Which Prop Are You Holding?

The triptych shows three separate panels. Each one holds a different prop in motion.

Left panel, red light: a ball tracing a clean arc above an open hand. Center panel, green light: a club held high with neon rotation trails - you can see the spin in the exposure. Right panel, blue light: a ring at the top of its arc above a reaching hand.

Three different objects. Three different techniques. Three different bodies of knowledge required to run them.

This is what any major change looks like from inside an organisation. Not one experience, shared evenly across departments. Three - or more - entirely different experiences, running simultaneously, each shaped by which prop the department finds in their hands when the change begins.

The red panel: balls

The ball in the left panel is mid-arc above an open hand. The trail of light shows its path: a clean, predictable parabola. The hand below is not lunging. It is waiting at the right position, because the juggler already knows where this ball lands.

In organisational change, the departments in the red panel are those whose existing movements are already close to what the change requires. In a cloud migration, this is the infrastructure and engineering team. In an AI adoption programme, this is the data and ML team. In a digital transformation, this is the team that has already been building digital tools.

These departments are not exempt from the change. They still have to learn new patterns, new platforms, new ways of working. But the fundamental body language - the shape of the throw, the timing of the catch, the rhythm of the work - is recognizable. They are throwing a ball they have thrown before in slightly different conditions.

This is why they appear to move through change faster. It is not more commitment. It is shorter re-learning time. The body already knows approximately where this goes.

The green panel: clubs

The club in the center panel is held high, rotation trails visible, the spin already in motion. Clubs are not more difficult than balls in the sense of being more complex. They are more difficult in the sense of being completely different.

A club must be thrown with the correct spin or the catch is impossible. It rotates in the air and you catch it at a specific point in that rotation - not the head, not the middle of the handle, but the grip point, timed precisely. There is no “almost right” with a club throw in the way there is with a ball. You either have the spin or you drop.

In organisational change, the departments in the green panel are those whose existing expertise is genuinely relevant to the change but who need to apply it in a completely transformed way. In a cloud migration, this is the security team. They understand threats, access control, and incident response - but the cloud transforms all of these into new tooling, new models of shared responsibility, new categories of risk they have not operated in before. Their knowledge transfers. Their technique must be rebuilt.

In a process management transformation, the ITIL team holding clubs faces a similar challenge. They understand structured workflows, incident management, service levels - but the new platform reconfigures how all of these work. Their vocabulary transfers. Their muscle memory does not. They drop more in the early stages. This is physics, not failure.

The blue panel: rings

The ring in the right panel is at the top of its arc. Blue light. Reaching hand below. The ring is flat against the air - you can see that it is kept precisely vertical throughout the flight. If it tilts even slightly, it wobbles and the catch becomes unreliable.

Rings are not the hardest prop. They are the most different prop. The motion required to throw a ring cleanly is unlike a ball throw or a club throw. The release point is different. The follow-through is different. The trajectory is different - rings tend to fly in a flatter arc. The catch requires different positioning. Almost nothing from ball or club juggling helps directly.

In organisational change, the departments in the blue panel are those for whom the change requires building an entirely new motion pattern from near-zero. In a cloud migration, this is the finance team. The change asks them to understand consumption-based billing, reserved instances, cost allocation tags, cloud financial management tooling. None of their existing skills in accounting or financial planning provide direct technique transfer. The concepts of what they are doing (manage cost, ensure compliance, track value) are the same. The motion is completely new.

The ring panel is not where weak departments end up. It is where departments end up whose existing movements have the greatest distance from what this particular change requires. The distance is a property of the change, not of the department.

Who is in which panel depends on the change

This is the key insight: the prop assignment is not fixed. It shifts with every change.

In a cloud migration, the tech team holds balls. In an organisation-wide shift to customer-centricity driven by a new CEO, the same tech team might be in the ring panel - their existing motion patterns (build, deploy, maintain) are now the furthest from what the change asks for (understand customers, co-design solutions, measure impact in different terms).

The triptych as a planning tool

The three panels of the triptych are separated by dark borders. Each panel has its own light, its own motion, its own timing. They do not share a frame.

This is accurate. The red, green, and blue panels of a change programme run simultaneously but they do not run the same way. The communication that lands in the ball panel bounces off the ring panel. The training pace that works for clubs confuses the balls team (too slow) and overwhelms the rings team (too fast).

Effective change management is three programmes with a shared goal, not one programme applied to three different audiences.

Read next: Distance From the Change - how far each panel is from the centre, and what that distance requires.