Talks on why change stalls, and what actually makes it hold
Chris Preece speaks to leadership and practitioner audiences on how change really happens in large, complex organisations: why so many programmes stall, what more control and reporting quietly cost in speed and in people's time, and what actually carried the changes he has led. The talks come from decades of that work, including the pandemic rebuild at Registers of Scotland, and from the book Omnicomplexity that came out of it.
They are made for leaders and teams who are tired of meetings that name a problem clearly and then change nothing.
What the talk gives a room
What control really costs
More control, reporting and standardisation each buy a kind of order, and each is paid for in speed and in your people's time. The room leaves able to see those costs clearly, and to see who in the organisation is quietly absorbing them.
Paper to digital in three weeks
When the pandemic locked Registers of Scotland out of its paper records, Chris was one of the people who rebuilt the service end to end in three weeks, work that ten years of plans had called too expensive, too risky and too complex. Digital submissions rose from 38 to 94 per cent within a year. Before the crisis, the registry had already moved its complex casework to cross-functional teams, and cases that once took eighteen months were finishing in under thirty days.
One move to try on Monday
Every audience leaves with one thing it can do without anyone's permission: sit where a live decision gets made and watch who actually makes it. The point is to leave with something you can act on straight away, not a set of slides.
Plain language your teams keep using
No jargon and nothing to score. People leave with plain words for work their teams are already doing, so the ideas are still usable in next week's meetings.
The talks
Two named talks, either as a keynote or worked out over a half-day. A programme chair can lift the abstract straight into a schedule.
The Cost of Control
Every organisation values stability, and almost none has counted what it costs to keep. More control, more reporting and more standardisation each buy a kind of order, and each is paid for in speed and in the time of the people who hold the work together, usually a few people absorbing problems quietly until the day they cannot. This talk shows a room how to see that cost, why reaching for more order by reflex damages good organisations, and the one move anyone can make without asking permission: sit where a live decision gets made and watch who actually makes it. Chris draws it from decades leading change in emergency services, national programmes and central government.
Paper to Digital in Three Weeks
When the pandemic locked Registers of Scotland out of its paper records, work that ten years of plans had called too expensive, too risky and too complex was running end to end in three weeks. Chris was one of the people inside that rebuild. Digital submissions rose from 38 to 94 per cent within a year. The talk tells that story, then explains what actually carried it: people who had never worked together building the new way of working as they went, and new working relationships forming where the old handoffs used to be. The audience leaves knowing what to look for, and what to protect, when the next big change lands on them.
What a room does with it
These talks are made for teams that keep seeing problems clearly and then changing nothing. Three things tend to happen afterwards.
People go and sit where the work happens
The Monday move is small enough that people actually make it. Leaders come back having sat where a live decision was made, having seen who was quietly carrying the load. That changes the next planning conversation.
Teams stop reaching for order by reflex
The room leaves asking a question it did not ask before: does this actually need more control, and what would that control cost us? Meetings that used to end in a new process start ending in a clearer decision.
The language keeps working afterwards
The cost of control, where decisions really get made, what a change needs to hold: plain terms with nothing to score. People use them in the following week's meetings, which is the real test of whether a talk landed.
Formats
Keynote
Forty to sixty minutes for a conference or an internal leadership day. The Registers of Scotland story carries it, the argument about what control really costs is made, and the room leaves with one concrete move. Time for questions afterwards.
Half-day session
A working half-day for a leadership team or a practitioner track. The same argument, then the room works its own live situations through the questions and each person leaves with a move and a date on it.
Where this comes from
Chris Preece has spent decades leading change in emergency services, national programmes and UK central government. Of his years in the fire and rescue market: “We helped take the product from a sixth of the UK market to a third, against the established suppliers,” he says. When the pandemic locked Registers of Scotland out of its paper, he was one of the people who rebuilt it end to end in three weeks.
The talks are drawn from that work and from the book that came out of it. The stories are true, the research behind them is named and cited, and the argument is clear about what would prove it wrong.
Bring the talk to your room
Tell us the room, the date and roughly what it is wrestling with, and we will come back with whether a keynote or a half-day fits best. Autumn 2026 dates are open.
Would rather talk it through first? Book a free discovery call.