Change Myths: The Professionals Guide to Separating Sense from Nonsense (Leading Change in the Digital Age)

How much of change management is evidence—and how much is inherited folklore?

Change practitioners are surrounded by confident claims: people resist change, brains hate uncertainty, learners have fixed styles, employees follow a predictable change curve, and leaders must create a burning platform. Many of these ideas are decades old. Repetition has made them familiar, not true.

In Change Myths, Paul Gibbons and Tricia Kennedy put some of the field’s most popular models and metaphors under sustained scrutiny.

Inside the book

• why the Kübler-Ross grief model does not become a business-change model by analogy
• what the evidence says about MBTI, learning styles, resistance, and urgency
• how neurobabble and claims that the brain “hates change” distort practice
• why linear models struggle with complex organisational change
• how myths spread through authority, intuition, repetition, and information disorder
• how to use the LIAR framework—leading authorities, intuition, argument, and research evidence—to test professional claims

This is not an argument for cynicism or for discarding every familiar tool. It is an argument for intellectual responsibility: knowing what the evidence supports, what it does not, and where judgement must begin.

Written for change practitioners, organisational leaders, consultants, HR leaders, and anyone who wants sharper tools for separating sense from nonsense at work.

Paul is a keynote speaker, serial author, and advisor to the "big-4" consulting firms on human capital. His first book, The Science of Organizational Change remains a best-seller on change management. His keynotes focus on future of work, human capital trends, behavioral science and culture change, and the future of change management.