Change leadership consultant Caroline Kealey thinks change management is dead. Communication leader Sharon O’Dea thinks Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) is dead.

That’s right: It’s time for another installment of “X is Dead.”

In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel outline the cases these two communication thought leaders make and offer our own thoughts.

Links from this episode:

• 2025: The Year Change Management Died
• Sharon O’Dea’s LinkedIn post on Enterprise Social Networks

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The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 24.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

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Raw transcript:

Hi everyone and welcome to four immediate release. This is episode 4 4 8. I’m Neville Hobson. And I’m Shell Holtz. And it is time for another segment of our recurring series X is dead. This is X as the algebraic symbol, not former elite Twitter. It’s been a long time, but we do occasionally dedicate some time to arguments that something we’ve been all.

Taken for granted is dead. And in just the last week, I saw two of these both on LinkedIn and both making pretty compelling cases. We’ll discuss both of them right after this.

Let’s start with change management. Carolyn Keeley wrote this one titled 2025, the Year Change Management Died. I’ve known Carolyn for years through IEBC, and she has a global practice in change leadership. A point she makes in the article. She calls it a sobering realization given her work in change management for the last 20 years.[00:01:00]

But she says change management isn’t working. It had been a useful third pillar in the traditional triangle of strategy, project management and change management when deploying planned transformations. She writes, that was then. This is now. Carolyn says, we’re now operating in a fundamentally different world.

The assumption of toggling between periods of change and of business as usual, entrenched in traditional change management now seems quat. She writes a variety of patterns. Account for change, management’s demise, including the dismantling of trust and legitimacy across all sectors. There’s a pervasive AI inspired fear of becoming obsolete.

Employees feel overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. Silos are calcifying as we retreat to information cocoons and people are in a perpetual state of continuous partial attention. Carolyn is certified in the ADKAR model of change management, but she says that the [00:02:00] thing that. Changing isn’t clea