Over more than 25 years in Business Change, I have seen the discipline evolve considerably. We are now much better at helping people adopt change. But adoption is not where the story ends.
When I started delivering major programmes in the early 2000s, projects were predominantly judged through the familiar lenses of scope, time and cost. We could have a strong project team, a good solution and a perfectly respectable implementation plan — and still fail to achieve what the organisation originally set out to achieve.
The missing piece was often hiding in plain sight: the people expected to make the new world work.
That is where Business Change emerged — in part, to address that gap. Since then, we have become much better at understanding impact, engaging people earlier, developing capability, assessing readiness and supporting adoption.
We have also become better at connecting adoption with outcomes. Prosci, for example, asks what proportion of project benefits depends upon employee adoption and usage.
But I think there is a more uncomfortable question transformation leaders need to ask about Human Value Dependency: once people have adopted the change, how much of the value in the business case still depends on what they subsequently do?
Adoption is necessary. It is not the benefit.
Consider a transformation promising significant productivity improvements.
New technology automates elements of a process. Workflows are simplified. Duplication is removed. Good Change Management prepares people to operate effectively in the new environment and supports adoption.
But where does the productivity benefit actually come from?
Part of the benefit may come directly from technology: a previously manual task that now happens automatically. Process redesign may contribute further value. But a material proportion of the promised gain may still depend on what people do next.
They may need to stop maintaining parallel spreadsheets. Make decisions at a different level. Trust and act on new data. Work across organisational boundaries. Exercise greater judgement. Redirect capacity released by automation towards work that genuinely creates value.
A person can be trained, engaged and successfully using the new system — and still not be doing those things. On paper, the transformation has achieved adoption. In reality, it may still be missing the benefit.
Follow the value backwards
The UK Government’s Guide for Effective Benefits Management in Major Projects distinguishes between outputs, outcomes and benefits. That discipline matters. But we need to apply it more explicitly to transformation design.
Take a hypothetical programme expected to deliver £2 million in annual efficiency savings. Rather than treating that £2 million as a single benefit generated by “the transformation”, trace it backwards.
What actually has to happen for that £2 million to exist?
Look at each benefit line and test the assumptions sitting behind it. Does it assume people will make decisions faster? Stop maintaining parallel processes? Work differently across organisational boundaries? Redirect released capacity towards higher-value activity? Exercise greater autonomy or judgement?
If it does, part of that £2 million has a human dependency. Somewhere inside that number is value that cannot be delivered by the technology or the redesigned process alone. It only exists if people work differently.
How much? That is precisely the number we should be trying to understand.
Real transformations are rarely obliging enough to divide their benefits neatly between technology, process and people. But that does not make the distinction irrelevant. It makes it important to investigate.
We would be unlikely to leave a technology dependency carrying a material proportion of programme value vaguely defined, inadequately resourced or without clear ownership and measures. Would we be equally comfortable doing so with a human one?
People as carriers of transformation value
This is not an argument against traditional Change Management. Good change managers already know that implementation without adoption is unlikely to deliver the intended outcome.
The shift is where we start. Start with the value the transformation has promised and work backwards.
For each material benefit, ask: What needs to be technically different? What needs to be operationally different? And what do people need to do differently?
Where that final answer requires different decisions, collaboration, judgement, use of capacity or capability, we are looking at more than an adoption requirement. We are looking at people as carriers of transformation value.
That makes their contribution a delivery dependency — not a softer, secondary consideration.
Human capability is not just a cost. It is part of the return.
This question is becoming increasingly relevant as organisations rethink work in response to AI. Dr Marcus Bowles, in his 2026 paper Rethinking Work: How AI is Reshaping Capability, Value, and the Design of Organisations, challenges organisations to stop treating human capability simply as a labour cost and to see it instead as an asset that can be built, deployed and compounded.
For those of us designing and delivering transformation, that prompts a practical question: if human capability creates value, where is that value visible in our transformation economics?
We can quantify technology investment, licences, implementation costs, headcount reductions, transaction times and process efficiencies. Human contribution is harder to quantify, so it can disappear into broader concepts such as adoption, engagement or readiness.
But difficult to quantify does not mean economically insignificant. If a material proportion of the anticipated return depends upon people behaving, deciding or performing differently, their capability is carrying part of the value of the investment. If we do not make that explicit, we risk under-designing the very thing the business case depends on.
AI makes the gap impossible to ignore
McKinsey‘s recent work on AI transformation illustrates the problem well: individual adoption does not automatically translate into enterprise value. Organisations capturing greater value are not simply increasing AI usage; they are redesigning workflows, roles and decision-making around what the technology makes possible.
In other words, using the technology is not the same as realising its value. AI makes this particularly visible because the traditional boundary between technology and user is changing.
The question is no longer simply, will our people adopt the technology? It becomes: what work should technology perform, what work should people perform, and how does that combination create the value promised by the transformation?
An organisation can deploy excellent AI, achieve impressive adoption and still fail to achieve its business case if the capacity released simply disappears back into existing ways of working.
That is the risk. The value only emerges when the organisation changes what it does with that new capability. And that brings us back to people — not as passive users of change, but as active carriers of its value.
Make the dependency visible
Perhaps we need another question in transformation design and business-case development.
Alongside technology, process, and financial dependencies, identify what we might call the Human Value Dependency: the proportion of anticipated transformation value that depends upon people developing the capability, making the decisions or changing the way they work required to realise it.
I am not suggesting every business case can be neatly divided into technology, process and human percentages. But trying to identify the dependency changes the conversation.
If a significant benefit depends upon people working differently, we should be able to answer three questions:
- Do we know precisely what people need to do differently and what capability that requires?
- Does the operating environment — including leadership, measures, and incentives — enable it?
- Can we measure whether the human-dependent value is actually being realised?
That last question is arguably the hardest. Measuring adoption is one thing. Measuring whether the human contribution to anticipated value has materialised is another — and it deserves a conversation in its own right.
But these are no longer questions about whether the Change workstream has completed its activities. They are questions about whether the transformation can deliver its business case.
The question we should be asking about Human Value Dependency
We do not need to make the case that people matter in transformation. Good Change Management already reflects that. Nor do we need to rediscover adoption. We understand its importance, plan for it and increasingly measure it.
The question now is sharper: how much transformation value are we expecting our people to carry?
If part of the business case only exists because people will work, decide, collaborate or perform differently after the solution has been delivered and adopted, their capability is not simply supporting the transformation. It is carrying part of its value.
If we can see that value, we can design the transformation to protect and realise it. If we cannot, we are not managing a soft change risk. We are leaving part of the business case to chance.
