In most organizations, employees have learned that if they wait out a change initiative, it usually disappears. Mark J. Concannon, Chief Executive Officer of Concannon Business Consulting, treats that instinct as the real obstacle to large-scale change, not resistance in the confrontational sense but patience.
People have watched enough initiatives fade to know that outlasting one is often the safest response. “Change is only successful when people, not just processes, are prepared to move with it,” he says. Concannon has led organizations through digital overhauls and enterprise-wide process shifts, and the work is less about explaining a change than about convincing people it is real and permanent. Everything else follows from whether people believe the change will outlast their skepticism.
Anchor the Change in Strategy, Not Urgency
Big change usually begins under pressure, such as a market shift, a technology demand, a leadership transition, or a pressure that pushes toward speed. Concannon argues that speed without alignment is just motion. “Slow down, just enough at the beginning to get the strategy right,” he says. The questions he wants settled first are concrete:
· “What is the real goal?”
· “Who needs to move first?”
· “Which metrics define success?”
A change grounded in a clear strategy signals permanence, because it is obviously connected to where the organization is going. A change driven by urgency alone signals the opposite, since urgency fades, and everyone knows it.
Communicate Like a Campaign, Not a Memo
Change stalls when communication is vague, one-directional, or sporadic, and Concannon reads all three as signals of impermanence. A single memo tells people a decision was made. Sporadic follow-up tells them it is already losing steam. He treats communication as a sustained campaign instead, with consistent messaging, visible leadership, and real-time feedback loops.
“Change doesn’t happen at a whiteboard,” he says. “It happens in hallways, team calls, and day-to-day decisions.” Sustained presence is itself the message. An initiative that keeps showing up, week after week, is demonstrating through repetition that it is not going away, which is the one thing that undermines the strategy of waiting it out.
Deploy Change Agents, Not Just Checklists
Templates and timelines matter, but Concannon believes they do not carry a change through its hardest moment. People do. Specifically, the individuals who lead by example and hold the change in place when it gets difficult. His firm embeds seasoned change agents to work alongside a client’s teams, people with both emotional intelligence and execution muscle. The reason is timing. Every change reaches a point where the initial energy is gone, and the difficulty is fully visible, and that is exactly when people decide whether to commit or quietly revert. A checklist cannot hold anyone through that moment. A credible person, present and invested, can, and their presence is proof that someone is still holding the line long after a memo would have been forgotten.
Large-scale change, in Concannon’s account, is not about turning everything upside down. It is about turning alignment into action and pressure into progress. To learn more, connect with Mark J. Concannon on LinkedIn.
