Every change you make in the business has two timelines. The operational one, which you can plan. And the emotional one, which you cannot. The second is longer, and it is the one that decides whether the change survives.
The curve describes what happens to performance after a change lands: it gets worse before it gets better. That dip is not evidence the decision was wrong. It is what change looks like from the inside, and owners who read it as failure tend to abandon good decisions about three weeks before they would have started working.
What is the change curve?
The shape is borrowed from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's work on grief and was adapted for organisational change. The labels vary between versions. The pattern does not: a stall when the change is announced, a period of resistance, a low point, then a climb as people experiment and adjust, finishing above the old level if the change was worth making.
Two things about the shape matter more than the stage names. The dip is real and measurable, not a mood — output falls, errors rise, and the capable people go quiet. And people enter the curve at different points and travel it at different speeds. You have been thinking about this change for months. Your team heard about it on Tuesday. You are near the end of the curve feeling pleased with yourself while they are at the beginning working out what it means for their Friday.
Why it matters to an owner
Because you are the one who will lose your nerve. Nobody else in the business has the authority to reverse the decision, so the risk sits entirely with you.
At the trough you will be presented with evidence. Jobs are slower. Someone is threatening to leave. A customer has noticed. Your operations manager, who never complains, tells you quietly that it is not working. All of that is true, and none of it tells you the decision was wrong. It tells you that you are at week five.
There is a genuine judgement to make here, and it is not "hold the line no matter what". The useful distinction is between people struggling with the new way and the new way not doing what it was meant to do. If your team are slow, frustrated and making mistakes with a new system, that is the curve. If the system itself cannot produce the report you bought it for, that is a design fault, and no amount of resilience fixes it. Ask which one you are looking at, in those words, and answer honestly.
Two groups dip harder than everybody else
Supervisors and middle managers get it from both directions: they have to sell a change they had no part in designing while absorbing the complaints from the people doing the work. If your operations manager is the most negative person in the building at week four, that is the position talking rather than the person.
Your longest-serving staff dip deepest, because they have the most invested in the old way and they were usually the ones who built it. Their resistance is not disloyalty, it is competence with nowhere to go.
The cost of reversing at the trough
You do not simply go back to where you were. You teach everyone that if they hold out for six weeks, changes go away. The next one will be harder, and they will know it.
What it looks like week by week
Take a typical system change — moving from paper job sheets to a job management app, in a small installation business. Weeks one and two: announced at a team meeting, training booked, nobody objects in the room, and two people carry on filling in paper as well, just in case. Nothing improves.
Weeks three to five: resistance arrives, not as argument but as friction. Photos are not uploaded. Jobs are closed with no notes. The office is re-keying the information the app was bought to stop them re-keying, so invoicing actually slows down because information now arrives in two places.
Week six is the trough. A long-serving engineer says he did not sign up for this. The owner has a bad Friday and seriously considers scrapping the whole thing.
Weeks seven to ten are where it turns, and usually because the owner stops running training and starts running a ten-minute stand-up about what is not working. Two or three small fixes come out of it, suggested by the people doing the job, and most take minutes. From week eleven the numbers settle above where they started. The change did not fail in week six. It was week six.
How to use it
Name where each person is, in writing
List everybody affected by your current change and put a number against them from one to five. The spread will surprise you, and it tells you who needs what.
Publish the dip before it happens
Say plainly: "for about six weeks this will be slower and more annoying than what we do now. That is expected. Here is when it should improve." An owner who predicts the dip owns it. An owner surprised by it looks wrong.
Pick one number and watch it weekly
Invoicing lag, jobs per day, complaints — whatever the change was meant to move. Without it you are managing on mood, and mood at week five is always bad.
Book the week six conversation now
Put a meeting in the diary for the middle of the trough, before the trough arrives. It is far easier to hold a decision you scheduled a review of than one you are defending in the moment.
Ask, do not tell, at the low point
"What is the most annoying part of this?" gets you three fixable things. "Why isn't everyone on board?" gets you silence.
Say out loud when you have climbed out
Most changes are never declared finished, so nobody gets the reward of having got through one. Mark it, briefly, with the number that moved.
Questions to ask yourself
- Out of ten, how confident are you that the resistance you are seeing is the curve rather than a fault in the plan? What would move that number?
- Where on the curve were you when you announced it, and where were they?
- Think of the last change you started and did not finish. What week did it die, and what did the team learn from watching that?
- What single number would tell you honestly whether the current change is working?
- Who in the business is carrying the change from both directions, and what support have they had?
Most owners do not have a change problem. They have a week six problem — and the only thing separating a change that lands from one that is quietly dropped is usually the owner knowing the shape of the graph.
Leading people through the dip is squarely Leadership Coaching work: the skill is holding a decision while genuinely listening to the objections it produces. It runs alongside Empowerment, because changes stick faster when the fixes come from the people doing the job, and Control and Responsibility, which is the difference between a change you can command and one you can only influence.
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Frequently asked questions
Where does the change curve come from?
The shape is borrowed from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's work on grief and was later adapted for organisational change by a range of practitioners. The stage labels vary between versions and are worth holding loosely. The pattern does not vary: a stall when the change is announced, a period of resistance, a low point, then a climb as people experiment and adjust, finishing above the old level if the change was worth making. Two features matter more than the names. The dip is real and measurable rather than a mood, and people enter the curve at different points and travel it at different speeds.
How do I tell resistance from a genuinely bad decision?
Ask which of two things you are looking at, in these words. If your team are slow, frustrated and making mistakes with the new way of working, that is the curve, and it will pass. If the new way of working cannot do the thing you introduced it to do, that is a design fault, and no amount of resilience fixes it. The distinction is between people struggling with the change and the change failing to deliver. This is why you pick one number at the start and watch it weekly. Without a number you are managing on mood, and mood at week five is always bad.
What does it cost to abandon a change at the low point?
More than most owners price in, because you do not simply go back to where you were. You teach everybody that if they hold out for six weeks, changes go away. The next one will be harder and they will know it. The more damaging version is the change that is never formally stopped: the old spreadsheet quietly returns, the licence is cancelled at renewal, and nothing is ever discussed. That is worse than deciding to stop, because there is no learning in it, only a business that now understands changes to be optional. If you are going to reverse a decision, say so out loud and say why.