Removing Barriers: The Change-Management Best Practice Most Transformations Miss

Most transformations don’t stall because the strategy is wrong. They stall because energy can’t flow. People who want to act can’t; people who try to act get blocked; people who did act once decide not to try again. In John Kotter’s eight-step change model, leaders are told to build urgency, form a guiding coalition, craft a vision, and remove obstacles so a volunteer army can mobilize. In Greg Satell’s Cascades, change spreads circle by circle—if people feel safe enough to take the first step. Put simply: progress equals willingness × permission. You already have willingness. Your job is to engineer permission.

This post is a field-tested playbook for turning “remove barriers” from a vague intention into a concrete management system—so your people feel safe, energized, and empowered to actually change the way you work: processes, systems, reporting, and culture.

The leadership mindset shift: from gatekeeper to groundskeeper

Traditional governance is gatekeeping: approve, reject, slow down, escalate. Transformational governance is groundskeeping: cultivate the soil so ideas can take root, grow, and spread. That means:

• Assuming initiative is precious and must be protected.
• Designing for momentum, not perfection.
• Treating every barrier as a solvable design flaw in the organization, not a personal failing.

When leaders adopt a groundskeeper mindset, the organization starts to breathe. People try. Trying produces learning. Learning produces improvement. Improvement compounds.

The four sources of barriers (and what to do)

We consistently see four categories of obstacles that sap momentum. Remove them deliberately.

1) Structural barriers: “I don’t have the time or authority.”

Symptoms: No capacity to experiment; approvals stacked across functions; unclear decision rights; project-by-committee.

Fixes:

• Timebox permission: grant every change team a standard 20% “change allocation” (or a fixed sprint capacity). Put it on calendars. Protect it like revenue.
• Decision rights charter: for each initiative, publish a one-page RACI with two-way SLAs (e.g., “Architects respond within 3 days,” “Legal reviews within 5 days”). Silence past the SLA = provisional approval.
• Guidelines over gate checks: replace blanket approvals with policy-as-checklist: what data can be used, what contracts must exist, what testing is required. If the checklist is green, teams ship.
• Change enablement lanes: small, low-risk changes use an express lane (pre-approved patterns); higher-risk items go to a weekly change board that’s measured on throughput, not the number of “no’s.”

2) Procedural barriers: “I can’t figure out how to do this the right way.”

Symptoms: Teams want to comply but don’t know the path; every squad reinvents security, procurement, or data access.

Fixes:

• Golden paths: publish step-by-step “how we ship here” recipes with templates, examples, and office hours. Make the right thing the easy thing.
• Self-serve platforms: provide internal portals for data products, integration APIs, identity, observability, and model deployment. Fewer tickets, more progress.
• Starter kits: for process, analytics, and AI work, give squads a pre-baked repo/environment with guardrails: logging, audit trails, automated tests, and a blameless incident template.

3) Cultural barriers: “If I mess up, I’ll be punished.”

Symptoms: Silence in meetings; innovation theater with no risk; good ideas saved for after-hours; finger-pointing postmortems.

Fixes:

• Sense of safety, explicitly: state in writing that good-faith mistakes won’t be penalized. Back it with behavior: celebrate attempts, not just wins.
• Failure budget: allocate a small, visible budget (time or dollars) for experiments that may not work. If you’ve never used it, you’re not trying hard enough.
• Blameless reviews: after any incident or miss, hold a learning review—no names, no shame—capturing what the system taught you and how you’ve improved the guardrails.
• Leaders model vulnerability: executives share their own “smart failures,” what they learned, and what changed because of it.

4) Political barriers: “This change threatens someone’s turf.”

Symptoms: Shadow vetoes, passive resistance, “not invented here,” quiet defunding.

Fixes:

• Guiding coalition with teeth: cross-functional sponsors meet biweekly; publish decisions and unblockings in writing. Tie sponsor KPIs to adoption, not attendance.
• Value-sharing mechanisms: where savings or gains cross boundaries (e.g., Supply Chain savings that raise Sales costs), pre-agree a split or a pooled value fund to defuse turf wars.
• Transparent trade-offs: use a simple value tree (impact on revenue, cost, risk) to show why portfolio priorities are where they are. Sunlight reduces shadow vetoes.

Safety fuels speed: Kotter’s urgency meets Cascades’ safety

Kotter teaches urgency—the burning platform that starts movement. Cascades adds safety—the cool heads and warm culture that sustain it. If urgency says “move,” safety says “you can move here, now, like this.”

Combine them:

• Urgency signals: consistent narrative about why now (market shifts, customer pain, regulatory risk).
• Safety scaffolding: explicit guardrails, clear lanes, supportive reviews, and visible recognition.

Urgency without safety triggers panic and politics. Safety without urgency breeds complacency. Together, they create responsible acceleration.

The “Remove Barriers” operating system: 10 practices you can deploy this quarter

The “Safe-to-Try” rule
If a proposal is reversible and within guardrails, the burden of proof flips: you must show why not to block it. Otherwise, it ships in a timebox.

Micro-charters for change teams
One page that clarifies mission, metrics, decision rights, constraints, and runway. Approved in 72 hours.

Change SLAs
Publish SLA dashboards for legal, security, architecture, and finance approvals. Treat approval latency as a leadership KPI.

Pre-mortems and “red team” hours
Before launching, teams imagine the failure headline and design mitigations. This channels fear into design, not delay.

