The Science of Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture

Why do so many change programmes underperform—and why does the field keep recycling answers that fail?

Organisations spend heavily on transformation while relying on slogans, shaky statistics, and pop psychology. The Science of Organizational Change offers a more rigorous route: apply evidence from behavioural science, decision science, risk, complexity, and systems thinking to the work of leading change.

Paul Gibbons combines scholarship with decades of business and advisory experience to test the assumptions behind orthodox change management.

Inside the book

• how to distinguish defensible evidence from change-management mythology
• why cognitive bias, the planning fallacy, and risk psychology distort strategic decisions
• how organisations build change agility across people, culture, structures, and processes
• what behavioural science says about habits, choice architecture, resistance, and accountability
• how complexity and systems thinking change the way leaders plan and govern transformation
• how to connect analytics with judgement when uncertainty cannot be reduced to a forecast

The result is not another step-by-step change model. It is a challenge to orthodox change management and a practical case for leadership as a science-based craft.

Written for executives, transformation leaders, change practitioners, strategists, and students of organisational behaviour who want tougher thinking and better decisions when the stakes are high.

Paul Gibbons has a 40-year career straddling international business and academia. His research and writing explore how philosophy and science can be used to enlighten contemporary business thinking, debunk myths and pseudoscience, and solve practical business problems, including changing culture, developing leaders, and using analytics and evidence to make strategic decisions. Paul's academic background, starting in math, then in economics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, allows him to bring perspectives to business not typically found in traditional business books. His consulting career, mostly in Europe, included founding an award-winning "teal" Organization Development consulting firm, Future Considerations. Paul has coached dozens of CEOs - on strategy, change, and talent issues. His change experience includes clients such as Comcast, Shell, PwC, BP, Barclays, KPMG, British Airways, HSBC, Nokia, The Body Shop, Comcast, the NHS, and UK Ministers. He was the change management lead on a $1 billion program for the UK's Department of Work and Pensions. Paul has appeared in Microsoft's Distinguished Author Program and at Google and appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He now writes, hosts the award-winning Think Bigger Think Better philosophy podcast, plays competitive poker, chess, and bridge, and raises two boys in Colorado.