Written by DeEtta Jones
Nearly every change effort I have watched over the past thirty years has had some version of the same goal written into its plan. Get buy-in. Bring people along. Win hearts and minds.
It is such a familiar objective that we rarely stop to examine it. But I have come to believe that buy-in is the wrong goal — and that chasing it is one of the quiet reasons so many well-designed changes stall.
Start with what the word actually means. Buy-in means agreement. It means we have explained the thing well enough that you now endorse it. That sounds reasonable enough, until you notice what it assumes: that this change is the one that will finally fix things, that our job is to persuade you of it, and that yours is to accept it and carry it.
So we build a communication plan. We announce. We explain. We hold the town hall and take questions. And then we look for evidence that buy-in has occurred — nodding, agreeable silence, an absence of pushback — and we call that alignment and move on to implementation.
But nodding is not agreement. Silence is certainly not agreement. And here is the part that matters most: even genuine, wholehearted agreement is not what change actually requires.
Buy-in asks for a position. Change asks for capacity.
Consider what a significant change actually demands of a person. New behaviors, often performed in public, while they are still visibly bad at them. New relationships with people they have not needed to work with before. New tools, new language, new ways of making decisions. And frequently, the hardest thing of all: setting down expertise they spent fifteen years building and becoming a beginner again in front of colleagues who used to come to them for answers.
None of that is a matter of opinion. A person can agree with a change completely — can believe in it, advocate for it, want it to succeed — and still be entirely unable to do it.
I watched this play out in an organization changing how decisions were made — a question of decision rights. Authority was being pushed downward. Managers who had spent their careers escalating decisions upward were now expected to make calls themselves and stand behind them. In the meetings, the response was enthusiastic. People had been asking for this kind of autonomy for years. There was real, sincere buy-in.
Six months later, almost nothing had changed. Decisions were still traveling up the hierarchy. The leadership team was confused: they had responded to exactly what the organization asked for — “power with,” the ability to share in the important decisions shaping the organization and affecting them. Executives assumed it was resistance — that the same people who said they wanted authority would not take it when offered.
That was not what was happening. Those managers really did want to share in the decision rights of the organization. What they did not have was any experience making that kind of decision, any sense of where the boundaries were, or any evidence that a wrong call would be survivable. They had been given permission, described as “empowerment,” but nothing else. They agreed with the change and were simultaneously not equipped for it — and those are entirely different conditions that look identical from the outside.
This is the gap we misdiagnose most often. We see someone who agreed in the meeting and then did not change, and we conclude they were resistant — that they said yes but meant no. Usually that is not what happened at all. They meant yes. They simply did not have what the yes required.
Resistance is what we call it when someone cannot do the thing we asked or “empowered” them to do, and we assumed the only obstacle was willingness.
The better questions
If buy-in is the wrong goal, what should we be pursuing instead?
Capacity. Readiness. The honest question is not whether people are on board — it is whether they are equipped. And that question breaks into four others that are considerably more useful than anything a communication plan can address.
- Do people understand what this means for their actual work? Not the strategic rationale, which is what most change communication delivers. The specific, concrete implications for what someone does on Monday morning. Most people can recite the reason for a change and still have no clear picture of what it asks of them personally.
- Do they have the skills the new way requires? Or are we quietly assuming they will pick it up as they go? A great deal of change failure is simply an unfunded training requirement that nobody named.
- Is there room in their week for the learning curve? New ways of working are slower before they are faster. If the change lands on top of an already full plate with no allowance for the inefficiency of learning, people will revert to the old way under pressure — not out of defiance, but out of arithmetic.
- Is it safe to be visibly “not good yet” at something new for a while? This is the one organizations most often get wrong. If the first stumble gets treated as evidence that someone was never really on board, everyone watching learns that the safest course is to perform agreement while continuing to do things the old way.
Those questions are harder than “did they buy in.” But they are answerable, and every one of them points at something you can actually build.
What you find out, and when
Here is the part I would most want a leadership team to sit with.
When buy-in is the flagship message, you optimize for the appearance of agreement — and people are extraordinarily good at giving you that. You will get the nods. You will get the polite yes in the meeting. You will walk out of that room believing something happened that did not happen. The truth arrives months later, in the form of an implementation that quietly failed and a conversation about why people are so resistant.
When you optimize for capacity, you find out much earlier what people are equipped to do. You discover in week two that a whole layer of managers has no idea what the change means for their team’s daily work. That is uncomfortable information, and it is enormously more useful than a room full of agreeable faces.
This is also why I encourage leaders to think about an organization’s health more broadly than climate — how does it feel to work here? In those surveys, there is often a gap between what employees report feeling and what leaders say they communicated. Leaders communicate “we want buy-in” or “we empower managers,” and the responses come back “we don’t feel heard” or “we don’t feel equipped.” That gap cannot be closed by more communication alone, nor by more generous intentions.
What closes it is a more active measurement of organizational capacity. I ask people to match their organization against described states of how work actually happens: how decisions get made, how priorities get set, how resources move. Not “how do you feel about this, one to five,” but “which of these is a recognizable description of your Tuesday.” The first question collects opinion. The second collects evidence, and it is actionable. It is not “Do they like us?” but “Are we equipping them to be successful?”
The shift is not complicated, though it does require setting down a habit most of us have practiced for years. Stop treating change as a persuasion problem to be solved with better messaging alone. Start treating it as a capacity problem to be solved by building what people are missing.
Stop asking whether people are on board.
Ask whether they are equipped. Then go build what is missing.
Author Bio:
DeEtta Jones is an organizational strategist and systems designer. For more than thirty years she has advised leaders in organizations that rarely share an advisor — federal agencies and global banks, hospital systems and dance companies, technology firms and research universities — because the challenge underneath is the same everywhere: how people and institutions build capacity and navigate change. She is the founder of DeEtta Jones & Associates and of CultureRoad, a design system for organizational capacity and change. Her State of Organizational Capacity Report publishes in October 2026.
