There’s a moment in every change management workshop that I’ve come to think of as the diagram problem.
Someone puts up a slide - the iceberg, the burning platform, the eight-step model, the bridge - and the room nods. The room understands what they’re looking at. And then the room forgets it, because diagrams don’t live in your body. They live in your notes, where they sit until the next thing replaces them.
I’ve been in enough workshops to know that this is the failure mode of most change communication. Not the content. Not the facilitator. The medium. Abstract pictures about abstract concepts, presented to people who need to feel something to change anything.
What happens when you put a ball in someone’s hands
I’ve done workshops where I hand a ball to every person in the room and ask them to throw it to the hand that has more bandwidth right now. Most people throw it immediately, without thinking, to their dominant hand.
Then I ask: what just happened?
The answers come fast. I defaulted to what I’m comfortable with. I didn’t think about it. My non-dominant hand is basically decorative.
We haven’t opened a single slide. We’re already talking about load distribution, default behaviours under pressure, the gap between intended and actual resource allocation. The ball started the conversation that twenty minutes of theory would have gotten to eventually.
This is not a trick. It’s a property of physical metaphors: when the concept is in your hands, you understand it differently than when it’s on a screen. The weight of the object makes the abstract concrete. You can feel what “load” means. You can feel what “off-balance” means. You understand coordination differently when you’re the one trying to coordinate.
The juggling model of change
When I teach three-ball juggling as a change management framework - which I do, regularly, in keynotes and workshops - I’m not using juggling as an illustration. I’m using it as the method.
The three balls are three simultaneous workstreams. The pattern is the process. The drops are the moments where something slips - not because you failed, but because you’re running at the edge of your capacity and the system is giving you feedback.
What juggling teaches, physically, is something that change models try to describe abstractly: a system under load is always one bad throw away from dropping something, and the response to a drop is not panic - it’s recovery.
You pick it up. You keep going. The pattern continues.
The response to a drop is not panic - it’s recovery. You pick it up. You keep going. The pattern continues.
In the workshops, this happens in real time. Someone drops a ball. They instinctively apologise, or laugh, or freeze. We talk about that reflex - the one that says a drop is a failure rather than information. That reflex is what slows down organisational change more than any structural issue. Not the drops. The interpretation of the drops.
Props are not props - they’re data
Different props teach different lessons, and this is something I use deliberately.
Stage balls are forgiving. Light, predictable, low consequence when they drop. They’re great for beginners, and they’re the right prop when you’re introducing an idea to people who are new to it. Don’t start with something difficult. Start with something manageable.
Clubs are harder. They have more mass, more flight complexity, more potential for things to go wrong. They represent the advanced state: the team that’s been doing this long enough to take on genuine complexity. They’re also dramatically more satisfying when they work.
Rings are flat and unforgiving. They punish sloppy technique in a way that balls don’t. They’re the prop for precision-dependent systems - the ones where close enough isn’t good enough and slight misalignments compound quickly.
None of this requires explanation when someone is holding the prop. They feel it.
Why the iceberg doesn’t work and the ball does
The iceberg tells you that 80% of change resistance is hidden below the surface. That’s true. It’s also passive. You look at an iceberg. You don’t touch it. It doesn’t respond to you.
A ball responds to you. Throw it wrong and you feel it immediately. The feedback is instant and physical. The connection between your action and the outcome is direct and unambiguous.
This is what change management mostly lacks: immediacy. Most frameworks describe change as something that happens over months and quarters, which it does - but the learning happens in moments. The moment you throw something and it goes wrong. The moment you catch something you didn’t expect to catch. The moment you realise you’ve been juggling for three minutes without dropping and something has shifted in how you’re doing it.
Those moments don’t happen in front of slides. They happen when the thing is in your hands.
What I tell organisational leaders
If you want people to understand change, give them something they can drop.
Not as a metaphor. Actually give them something. Put a ball in the room. Let people try something they haven’t done before and watch where they get stuck. The stuck points are the stuck points. The drops are the gaps in your current capacity. The recovery behaviour tells you more about your culture than any engagement survey.
The juggling is never just the juggling. It’s a diagnostic. It’s a mirror. It’s the fastest way I know to get a room of people talking honestly about how they actually work together, rather than how they’re supposed to work together.
Put a ball in someone’s hand. They’ll tell you everything.
Linda Mohamed designs and delivers juggling-based workshops for organisations across Europe. She brings the props. You provide the people.
Related: The Pattern Requires Everyone - on distributed systems and why every node matters. No Prerequisites - on why juggling’s low entry barrier is a feature, not an accident.