Walk into any nonprofit, agency, or company in transition and you'll find a strategic plan that looks airtight on paper. You'll also find staff who don't quite believe it. The gap between those two realities — between what leadership has decided and what the organization has actually accepted—is where most change efforts die. Research from McKinsey and Prosci consistently puts the failure rate of major change initiatives near 70%, and the most common cause isn't bad strategy. It's bad change communications.

A few years ago, while I was on staff at Servant Partners—a faith-based nonprofit working alongside the urban poor in 17 cities globally—I had a long conversation with Derek Engdahl, then our Co-General Director (and effectively my CEO), about what it actually feels like to lead change from inside. Around the same time, I interviewed Cielo Castro, Chief of Staff at Fairplex, a 487-acre nonprofit enterprise in Pomona that had just rolled out a 100-year strategic plan—and then absorbed COVID-19, a 30% layoff, and the conversion of its grounds into crisis-response space, all within two years.

Their stories converged on a single insight: change is a communications problem before it is a strategy problem. Here's what that looked like in practice.

1. Buy-in is built one conversation at a time

Both leaders refused the press-release approach to launching change. Derek treated strategic planning as a participatory exercise, gathering input from staff at every level. "People generally do better in accepting decisions they have some say in," he told me. Cielo described the goal as helping employees "see themselves in the plan."

This tracks with what Prosci's widely used ADKAR framework has been arguing for two decades: organizational change happens one individual at a time, and the hardest stage to engineer is desire—the personal motivation to actually participate. No leader can mandate it. The only reliable approach is to answer "what's in it for me?" specifically, for every stakeholder group.

2. Resistance is information, not opposition

Following Ronald Heifetz's classic adaptive leadership counsel, Derek deliberately invited change-skeptical staff into the planning process—not to neutralize them, but because they were carrying real information the change team needed. When they expressed feeling overwhelmed, his response was to break the change into "understandable, measurable pieces" and communicate progress.

Cielo encountered something subtler at Fairplex. Two decades of organizational trauma—public controversy, financial troubles, a "culture of fear" under a former president—meant that long-tenured staff carried wounds newer staff didn't. "Any change is a loss for someone," she said, "no matter how positive it is." That observation maps cleanly onto contemporary change-management research, which now classifies resistance as emotional, political, cognitive, or behavioral—each requiring a different communications response. Empathy, not logic, addresses the emotional kind.

3. The vision needs to be communicated more times than you think

John Kotter's eight-step Leading Change model—still the most-cited framework in the field—devotes an entire step to communicating the vision, and his most famous finding is that leaders typically under-communicate change by a factor of ten. Forbes' Communications Council captures the same principle through the marketing "Rule of 7": audiences need to hear a message roughly seven times before it lands.

Both Derek and Cielo lived this. Derek built a guiding coalition—a Kotter staple—to carry the strategic vision into corners of Servant Partners that headquarters communications couldn't reach. Cielo translated Fairplex's 100-year vision into something tangible: a land-use document proposing a central public park. Abstract change is hard to defend; institutionalized change gives stakeholders something concrete to react to, debate, and ultimately own.

4. Short-term wins are communications artifacts

Kotter's sixth step is to generate short-term wins—and he's explicit that wins matter less for their substantive impact than for their communicative function. They tell skeptical staff that the change is real. They give the guiding coalition something to point to. They convert momentum into evidence. Without them, the most disciplined change plan collapses under its own abstraction.

The throughline

Strategy gets a change initiative started. Communications—disciplined, repeated, empathetic, and willing to absorb resistance as feedback rather than fight it as opposition—is what makes change actually land. The leaders I learned from didn't have charisma in unusual measure. They had patience, a willingness to be questioned, and an instinct that the most important sentences in any transformation are not the ones in the strategic plan. They're the ones spoken to in the hallway, after the all-staff meeting, when someone turns to a colleague and says: "Okay. I think I get it now."