Change built
from the inside
No programme to roll out, no operating model to import. We move the decision to the people who can see the work, and set things up so the improvement keeps running without us in the room.
What that means in practice
Decisions stop escalating and start moving. The first thing we establish in every engagement is where the real calls are being made, and whether that is anywhere near the people who can actually see the work. Then we help you move the decision closer to the work, and make the move stick. The move has stuck when it survives the first time somebody with the power to reverse it disagrees.
We set conditions, not recipes, which is why the change survives us. A recipe written for another organisation stops working when it arrives in yours, which is why imported operating models keep disappointing their buyers. What travels is intent and conditions: the goal stated plainly, rules the room can change, contact between people who never normally meet. That is where new organisational capability actually comes from.
Change spreads person to person. Nobody transforms an organisation from a programme board. People change how they work when someone like them has changed first and it visibly worked. We build those connections deliberately, then step back while the change spreads on its own.
What we leave behind runs without us. You are left with peer coaching groups that keep running themselves, workshops that end in one real change the room chooses, and questions your leaders go on asking after we have gone. If it needs us in the room forever, it has not worked, and we will say so.
Read more: Decisions belong where the facts are.
Why imported change keeps failing
You have probably watched it happen: a programme lands, a target operating model rolls out, and eighteen months later the work has quietly gone back to how it was. It failed because it was pushed onto the organisation from outside and needed someone to keep pushing.
There is also something worth understanding about how your organisation stays reliable. The parts that feel most dependable, the month-end close, the payroll run, the process that never seems to go wrong, are held steady by people, and that steadiness has a running cost in their time, judgement and spare capacity. Add more control, more reporting or more sign-offs, and you spend more of exactly that. When those people run out of room, the reliable process is the first thing to break. Leaders who can see that cost early make better decisions about what to standardise, what to leave alone, and where the next failure is likely to come from. We bring that way of looking at an organisation, and we teach it to your leaders.
Read more: Who is really holding it together, and what that costs you.
What an engagement looks like
We start small: one live problem, one room, one decision that is stuck. No enterprise-wide discovery phase, no scoring exercise, no six-month roadmap to value. You will know within weeks whether this is working, because the test is visible on the ground: whether the decision moved, whether the change held, and whether the people closest to the work became more able to act.
We also tell you what would prove us wrong before we start. If a change we help you make cannot survive without us holding it, we have failed by our own standard. Consultancies rarely offer you a way to catch them failing; we think that is exactly why so much organisational change work does not stick.
One engagement, from the inside
Here is how a piece of this work runs, drawn from a real engagement Chris led. The identifying details are changed; nothing else is. A large service organisation had a familiar complaint: too many meetings, teams that never spoke to each other, and a sense that nothing anyone raised ever went anywhere.
We start with the work, not a slide deck. No discovery slides, no interview grid. We spend the first days where the decisions are actually made, following one live decision as it moves. That is where you see how the organisation really works. What we are looking for is simple: whether a decision that needs making stays with the people doing the work, or moves up to a manager who only has the report.
We find who holds the rule that is really in the way. Every stuck organisation has one rule doing most of the damage, and it almost never sits where the org chart says. Here the rule was that a change had to be signed off far from the people doing the work, so nobody nearer the work bothered raising one. We named the rule, and named the one person who could change it that quarter without asking anyone else. Read more: Who changes the rules?
We move one decision to the people who can see the work. We ran a single session with the whole service in it, more than a hundred people, with one condition set before we began: by the end of the hour the room leaves with one real change it has chosen and is allowed to enact. Not a wish list for someone else to read. A change the room chooses and has the real authority to carry out. The change they chose was not the one any senior leader would have picked, and that is the point. It was theirs, and they were the only people close enough to the work to have found it.
The change was still running without us. Weeks on, the session had become something the teams ran for themselves. The decision they had raised had moved, and it had held the first time somebody with the power to reverse it disagreed. People who had never spoken were now in regular contact. We were out of the room, and that is the only outcome that counts.
If you want the full reasoning behind this, with the evidence and the case stories, the book sets it all out. Start with the first chapter.
Where we do not fit
This work is not a transformation programme. There is nothing to roll out, no operating model to import, and no phased plan to remake the whole organisation. We move one stuck decision, set the conditions around it, and leave when the change can run without us. If you want a wall-to-wall change effort with a portfolio of workstreams, we are the wrong people, and we will tell you so on the first call.
And sometimes a rule will not move. We have sat inside an organisation for six months, made the contact, made the thinking visible, carried the real state of the work to the people who could change it, and watched the decision stay exactly where it was, held by people who genuinely believed that holding it there was their job. When that happens we do not dress it up. We say the rule has not moved, we say why we think it has not, and we stop. We will not bill you to keep pushing on something that will not give. Some rules you reach and cannot shift, and we are suspicious of anyone who tells you they always can.
We would sooner be the consultancy that tells you a thing did not work than the one that leaves quietly and lets you find out eighteen months later.
The fuller fit test, both sides of it: Who We Suit.
Where this thinking comes from
Omnicomplexity was founded by Chris Preece, who has spent decades leading change in emergency services, national programmes and UK central government. Every one of those places taught the same lesson: the people closest to the work usually hold the answer.
The approach is set out in full in Omnicomplexity: Leadership in Complex Organisations, with the scholarship, the evidence and the failures included.