Last week, I wrote that communication is always the problem.
That lesson came from realizing that discussing a company change in leadership meetings did not mean the entire staff knew about the impending change or understood what was happening. Information was moving through layers, losing context along the way, and sometimes never reaching the people affected by the decision.
My response was to communicate major changes directly to the company. I now do that on a regular basis.
Better communication only solves part of the problem.
You can communicate every decision clearly and still overwhelm the organization if too many changes are happening at once, in the wrong order, or without understanding how they affect one another.
That is the problem our Change Control Board is designed to solve.
Every Friday morning, a group of our leaders meets for an hour and a half to discuss change initiatives. Sometimes we go longer. We review changes already happening across the company, consider new changes people want to make, and discuss their impact before they are implemented.
The meeting exists because change rarely stays contained.
A decision that appears to belong to one department can affect several others. A new system changes a process. The process changes someone’s responsibilities. Those responsibilities change what needs to be measured. The new measurement may require different reporting, training, or accountability.
What looked like one simple change becomes six interdependent changes.
When I was a new CEO, I tended to evaluate changes individually. If an idea made sense, solved a problem, and appeared to improve the business, the natural response was to move forward.
That approach works when the company is smaller and most of the operational context lives inside the founder’s head. It becomes less reliable as the organization grows.
Once you get bigger, a good idea could be the wrong change. It may conflict with another initiative already underway. It may require resources that have been committed elsewhere. It may solve a local problem while creating a larger structural problem. Or just the opposite. It could solve a large problem while creating a slew of local problems. It may even be the right decision implemented at the wrong time.
The quality of the idea is only one part of the decision. Our Change Control Board gives us a place to examine the rest.
Proposed changes can include systems, processes, policies, priorities, investments, and broader operational decisions. The board evaluates whether a change aligns with our direction, values, and financial goals. We discuss the likely impact, determine its priority, and decide whether to approve it, reject it, or delay it.
The purpose is not to prevent change. It is to keep change from turning into chaos. We want to control the chaos.
Growing companies must change. They cannot keep the same structure, systems, and responsibilities as they add people, departments, clients, and complexity. But the company also has a limited capacity to process change.
That capacity is easy to overestimate from the leadership level. Leaders tend to see each initiative separately. Employees often experience all of them all at once.
A new process may look simple when it is presented in a meeting. To the person responsible for executing it, that process may arrive alongside a new manager, a software migration, shifting priorities, revised performance expectations, and three other “small” improvements.
None of those changes may be unreasonable by itself. Together, they can make execution less consistent instead of more consistent.
This is why our Change Control Board does more than approve ideas. It forces us to view the company as a connected system.
Change needs structure just as much as execution does. We ask what else a proposed change will affect. We identify who needs to be involved. We compare it against work already in progress. We decide where it belongs in the sequence. We also create a record of the decision, the work that follows, and the people responsible for it.
Communication helps people understand what is changing. A Change Control Board helps leadership determine whether the change should happen in the first place, and if so, when it should happen, and what else must change with it.
One controls the uncertainty surrounding change. The other controls the change itself. As companies grow, neither can be left to assumption. Otherwise, good ideas accumulate faster than the organization can absorb them, and leaders mistake activity for progress.
Change is inevitable. Chaos is not.
How are you deciding which changes your company will take on, and which ones need to wait? Reply directly to [email protected].
~ Erik
About
Erik J. Olson is the Founder and CEO of Proxa, where he builds and operates multiple marketing agencies focused on predictable, system-driven growth. He has scaled agencies across multiple markets by replacing fragmented execution with structured systems that drive consistent revenue. Erik is the author of Million Dollar Journey and writes The Business of Agency newsletter. He is building Proxa into a $100M platform with a planned private equity exit.