Thriving in the Change Economy: Why Change Management Isn’t Enough Without Change Enablement

The Problem With Change Management Today

Here’s the core problem: we’re obsessed with launching change, not enabling it.

As I break down in Chapter 8 of Just-in-Time: The Future of Enablement In a World of AI, I estimate that 90% of organizational energy goes into planning and implementation: product briefs, launch lists, sprint planning, and go-lives. Dozens of project management tools exist to support this. But what about updating documentation, reinforcing learning, and ensuring adoption? That’s the last item on anyone’s list—or worse, it’s on no one’s list at all.

This imbalance is striking, especially given the stakes. Organizations spend millions on new CRMs like Salesforce, yet struggle to allocate even a small fraction of that investment toward training and adoption.

At Spekit, we often positioned our platform as an insurance policy for those investments. For less than 3% of a typical CRM budget, companies could protect the much larger spend from being undermined by poor adoption. Once executives saw it framed that way, the value proposition became crystal clear.

Change Enablement: The Missing Piece

That’s why I define change enablement this way:

Change enablement encompasses all the steps—from documentation and training to communication and reinforcement—that you take to help people successfully adapt to and adopt change within an organization.

Think of it as the human side of change management. While change management focuses on the processes of implementing change, change enablement focuses on the people affected by those changes.

Change enablement is the crucial “how” that ensures changes stick. Yet it gets a mere 5–10% of the attention and budget in most projects.

The result? Content decay—when playbooks, battlecards, process docs, and training quickly become outdated or contradictory. Sales teams rely on stale information, leading to missed deals, customer churn, and compliance risks.

The Overlooked Risk of Micro-Changes

Most organizations have at least some structure around major (“macro”) changes like CRM migrations, methodology shifts, or new product rollouts. But the real risk lies in the “micro-changes”:

• New CRM fields

• Updated battlecards

• Minor process tweaks

• Revised product messaging

These happen constantly. And yet, there’s usually no consistent communication strategy. One week it’s an email, the next a Slack post, sometimes it’s forgotten altogether. Even when communicated, documentation often isn’t updated.

I experienced this firsthand managing Salesforce documentation at RealtyShares. We kept a “source of truth” spreadsheet we called The Beast. Despite audits and best intentions, it became inaccurate within weeks. Manually tracking every change was impossible.

Multiply that problem across every system, product, and process in your company, and it’s easy to see why employees end up confused, frustrated, and error-prone.

A Repeatable Framework for Change Enablement

The good news: while you can’t stop the pace of change, you can build a repeatable change enablement process to make adoption predictable and scalable. Here's a best practices guide you can download.

Step 1: Size the Change

Here’s a simple “T-shirt sizing” framework:

Step 2: Define the Tactics by Size

Step 3: Communicate and Reinforce

Make the framework visible and consistent across the company so employees know what to expect for each type of change. This clarity eliminates guesswork, builds trust, and reduces friction.

Pro Tips: Change Management Do’s and Don’ts

Here are some best practices from the field:

Don’t leave documentation as an afterthought.
Do make updating enablement content a required step in your release process (e.g., include it in Jira).

Don’t wait until the last minute to announce changes.
Do establish a regular comms schedule (e.g., biweekly updates + office hours).

Don’t bombard teams with fragmented Slack/Email messages.
Do standardize a comms template + naming convention for easy searchability.

Don’t “say it and forget it.”
Do reinforce via FAQs, champions, and ongoing touchpoints.

Don’t measure rollout alone.
Do track adoption, engagement, and business impact.

The Bottom Line

In the Change Economy, the half-life of skills is shrinking. What your team knows today may be irrelevant next year.

Traditional change management is not enough. Without change enablement, most initiatives fail to take root, content decays, and adoption stalls.

But with a repeatable framework, consistent reinforcement, and a culture of learning agility, companies can transform change from a liability into a competitive advantage.

Because in today’s world, adaptability isn’t just survival, it’s success.