We Not Me turns 150 episodes old this month, and Dan Hammond and Pia Lee are using the milestone to talk about something every leader running a transformation is quietly grappling with: why 88% of organisational transformations fail — up from 70% not long ago. Prompted by a Forbes article on the subject, they dig into why "transformation" so often becomes corporate shorthand for restructuring, downsizing, or otherwise firing people, and why that confusion poisons trust before the real work even starts.

The conversation centres on Charles Handy's sigmoid curve — the idea that any curve of growth eventually turns downward, and that a new curve must be started while the old one is still rising, not after it's collapsed. Dan and Pia unpack why this is so hard in practice: leaders can see the need for change most clearly, but their teams are always a few steps behind on the emotional journey. Drawing on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's stages of grief and William Bridges' distinction between change and transition, they argue that transformation isn't a communications exercise — it's an individual, leader-led process of helping people let go of identity, status, and habit before they can move toward something new.

Key Themes & Takeaways

• Transformation failure rates have climbed from 70% to 88% — and much of that is definitional: restructuring, downsizing, and "realignment" get dressed up as transformation, which employees correctly read as "you're fired," not "you're transformed."
• Charles Handy's sigmoid curve shows that a new curve must start before the current one peaks — but because performance looks fine on the way up, leaders struggle to convince anyone that change is urgent until it's too late.
• The transition zone between two curves is genuinely painful: old and new parts of the business end up competing for resources and legitimacy, with the "old" side feeling like the unwanted stepchild funding a new venture that isn't yet profitable.
• People don't just resist change intellectually — they move through denial, anger, and bargaining before reaching acceptance, and no two people move through that cycle at the same speed.
• Defining the new curve requires clarity on three things: what you're aiming for (clarity), the climate/culture needed to get there, and the competence — skills and behaviours — the organisation doesn't yet have.
• Leaders often assume the organisation will change while they personally stay the same — a fallacy that, left unchecked, is itself a predictor of ending up in the 88%.
• "Change fatigue" is real, especially when sigmoid curves land too close together — teams that haven't finished processing one change get hit with the next before they've found solid ground.

Three Reasons to Listen

• Listen if you've ever announced a change, moved on, and wondered months later why nothing actually shifted — this episode explains why communication isn't leadership.
• Listen if you're leading a transformation and privately think you'll be able to stay the same while everyone around you changes — Dan and Pia explain why that's a fallacy that quietly sinks change efforts.
• Listen if your team seems to be dragging its feet on a change you think is obviously right — the sigmoid curve explains why leaders are always further along the emotional curve than their teams, and what to do about the gap.

Notable Quotes

"Organizations change and people transition." — Pia Lee, citing William Bridges

"If you're leading change and you haven't changed, well, you're probably going to fit into the 88% (who will fail)." — Pia Lee

Max Crane runs La Stazione, the café in the Yorkshire Moors he bought last year from the mentor who gave him his start as a teenager. On the surface this is a conversation about coffee and community, but the real subject is what happens when a leader refuses to over-engineer culture: Max builds an entire team ethos around twenty-second interactions, hiring for character over CV, and treating mistakes as inevitable rather than dangerous.

The shift in the conversation comes when Max admits he can't fully explain why it works — and argues that's the point. The more deliberately you try to manufacture a "vibe" or codify values into a framework, the more it curdles. His approach — pick people for who they are, let them show up as themselves, debrief calmly after the shift rather than in the heat of the moment — offers senior leaders a useful provocation: sometimes the most replicable thing about a strong culture is refusing to over-systematise it.

2. Key Themes & Takeaways

• Max hires for character, not experience — a candidate with no CV who makes eye contact and laughs at a bad joke beats a "maestro" barista with eight years' service.
• His onboarding line to every new hire is "I hired you for you" — staff are told to be themselves with customers, not perform a script.
• Short interactions compound: Max argues you can meaningfully shift someone's whole day in the twenty to thirty seconds it takes to serve them.
• Mistakes are treated as low-stakes by design — errors are handled with a shrug and any real feedback is saved for after the shift, never in the moment, to avoid emotional fallout.
• Max is explicit that over-analysing or over-engineering culture kills it — the more you try to force positivity or codify it into values statements, the less genuine it becomes.
• He's candid about his own burnout risk as an owner-operator, and about learning that "being there" and "being present" are different things — an unavailable, exhausted leader can't actually support a team.
• The team functions as informal welfare infrastructure: Max describes staff quietly checking in on customers' wellbeing, and for some regulars — especially elderly customers — his team may be the only human interaction in their day.

3. Three Reasons to Listen

• Listen if you've ever tried to codify "culture" into a values deck and suspected it made things worse, not better.
• Listen if you're hiring and secretly know the strongest candidate on paper isn't always the strongest person for the room.
• Listen if you're a leader who's proud of how much you work — Max's honesty about burnout and "being there vs. being present" is a useful gut-check.

4. Notable Quotes