Gentle Brute Force: What Actually Makes Change Stick

Published 2024-03-12 · Updated 2026-06-23 · By Alan Wizemann

Topics: Digital Transformation, Product Strategy & Development, Team Building & Culture, Growth Leadership

There is a drawing I keep coming back to whenever I think about transformation, a simple sketch that shows the start of a change dipping downward into a valley of chaos and confusion before it gradually climbs back up toward something that actually works. The point of the drawing is almost too simple to take seriously, which is precisely why people miss it. You will spend far more time down in the chaos phase than you think you will, and most leaders are not ready for how long it lasts. I have been through enough transformations now to know that everyone gets excited about the output (the new platform, the AI feature, the redesigned experience that photographs well in a board deck). That is the shiny part, and it is the part nobody has to be convinced to care about. What nobody really warns you about is the dirt underneath it – changing the funding models, changing how teams report their progress, getting executives to genuinely understand what is happening rather than nodding along in a meeting. That unglamorous work is what takes longer than anything else in the whole transformation.

What makes it actually work, in my experience, is something I have started calling gentle brute force. The idea behind it is that if you wait to get full consensus before you make a change, you will be waiting forever. The window closes, resistance calcifies, and people grow comfortable enough with the announcement that they assume you will walk them through every step before anything truly shifts. So instead of waiting, you make the change, and then you show people why you did it, and that is the brute force half of it. The gentle half matters just as much, though, because this is not about ramming things through without explanation. It is about moving fast enough to stay a step ahead of the opposition while being transparent enough that the people around you understand what is happening and why. You give them the context after the fact, but you give it to them clearly and quickly, so they have the time to actually adapt to the change rather than spending all of their energy arguing about whether the change should have happened at all.

The most memorable example I have from my own career came during my time at Target. When I joined, Target was a business-formal company – suits and ties, the whole register of it – and we were trying to build internal digital capabilities, which in practice meant hiring a lot of engineers. You do not have to spend long around engineers to know that suits and ties are not exactly the standard dress code in that world. The resulting culture clash was real enough that it was actively getting in the way of what we were trying to do. We could have tried to explain it the conventional way, sitting down with every team one meeting at a time to make the case that we needed to embrace a different working culture in order to attract the talent we needed. Or we could have put out an internal memo laying out the argument. Both of those approaches have a way of going precisely nowhere, because they create a debate, they invite counterarguments, and they hand the people most resistant to change a forum to be resistant in.

What we did instead was change the dress code, and not just for the technology teams but company-wide. The new policy was almost comically simple: dress your day. If you had a meeting, dress it up; otherwise, wear what you want. It sounds small written down like that, and yet the effect was remarkable. A single visible signal that touched how every person showed up to work in the morning communicated something far bigger than clothing ever could. It said, plainly and without a memo, that we are changing, that the old way of doing things is no longer the only way, and that the new people arriving were going to look different and work differently and that this was going to be okay. The marketing team in particular ran with it, leaning into the communication around the change and folding it into a broader narrative about adaptation at a moment when the company genuinely needed to change, with store traffic declining and Amazon eating steadily into retail. That dress code change unlocked something in the collective acceptance of what was coming. Not long after, they changed the CEO – it was a period of monumental change, and a simple shift in how people dressed helped set the stage for all of it.

I have seen this pattern enough times that I now look for it in every transformation I lead, asking myself what the symbolic change is, the one that is not the product itself but that can shift how people feel about the broader shift. Sometimes it turns out to be how meetings are run, sometimes it is what gets reported up to leadership and what deliberately does not, and sometimes it is simply being honest about the chaos rather than pretending it away. That honesty is the other thing I have come to rely on, because transparency during the chaos matters far more than projecting confidence through it. I have been in the middle of transformations where I genuinely did not know what was going to happen from one week to the next, where there was just too much change in motion to hold it all. The instinct in that moment, especially at a senior level, is to keep a calm face and put out a steady message and act like you have the whole thing figured out. That approach almost always backfires. When teams can sense that the chaos is real but the leader is pretending it is not, the distrust compounds quietly, and people start filling in the gaps with their own stories, most of which are considerably worse than the reality.

What actually works is gathering the team and saying something closer to the truth: here is where we are on the change curve, we are still in the chaos section, I know it feels like that, and honestly I feel it too, but here is why I think we are going to come through it and here is what I need from you while we figure it out together. That kind of candor builds buy-in in a way that polished messaging almost never does. When you tell people that you do not know exactly what is happening either, and that you are in the room with them to work it out, you get a level of real engagement that no town hall full of everything-under-control reassurance can produce. There is one more thing that changes the speed and the difficulty of all of this, which is whether leadership is already aligned on the need for change in the first place. When you are at a company where the top is already pulling in the same direction, transformation moves at a completely different pace, because you are not fighting the current at the same time you are trying to swim. You are still dealing with all the organizational complexity, the funding questions, the slow culture work, but the window itself stays open longer, and that makes a real difference.

That has been my experience at Southern Glazer's, where the transformation has been genuinely welcomed, which does not mean it has been easy but does mean the work can compound on itself. Each change makes the next one a little less surprising, and over time the organization builds a tolerance for it, and then something better than tolerance, which is an actual appetite for it. The change curve still shows chaos in the middle, and that part does not disappear no matter how aligned the leadership is. But when you are honest about that valley, and when you have shown people a few times that the curve really does climb back up on the other side, they slowly start to believe that it will do so again, and that belief, more than any platform or feature, is what makes the next change stick.