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When organizations talk about change, it is often framed as a tidy sequence. Identify the problem, design the solution, implement the plan. In practice, change rarely unfolds that cleanly. Organizational change is a human process before it is a technical one, and it moves at the pace of meaning making, trust, and shared understanding.
One of the most common reasons change efforts stall is not a lack of strategy. It is a lack of shared understanding. People may agree that something needs to change while holding very different interpretations of what is changing, why it matters, or how success will be defined. Without surfacing and aligning those interpretations, organizations often mistake compliance for commitment and activity for progress.
This is where facilitation becomes a critical lever for organizational change.
Change Happens in Groups
Culture does not shift because a new initiative is announced. It shifts through repeated interactions. Meetings, conversations, decisions, and the unspoken norms that shape how people show up together. Facilitated spaces are where those interactions become visible and, importantly, interruptible.
A helpful lens for understanding this process is the familiar forming, storming, and norming cycle. While often associated with team development, these stages show up again and again during periods of organizational change.
In the forming stage, people are orienting themselves. They are asking, sometimes silently, what is changing, what is expected of me, and is this real. Skilled facilitation during this phase emphasizes clarity, transparency, and shared language. The goal is not certainty. It is coherence.
Storming tends to follow. This is where tension, resistance, and emotional responses surface. Too often, storming is treated as a sign that something has gone wrong. In reality, storming is data. It reveals misalignment, unspoken fears, power dynamics, and unresolved questions. Facilitators play a key role here by normalizing conflict, slowing the conversation down, and helping groups distinguish between productive tension and harm.
When groups are supported through storming, norming begins to emerge. New agreements take shape. People start to reference shared language and shared purpose. Decision making becomes clearer. Norming does not mean the absence of conflict. It means the group has new ways of navigating it together.
Shared Understanding Fuels Culture Shift
At the heart of successful organizational change is shared understanding. A collective grasp of what is happening, why it matters, and how people are being asked to participate. From there, shared vision becomes possible, not as a slogan, but as a lived orientation toward the future.
Facilitation supports this by making meaning making explicit. It creates spaces where assumptions can be named, differences explored, and alignment built over time. When done well, facilitation does not just move an agenda forward. It builds an organization’s capacity to adapt.
Organizational change is not about managing people through a process. It is about helping groups learn how to navigate uncertainty together, and that work is inherently cultural.
Curious what this looks like in practice or want to learn more about facilitation and organizational change? Look out for our upcoming Voices & Views panel discussion on FACILIT8me with Dr. Stacie Gibson in 2026.
