ESSAY

No Plan Survives Contact: What the Marines Taught Me About Change Management

I have sat through a lot of change management presentations over the years. The presentations with a Kotter slide, the “burning platform” metaphor, and a color-coded roadmap that conveniently turns green somewhere around 4th Quarter. There is usually a moment, somewhere between the stakeholder matrix and the communication plan timeline, where I catch myself thinking: I wonder how long this holds once we start execution and it does not go as planned?

That is not a dismissal of the frameworks, I have drawn on all of them, PROSCI, Kotter’s 8 Steps, McKinsey’s 7-S, they are all genuinely useful.

After 21 years in the Marine Corps and now leading change management for one of the most complex infrastructure programs in the Pacific Northwest, I have developed a strong conviction. Most change initiatives do not fail because the methodology was wrong. Changes fail because the people leading the effort were not equipped to manage what happens when the plan collides with reality.

The Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke put it plainly, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” I have seen that principle prove true from the deserts of Fallujah to the granola-infused, corporate-jargon-heavy consulting departments of corporate stakeholder meetings. The context changes but the dynamic does not.

The Enemy Doesn’t Read Your Change Management Plan

In 2005, I deployed to Iraq as an M1A1 Tank Operator. Preparations were thorough and consisted of preplanned routes, rehearsed contingencies, and reviewed threat assessments. Training and rehearsals were extensive and covered many different possibilities. Thirty seconds into our first contact, and no part of what we experienced, resembled what we planned.

What kept the unit functional during contact was not the plan, it was the depth to which every Marine understood the Commander’s Intent. This depth of understanding extends beyond one’s assigned tasks, but the underlying objective, which matters more than people realize. When circumstances shift faster than communication can keep pace, the difference between an adaptive team and a stalled team is almost always whether individuals understood the “why” well enough to exercise individual judgment.

The Marine Corps formalizes this philosophy through Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1. At its core, MCDP 1 establishes that effective military leadership is not about issuing airtight instructions for every scenario. It is about developing people who understand the mission deeply enough to respond intelligently to conditions nobody anticipated in the planning phase. The leader’s primary job becomes cultivating that understanding, not just issuing instructions.

This directly parallels to change. Think about your last transformation initiative, when something unexpected surfaced, as it always does. Did people know how to respond, or did everything stall while the team waited for clarification from the top? If it stalled, the gap usually was not in the plan itself. It was that people had internalized the steps without ever fully grasping the purpose behind them. Strip away the steps and you are left with nothing to navigate by as they have failed to grasp the deeper mission.

There is a meaningful distinction between building a comprehensive change management plan and building an organization that is genuinely capable of navigating change. The former is a document while the latter is a leadership outcome. Most organizations invest heavily in documents and underinvest in the outcome.

You Can’t Brief Your Way to Alignment

In 2018, I spent several months as a Multinational Operations Representative coordinating an exercise involving Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, and the United States. The mission required synchronizing personnel movements, equipment, and operational strategy across military forces with different doctrines, cultures, chains of command, and at times, different languages.

That environment teaches you something quickly: you cannot announce your way to a shared objective. A memo does not produce alignment. A well-structured brief does not produce synchronicity. When you are collaborating with partners who have legitimate institutional reasons to prioritize things differently than you do, the only path to genuine coordination runs through relationships. Bringing people into the planning process before the decisions are already made.

When a Norwegian officer or a Finnish logistics lead had meaningful input, in shaping our operational approach, the dynamic shifted. They were not executing someone else’s plan with reluctant compliance; they were executing a plan as direct contributors. That sense of ownership creates a fundamentally different psychological posture. The same dynamic holds in any organization. People protect what they helped build and comply with what was handed to them.

I see the organizational equivalent of this play out constantly. A leadership team spends months developing a transformation strategy, runs it through legal, HR, and finance, sharpens the messaging, and then unveils it to the people who will have to live with it, often without any of those people having been consulted along the way.

The uncomfortable truth is that if stakeholders are encountering a change initiative for the first time at the rollout meeting, the engagement problem was already entrenched long before that meeting happened. By the time you are launching a change, you should have people embedded throughout the organization who co-created the approach, who can speak to it authentically, and who are prepared to advocate for it when skepticism surfaces.

