Engineering Breakthrough Growth Requires a Bias for Change
Blog by Kim Scribner
We spend a lot of time helping organizations pursue breakthrough growth: defining the strategy, clarifying the operating model, aligning teams, and building the habits that make performance repeatable. But eventually, every organization reaches the moment where the same truth applies internally:
The habits that got you “here” will not get you “there.”
Breakthrough outcomes don’t come from business-as-usual execution. They come from deliberate change, especially in the way we work, prioritize, and learn.
Most organizations don’t struggle because they lack ambition. They struggle because they try to reach a new level of clinging to old routines. And change isn’t hard only because it requires new processes. It’s hard because it demands new habits: new behaviors repeated consistently, even when the old ways are comfortable and familiar.
If you want a breakthrough, you have to be willing to break something first—often the invisible defaults you’ve been operating with for years.
Change can’t be “done to” people
One of the most practical insights from Lean Change thinking is that sustainable change doesn’t happen when it’s pushed onto people who feel powerless.
When change is experienced as something being done to you, psychology kicks in:
Resistance shows up as skepticism or disengagement.
Or worse, people wait quietly for direction—doing only what’s explicitly asked.
Neither reaction creates momentum. Neither produces breakthrough growth. Breakthrough performance requires shared ownership, not passive compliance.
A bias for change is a leadership behavior…not a slogan
“Bias for change” is the discipline of moving from agreement to action. It looks like:
Choosing to test, not debate.
Choosing progress over perfection.
Choosing learning over protecting the status quo.
Choosing to act with the information you have, while improving the information systems over time
Having a bias for change is how you engineer the conditions for a breakthrough.
Breakthrough growth is built through integrated workstreams
Most organizations attempting breakthrough growth eventually face the same set of levers:
Strengthening the growth engine: building a more intentional, repeatable system for awareness, engagement, and conversion.
Evolving offerings: clarifying and codifying what you do best, in a way that customers can understand, buy, and consistently benefit from
Improving delivery: increasing efficiency and effectiveness without losing the high-trust experience that actually creates loyalty.
The workstreams should be specific to your organization's needs - interconnected mechanisms that reinforce one another. If you want a breakthrough, you don’t optimize one while neglecting the others—you integrate them.
Be Lean: small experiments, not massive rollouts
Lean Change Management doesn’t rely on grand announcements and sweeping rollouts. It relies on small, disciplined experiments. Because the goal isn’t just to introduce change. The goal is to make change stick.
The most effective transformations are built the same way high-performing teams build products:
Hypothesis
Experiment
Evidence
Iterate
You don’t need permission to start
You may not have the power to change the entire system overnight, but you do have the power to change how you approach one specific task each day.
Momentum comes from action: one clearer handoff, one better client conversation, one tighter meeting cadence, one improved template, one experiment that removes friction, one decision that moves from“we should” to “we did.”
We are the engineers
Breakthrough growth isn’t something individuals wait for.It’s something that’s built—intentionally—through choices, habits, and action.If your organization needs to accelerate, the question is rarely “Do we need change?”
The real question is: Do we have a bias for change strong enough to outpace our attachment to the habits that made us successful up to this point?
The breakthrough won’t come from the plan. It will come from what you do next.
