Reinvention isn’t something you launch. It’s something you live. It doesn’t start with a LinkedIn post—it starts with a shift in behaviour.
Everywhere you look, organisations are transforming—at least on paper.
There’s a new vision deck. A bold tagline. A press release filled with words such as agile, customer-centric, and future-ready. There’s usually a launch video, maybe even a new font. It all looks impressive. And it gives the illusion that reinvention is well underway.
But behind the scenes, not much is different. The same decisions are being made in the same rooms. The same incentives reward the same behaviours. The same systems, processes, and cultural dynamics persist.
This is what I call performative transformation—change that looks good from a distance but lacks depth up close.
And while it might get applause in the short term, over time it becomes dangerous. Because people inside the organisation can see it for what it is. And once employees stop believing transformation is real, it becomes almost impossible to do the real thing.
Change fatigue in disguise
The danger of performative transformation isn’t just that it’s shallow. It’s that it exhausts the very people you’ll need to make the next transformation real.
When teams go through multiple rounds of grand pronouncements with little to show for it, they start to disengage. Leaders talk about ‘change fatigue’, but what many are really facing is false change fatigue—people are tired, not of change itself, but of being asked to believe in change that never happens.
This creates cynicism. It erodes trust. And most importantly, it conditions teams to play along while quietly standing still.
True reinvention doesn’t always come with clean narratives and tidy visuals. It’s often clumsy, uncomfortable, and invisible at first. It starts not with a big reveal, but with honest questions: What’s no longer working? Where are we pretending to move forward but actually stuck? What would we do differently if we weren’t afraid of breaking what we’ve built?
It means leaders admitting they don’t have all the answers. It means creating space for discomfort. It means inviting challenge, not just applause.
The irony is, once that deep work starts, the results speak for themselves. People don’t need to be told transformation is happening—they feel it. In how decisions get made. In what gets rewarded. In who gets promoted. In what problems get solved.
Reinvention isn’t a campaign
Reinvention isn’t something you launch. It’s something you live. It doesn’t start with a LinkedIn post—it starts with a shift in behaviour. The role of leadership is not just to signal intent, but to demonstrate it, consistently, day after day.
The most successful transformations I’ve seen didn’t begin with slogans. They began with a quiet decision to do things differently, long before anyone was watching.
So if you’re thinking about reinventing your business—or if you’re in the middle of a change programme that feels more cosmetic than cultural—ask yourself this: What’s really different today from a year ago?
And who in your organisation would back that up?
If the answer is thin, you don’t need a new message. You need a new way of working.
Because real change doesn’t come with a hashtag.
It comes with action. And people notice the difference.
Photo by Walls.io on Unsplash.
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