That is stakeholder development. It is a different discipline than stakeholder communication and conflating the two is one of the more expensive mistakes I see in this profession.

The Change Nobody Talks About

In 2021, I led what appeared on paper to be a straightforward process improvement initiative. The initiative involved new data-driven workflows, revised KPIs, and updated reporting standards. This change affected an 80-person team distributed across 31 locations covering roughly 750,000 square miles. New tools. New performance expectations. A classic operational change.

Many of the Marines on that team spent years developing genuine expertise in the existing way of operating. Their professional identity, their sense of competence and standing, was associated with a particular set of skills and methods. When I arrived, asking them to do something different, the message they received, regardless of how carefully I framed it, was that the capabilities they had worked hard to build were becoming less relevant. It was not received as a solution to a process problem but an identity threat. It required a fundamentally different response than a training rollout.

Nobody self-reports feeling professionally threatened on a survey. People became quieter in collaborative settings, compliance was technically adequate but lacked genuine engagement, and there was a steady stream of objections that individually seemed reasonable but collectively functioned as institutional drag. If your primary visibility into adoption is metric-based, you will certainly miss this signal until it has already shaped the outcome.

What moved things forward was setting aside the implementation timeline long enough to have different conversations. Not presenting the change but asking people what they were concerned about losing. The answers were partly operational and largely personal. Once I understood what was at stake for people, I could design the transition in a way that acknowledged what they had developed while making an honest case for where the organization needed to go. We reached 100% adoption. It was not because the rollout was flawless or the technology was compelling. It was not. We got there because we treated the human dimension of the change as the core project, and the new systems as the surface layer that followed once people were genuinely ready to move.

What I Actually Carry into Every Change Initiative Now

Communicate intent, not just instructions.

Instructions are fragile and they are designed for conditions that may not persist. Intent is durable because it gives people a basis for judgment when the conditions change. A team that has internalized the “why” can improvise intelligently when the “what” stops working. A team that only knows the “what” stalls the moment the plan needs to flex.

Build trust before you need it.

Credibility can be earned during a crisis but should exist before one arrives. In the Marine Corps, trust is earned, never given. We earn it through honoring our commitments, displaying excellent judgment during low-stakes conditions, and a willingness to prioritize the mission and the people over personal convenience.

Organizational change operates under the same logic. Stakeholders who do not have an established basis for trusting you will default to interpreting ambiguity unfavorably once a transition becomes difficult. Relationship investment is not a soft expenditure. It is one of the most concrete forms of risk mitigation available to a change leader.

Treat resistance as diagnostic information.

In multinational operations, when an allied unit pushed back on a proposed course of action, the instinct to override them was almost always wrong. Not only damaging fragile relationships, but because they frequently had operational context the planning team lacked. Resistance in organizational change carries the same potential. The frontline employee who tells you a new process will not work in their environment may simply be reluctant to change. Or they may be surfacing a genuine implementation flaw that the design team never encountered or considered. I have learned to treat pushback as data worth interrogating rather than friction to be managed away.

Same Principles, Different Uniform

Today I am leading change management for the Interstate Bridge Replacement Program at WSP. This multi-billion-dollar infrastructure initiative replaces the I-5 crossing between Oregon and Washington. The stakeholder landscape spans federal agencies, two state DOTs, tribal nations, transit authorities, port authorities, and multiple layers of local government. On any given week, something shifts that was not in the plan.

What I reach for in those moments is not a framework, it is the relationships built before the pressure arrived. The shared understanding of what we are trying to accomplish, and the trust established through months of consistent follow-through. None of that interpersonal investment appears in a methodology but it determines whether a change initiative holds together when conditions get difficult.

I believe our profession sometimes reaches for frameworks as a way of avoiding the harder, less structured work of developing ourselves as leaders who can function in genuine uncertainty. Leaders who can read the room, build trust that holds under pressure, and keep people oriented toward an objective when the original plan no longer applies.

The Marine Corps taught me that the mission has no interest in your plan. It only cares whether you and your people are prepared for what unfolds. I believe the same is true for organizational change. I think this profession would benefit from investing at least as much in developing that kind of leadership capacity as we do in refining our change management plans.