It is a set of disciplines that operate alongside the formal programme activities and address the informal spaces where change is actually decided.
The distinction matters. Briefing a manager tells them what is changing. Enabling a manager gives them the specific tools, language and support to manage their team through the change — to handle the questions they will actually be asked, to navigate the resistance they will actually encounter, to have the difficult conversations that the change will actually require.
Manager enablement means: what will your team ask you, and what will you say? What will you do when someone in your team reverts? How will you have a performance conversation about adoption if adoption is not happening? What is in it for you personally, and how do you talk about that honestly with your team?
These are corridor conversations. The programme that equips managers for them will have a different outcome from the one that sends a briefing document and expects them to cascade it.
The formal channels — pulse checks, feedback forms, programme board status reports — tell you the managed version of what is happening. The informal channels tell you what is actually happening.
Designing for the corridor means deliberately creating and maintaining access to informal intelligence. The change champion who is trusted enough by their peers to know what people really think. The manager who will tell you honestly what her team is saying. The informal leader who, if you have built a genuine relationship with them, will tell you what the corridor sentiment is.
This intelligence is the most valuable information in the programme. It arrives earlier than the formal signals. It is more honest. And it gives the programme team the ability to respond to reversion before it becomes visible in the data.
Change narratives are usually written for formal communications: structured, professional, approved by the communications team. They sound like change narratives. Nobody in a corridor conversation speaks in change narrative language.
The test of a change narrative is not whether it reads well in a programme communication. It is whether a manager can use it in a conversation with her team on Monday morning without sounding like she is reading from a briefing document. It is whether a team member can explain to a new colleague why the organisation is doing this in a way that sounds like a genuine person's view rather than a corporate message.
The corridor narrative is shorter, more honest, and more human than the formal one. It acknowledges the difficulty rather than glossing it. It speaks to what the listener cares about rather than what the programme team wants them to care about. It sounds like something a person actually believes, because it is.
Change management as it is typically practised is a room-based discipline. The change team attends programme boards and steering groups. It runs workshops and training sessions. It sends communications and manages feedback surveys. All of this happens in rooms.
Designing for the corridor means being present outside the rooms. Walking the floors. Having informal conversations with people who are going through the change. Sitting with frontline teams to understand what it actually feels like. Being visible in the spaces where the real signals are sent — not as an observer but as someone who is genuinely interested in what is happening and will do something with what they hear.
This is not a methodology. It is a commitment to being in the place where the change is actually happening rather than managing it from a distance. It is, in the most literal sense, working in the corridor.
The change practitioner who spends more time in the corridor than in the steering group will, over a career, deliver more change that holds than the one who does the opposite.
The Honest Conversation About Change Management
Change management has a credibility problem. Not among practitioners — among the people it serves. Ask a senior leader in a large organisation what they think about change management and you will hear some version of the following: it produces a lot of activity, it generates impressive-looking documentation, and it does not reliably produce the change it is asked to manage.
The criticism is not unfair. Most change management programmes are designed for the room. They produce governance, communications, training and stakeholder management that is appropriate for the formal programme environment. They do not produce the sustained, embedded behaviour change that the business case promised — because that change happens in the corridor, and the corridor is not in the programme plan.
The change management profession has, for the most part, responded to this credibility problem by getting better at what it was already good at. More sophisticated frameworks. More detailed stakeholder analysis. More structured communications planning. The methodology has improved. The results have not improved proportionately.
The improvement that would change the results is not methodological. It is attitudinal. It requires change practitioners who believe that the informal is as important as the formal, that the corridor is as important as the boardroom, and that the most valuable thing they can do is not manage the programme but understand and engage with the human reality of the change as it is actually being experienced.
Why It Matters Now
Organisations are facing more change, more simultaneously, than at any previous point in most practitioners' careers. AI is restructuring roles and processes at a pace that has no precedent. Regulatory requirements are accumulating. The public sector is being asked to transform with fewer resources. The workforce is more distributed, more sceptical of top-down mandates, and more capable of finding workarounds than it has ever been.
In this environment, change that is designed only for the room will not hold. The pace of the external environment means the gap between what is decided in the boardroom and what is actually happening on the ground grows faster than formal programme governance can close it. The complexity of the changes being attempted means the exceptions and edge cases that training did not cover emerge faster and more frequently.
The organisations that successfully navigate this period of change will be the ones that have built genuine change capability — not in a central programme function but in the fabric of the organisation. In the managers who know how to lead their teams through uncertainty. In the informal leaders who can shape the group's view in the corridor. In the culture that has learned to treat change as something it does rather than something that is done to it.
Building this capability is harder and slower than running a change programme. It requires a different kind of consulting — one that is more interested in building the organisation's capacity than in demonstrating the consultant's methodology. One that measures success at month twelve, not go-live. One that is willing to be in the corridors rather than just the boardrooms.
Cairn Novaris
Cairn Novaris was built on a specific belief: that the most important change management work happens in the spaces between the formal programme activities, and that the practitioners who understand this are more effective than those who do not.
We work in the corridors. Not as a methodology — as a commitment. We are interested in the Monday morning conversation, in the informal leader's view, in what the manager actually says to her team. We design our change programmes to operate in the informal spaces as well as the formal ones. We measure our success at month twelve, not go-live.
We believe that the organisations that navigate this period of change well will be the ones that have invested in genuine change capability — in people who understand the human reality of transformation, who are willing to be present in the difficult moments, and who tell the truth about what is working and what is not.
That is what we are building. Not a methodology. A point of view, backed by deep knowledge and applied with honesty.
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