Blameless postmortems
Standard template: what happened, what surprised us, what we’ll try next, who needs to know. Action items timeboxed and tracked.

Barrier Backlog
Every team maintains a ranked backlog of impediments. The guiding coalition commits to removing the top three every two weeks and publishes the before/after.

Guardrail Library
Short, living documents: data use, privacy, model risk, vendor onboarding, open-source policy, change classification. Updated by the platform/security owners with feedback loops.

Recognition that matters
Monthly “Barrier Breaker” awards for individuals or squads who unblocked others. Recognize behavior (collaboration, transparency), not just outcomes.

Rotation and shadowing
Let skeptics shadow a change team for two sprints. Often resistance melts when people see the rigor and safety up close.

“Two-way doors” vocabulary
Teach the difference between reversible and irreversible decisions. Most choices are two-way doors—treat them that way.

Metrics that prove barriers are falling

Executives respect what they can see and measure. Track:

Change Lead Time: request-to-first-value (aim for steady reduction).

Approval Latency: average age of tickets in legal/security/architecture queues.

Throughput of Safe-to-Try: % of changes shipped via express lane.

Adoption Velocity: time from availability to 50% target users adopting.

Learning Rate: # of blameless reviews per quarter and % with implemented improvements.

Psychological Safety Index (pulse item): “I can raise risks and try new approaches without fear of negative consequences.”

Barrier Burn-Down: size and age of the barrier backlog; top three impediments resolved each sprint.

If you want one north star, use Change Lead Time. If it’s shrinking while quality and safety hold, your operating system is working.

Reward the doers (and the learners)

People resist change for human reasons: fear of failure, reputation risk, fatigue. The antidote is visible fairness.

• Reward attempts, not just outcomes: public thanks, stretch assignments, visible endorsements, learning stipends.
• Make learning the default: “We either win or we learn” isn’t a poster; it’s a policy backed by budgets, time, and promotions.
• Protect reputations: decouple public dashboards from individual blame; showcase team improvements, not personal errors.
• Promote from the arena: prefer leaders who’ve shipped change—successfully and unsuccessfully—over those who have only governed it.

How TMO, HR, and Digital/IT collaborate to enable a volunteer army

TMO coordinates the change portfolio, runs the barrier backlog, and facilitates cross-functional trade-offs.

HR/People & Culture measures psychological safety, embeds “smart failure” in performance frameworks, and aligns recognition with barrier-breaking behaviors.

Digital/IT provides platforms and guardrails so teams can move fast without breaking the enterprise.

Together, they create a high-trust conveyor belt from idea to impact.

A 90-day sprint plan to institutionalize barrier removal

Days 1–15: Diagnose and signal

Run three listening sessions (frontline, managers, enablers) to surface top impediments.

Publish a brief from the CEO/CIO/CHRO: “We are removing barriers. Here’s how we’ll measure progress.”

Days 16–45: Build the scaffolding

Launch Guardrail Library (v1) and Safe-to-Try policy for low-risk changes.

Stand up the Barrier Backlog and SLAs; start the express lane.

Train leaders on blameless reviews and two-way doors.

Days 46–75: Mobilize and model

Select three lighthouse initiatives; apply the new operating system end to end.

Hold weekly unblock sessions; publish “before/after” barrier stories.

Days 76–90: Institutionalize

Add metrics to the executive scorecard.

Update performance frameworks to include barrier-breaking behaviors.

Announce the first Barrier Breaker awards and share the learning compendium.

A short vignette: when safety met urgency

A retail organization needed store operations dashboards redesigned and agentic AI assist for planograms. Historically, approvals took months; pilots died on the vine. The COO and CIO adopted Safe-to-Try for reversible changes, published a four-item guardrail checklist, and set five-day SLAs for architecture and data access.

Within eight weeks:

• Two cross-functional squads shipped v1 dashboards and a lightweight agent for planogram suggestions.
• The approval latency fell from 28 days to 5.
• A pricing pilot stumbled; the team ran a blameless review, found a data contract flaw, and fixed it in one sprint.
• Employee pulse “I feel safe to try new approaches” rose 11 points.
• Adoption passed 60% across pilot stores; shrink and labor hours both improved.

No heroics—just designed permission.

The 3H test: Head, Heart, Hands

Use this to keep your program honest:

Head (Understanding): Do people know the why, what, and how of safe change here? Are guardrails and guidelines explicit?

Heart (Safety & Motivation): Do people feel respected when they try? Are attempts recognized? Do leaders share their own failures and learnings?

Hands (Enablement): Can teams actually act? Are platforms self-serve? Are SLAs kept? Are two-way doors open?

If any H is missing, barriers creep back.

Executive call to action

You can’t coach a team that isn’t allowed to play. This quarter:

• Name barrier removal as a strategic priority in your transformation plan.
• Adopt Safe-to-Try for low-risk, reversible changes; publish the guardrail checklist.
• Stand up the Barrier Backlog and biweekly unblock ritual.
• Measure approval latency and change lead time; publish the trend.
• Reward the doers and the learners—loudly and specifically.

Urgency gets people to the starting line. Safety and permission get them across the finish line—again and again. Remove the barriers, and you’ll unlock the volunteer army that Kotter envisioned and the expanding circles that Cascades describes. That’s how transformation stops being a campaign and becomes your company’s way of working.