The branded YETI was never the point.

Change management has a maxing problem. Here’s what it’s costing you.

If you’ve spent any time online lately, you’ve seen the maxers. Looks maxing. Sleep maxing. Wallet maxing. The concept isn’t crazy: find what works, do more of it. There’s something almost admirable about the commitment.

The problem is that maxing and optimizing aren’t the same thing. More isn’t necessarily better. More is just more.

I see organizations do this in change management all the time. And it costs them.

The effort peaks early. The capacity bottoms out late.

Front-loading investment is not the same as building something that lasts.

Any change practitioner worth his salt can tell you that 70% of transformation initiatives fail, with employee resistance being one of the top reasons (McKinsey). More recent - and discouraging - insight tells us that the 70% failure rate hasn’t improved in decades (BCG, Fortune, May 2026). 

Yet, we set out on the same path each time. Early in a transformation, there’s energy. There’s budget. The team hasn’t been ground down yet. So the change plan gets ambitious: a gamified training platform, a launch event with catered lunch and a branded YETI, pulse surveys every two weeks, themed graphics for the communications cascade.

The plan looks great. Leadership approves it. Everyone feels good about the level of investment because we all know it’s important. 

Then the project grinds forward. The budget gets reallocated. The team that was supposed to execute the second half of the plan is now running on fumes, doing four things at once, and counting down to go-live (or they’ve moved on, with or without their big retention bonuses). That’s exactly when the real work of change happens: the final sprint, the chaotic weeks when new processes are supposed to become habit, the moment when people’s behavior determines whether this thing is actually going to stick.

You spent your resources - time, money, talent - when the stakes were low. You ran out of them when the stakes were highest. The YETI is in someone’s cabinet. The work is not done.

Activity is not progress. But it photographs well.

The tactics that are easiest to fund are often the least effective.

There’s a specific kind of change management work that thrives in organizations: visible, tangible things that are easy to describe in a leadership update. Gamified e-learning. Town halls with live polling. Branded swag. Pulse surveys generating dashboards that leadership loves to see and make it look like something real is being measured.

These things get funded because they’re easy to point to. That’s not the same as them working. And because they consume real resources (budget, time, people who are already stretched), they crowd out the things that actually move people’s behavior: honest conversations with resistant stakeholders, real readiness assessments, careful thinking about sequencing and timing, thoughtful revisiting of topics where it’s necessary (without opening up closed decisions willy nilly).

There’s also a harder problem. Employees have been through enough transformations to recognize the performance. The elaborate launch event signals that leadership is investing in appearances. The seventeenth pulse survey reads as surveillance, or box-checking, or both. You don’t get cynicism in spite of all the effort. You get it because of it.

Change management is the soft skill everyone thinks they already understand.

Which is why the expertise gap rarely gets named until the damage is done.

Here’s another pattern I see constantly: a capable, well-intentioned person (usually mid-level, usually already carrying a full workload) gets assigned to lead change management for a major transformation. They get handed a methodology they’ve never used, a stakeholder map someone else built, and a timeline that was set without their input. Then they’re expected to run change management for a program that’s orders of magnitude more complex than anything they’ve done before.

This is not a resource problem. It’s an expertise problem. Good change management requires someone who has seen enough transformations to know when the playbook applies and when to throw it out. Someone who can sit in a room full of resistant middle managers and understand both what’s driving the resistance (it’s usually not what they’re saying) and what can feasibly be done or changed to address their concerns (that takes a depth of understanding of the transformation itself and trust of the team implementing it). Someone who can tell a senior leader something they don’t want to hear without losing the relationship or the room. Junior practitioners may know the steps. That’s not the same thing as knowing what to do.

And even when the right person is in the role, something else tends to derail it. Change management, like communication, is a discipline that everyone feels entitled to weigh in on. A leader who would never dream of second-guessing the CFO’s financial model will cheerfully override the change strategy. “Can’t we just send another email?” “The training should come after go-live, not before.” “This messaging feels too negative, we should be getting people excited!” “The messaging feels too positive, people need to understand this is going to be challenging!” Every steering committee becomes a referendum on tactics, and the methodology slowly becomes unrecognizable.

Methodology without authority is just a document. The person leading the work needs explicit authority to make the calls, not just organizational backing. And the specific failure mode here is a familiar one: being overruled by someone with more seniority but less expertise in this particular domain. Seniority is not a substitute for knowing how change actually works.

Optimization is not a smaller version of maxing.

It’s a different animal entirely.

The maxing instinct comes from a real place. Organizations have failed at enough transformations to be genuinely scared, and fear produces a desire to do everything. Cover every base. Leave nothing out. But doing everything is not the same as doing the right things. Past a certain point, more communications create noise. More surveys produce fatigue, and eventually data you can’t trust. More engagement sessions generate meeting resentment. The interventions start working against the change.

Optimization asks a different question: not “what can we add” but “what will actually move people, and what needs to be in place to sustain that when it matters most.” It requires a methodology (not any specific one; the best methodology is the one your organization will actually use and stick to). It requires someone with real expertise leading the work. And it requires giving that person the authority to hold the approach when someone with more seniority but less expertise decides they have a better idea.

None of that produces a good slide. It doesn’t come with a theme or a color palette. But it’s the difference between a transformation that lands and one that just goes live.

Those are not the same thing.

And yes, once you’ve got the methodology, the expertise, and the authority sorted: give people a branded YETI. People love those things.

Amy Kawabori

Founder, Kawabori Advisory  |  kawabori.com