Catalyzing Change to Disrupt the Status Quo: How Women Leaders Move Change By Flipping the Script
Voice allows you to speak.
Visibility allows you to be seen.
Catalyzing change allows you to shift the system, especially those that were never designed with you in mind.
Up to now, this series has explored the inner architecture of leadership: power, achievement, genius, networks, voice, and visibility. These are not abstract concepts. They are capacities you have earned, often through experiences that asked too much of you and quietly rewarded you for absorbing the strain.
That absorption has been the hidden cost of success. It is the invisible labor of smoothing friction, carrying tension, and compensating for misaligned systems so progress can continue without anything fundamentally changing.
Many organizations remain stuck not because leaders lack insight or commitment, but because the cost of change is quietly absorbed by those most capable of holding it. At a certain point in leadership, success inside the system gives way to a harder question: What if, instead of absorbing the cost, we changed the system itself? This is the threshold where leadership moves fully outward.
A Failure That Clarified the Work
I have spent my career studying change in human systems. But I should say this plainly: I have not always been skilled or courageous enough to catalyze it.
My own failure came in a European boardroom.
I was doing what I had done many times before, using presence, pattern recognition, and disciplined facilitation to help a leadership team name the real sources of their misalignment. Power was shifting in the room. Conversations were becoming more honest. The system was beginning to move.
Then we broke for coffee.
One of the leaders, clearly unsettled by the rebalancing that had just occurred, redirected his frustration toward me. In front of the entire group, he made a comment designed to diminish my authority. It landed. For a moment, it worked. I excused myself and went to the restroom. I steadied my breathing and returned to the room. I did what many women leaders know how to do instinctively. I contained the impact so the system could continue functioning even as the underlying pattern went unexamined.
It was only days later, once I had returned home, that I allowed myself to fully register the cost of that moment not just professionally, but personally. What stayed with me was not the comment itself, but how quickly my system knew exactly what to do. That reflex and the ability to smooth, absorb, harmonize, and move on had been trained over years of success.
This is not a story of resilience. It is a story of how the status quo is maintained.
I did not catalyze change in that moment. I stabilized the system instead. That failure clarified something essential: what was missing was not competence or courage. It was a different understanding of how change actually works. This article introduces the final domain of the Leadership Blueprint: Change Catalyzation.
Five Hard-Won Truths About How Change Actually Works
Before I could catalyze change, I had to examine some deeply held assumptions. These five truths now guide how I lead change and how I help other leaders do the same.
1. Change doesn’t move because leaders are commanding. It moves when leaders shape the conditions that allow it to emerge.
Authority can announce change, but it cannot make it take root. Command produces compliance. Conditions produce commitment. When leaders stop pushing outcomes and start shaping the environment, change begins to move on its own.
2. Change is not a plan to execute; it’s a human system to engage.
Plans assume predictability and linear progress. Human systems carry history, identity, and emotion. Change moves through trust, interaction, and shared meaning over time. When leaders treat it like a rollout, people wait it out. When they engage the system itself, people test, adapt, and take ownership.
3. People don’t change because you want something different. They change when the current state becomes untenable.
Logic informs. Pressure mobilizes briefly. But transformation requires a felt recognition that this no longer works. Until people experience the friction, consequences, or limitations of the current state for themselves, change remains performative.
4. Resistance isn’t the problem. It’s the data.
What leaders call resistance is often the system protecting identity, roles, and meaning. Suppress the signal and the system tightens around the very patterns you’re trying to change. Listen to it and you learn where coherence is anchored and what must be honored or reworked for change to hold.
5. Change requires disruption, not just harmony. And it gets noisy when it’s working.
Many women are rewarded for creating harmony. But harmony alone stabilizes systems; it does not transform them. Real change is social before it is structural. It moves through difference, tension, and connection, not quiet agreement. When conversations sharpen and assumptions surface, that’s not failure. That’s the system doing its work. Silence is often a sign the system is complying, not changing.
From Insight to Navigation
If these truths sparked recognition or discomfort that’s not accidental. Most women leaders already sense them. You’ve felt when command backfires, when plans collapse under the weight of human reality, when agreement masks inertia, and when resistance carries more information than opposition ever could.
The challenge isn’t awareness; it’s what to do when you’re inside it. Knowing how change works does not automatically tell you how to lead when tension rises, when resistance surfaces, or when the pressure quietly shifts back onto you to smooth things over and make it work. What’s needed in those moments is not more insight, but a way to read and adjust the system while you’re still inside it.
The Change Dials™: Leading Without Carrying the System
From a complexity perspective, leaders do not cause change. They shape the conditions that influence whether it moves, stalls, or quietly reverts.
Change is shaped by six conditions present in every human system:
the drive for something to be different
the diversity of perspectives shaping meaning
the quality of connection and information flow
the level of safety to speak and experiment
the degree of stability holding patterns in place
and how control and autonomy are distributed
There is no single right setting only contextual judgment. When these conditions are misaligned, leaders often compensate personally. When they are adjusted, momentum redistributes and the system begins to adapt. The central question the Change Dials™ surface is this: Where am I compensating for the system—and what would shift if I stopped?
The Change Dials™ worksheet helps to translate that question into practical judgment, helping leaders see which conditions they are unconsciously carrying and where small shifts can redistribute responsibility back to the system.
What I Would Do Differently Now
With a way to read and adjust system conditions, I would not handle that boardroom moment by containing it. I would have recognized the comment for what it was: a signal. Not a personal attack to absorb, but information about the system itself surfacing precisely because conditions were beginning to shift.
Instead of stepping away to stabilize and return quietly to the work, I would have stayed with the moment. I would have named what had just happened not to escalate conflict, but to make the pattern visible. I would have slowed the room down long enough for the group to feel the tension they were trying to move past. I would have asked a question that returned responsibility to the system rather than carrying it myself:
“What just happened here and what does it tell us about how power is operating in this room right now?”
That single move would have adjusted multiple conditions at once: safety, control, connection, and the real drive for change. It would have shifted the burden off me and back where it belonged. At the time, I didn’t see that option. Now I understand the difference between stabilizing a system and catalyzing change.
This is the shift from leading within the system to leading on the system and it is the final threshold of the Leadership Blueprint.
Our Closing Invitation
Change catalyzation is not about force or heroics. It is about discernment knowing when to intervene, when to hold, and when to let the system feel what it has been avoiding.
When leaders stop compensating for misaligned conditions, systems are forced to respond. Responsibility redistributes. Momentum becomes collective. Change moves not because someone carried it, but because the conditions finally allowed it.
This is the work of leading on the system, not just within it.
And it is the most consequential shift a leader can make.
Series Epilogue: The Leadership Blueprint
This series began with an inside question:
Who do I need to become to lead with coherence in systems that were never designed with me in mind?
Across power, achievement, personal genius, networks, voice and visibility, and change catalyzation, one truth has emerged: leadership is not about carrying more, proving longer, or smoothing what should be confronted. It is about coherence—within yourself, across relationships, and inside the systems you shape.
The Leadership Blueprint is an architecture for discernment in complex, human systems. It invites leaders to stop absorbing the hidden costs of misalignment and start shaping the conditions for collective movement.
The question now is not What do I need to do differently?
It is: What would change if I stopped carrying what the system needs to learn to hold?
When women answer that question honestly, leadership shifts and systems finally do.
I would love to hear your thoughts about this article series. Reach out to connect with me on LinkedIn or schedule a time to chat.
