Executive Summary
Change fails when leaders manage the plan instead of the reality. Deborah Rowland argues that the biggest lever for transformation is not project management or resourcing, it is whether leaders can see how the world actually is, rather than how they believe it ought to be.
Our “oughts” act as bouncers on the door of the nightclub of truth. The implicit codes we carry about how the world should work decide which facts get let in and which get turned away, and they come from a deep need to belong, not from cold logic.
The “eek factor” is a practical gauge of whether you are facing reality. The more discomfort a piece of data provokes, the more likely you are dealing with genuine truth rather than a comfortable story you have already told yourself.
McGilchrist’s hemisphere thinking offers a way in. “Is” leans on the right hemisphere’s capacity to take in a whole, living situation without first forcing it into categories, while “ought” carries the left hemisphere’s comfort with abstraction, though Deborah is careful to note that oughts are emotional, not purely rational.
Truth is felt in the body before it is named by the mind. Deborah’s own consulting practice includes a moment when a senior chemist physically collapsed under the emotional weight of a coming closure, a moment that changed the entire course of the change programme that followed.
Resistance is data, not an obstacle. It usually signals an ought holding on to a competing loyalty rather than facing the new is arriving, so the leader’s task is to name and acknowledge that loyalty, not to argue it away.
Monday morning starts with BED: bracketing, equalising, describing. A simple daily discipline for noticing when judgement is flooding your perception, giving space to inconvenient voices, and describing what actually happened rather than the story you have told about it.
We spend so much energy fighting for how the world ought to be, and so little time actually seeing what it is. That is the deceptively simple, genuinely demanding idea at the heart of Deborah Rowland’s new book, From Ought to Is: Catalysing Change and Movement in a Polarised World, and the subject of this episode of Arkaro Insights.
Deborah has spent nearly four decades leading and studying large-scale change inside organisations including Shell, PepsiCo, Gucci and the BBC. She is the founder of the Still Moving consultancy, a Thinkers50-recognised thought leader, and the author of Sustaining Change and the bestselling Still Moving. Her latest book asks a harder question than most change frameworks dare to: not how do we plan change better, but how do we see reality clearly enough to change it at all.
The bouncers on the door of truth
Deborah traces the book’s origins to research she carried out in 2019 into the deep systemic forces that keep organisations, and people, feeling stable and secure. Her finding was blunt: if leaders don’t attend to these forces, usually operating below conscious awareness, they will never be able to release change. Chief among them is our need to belong.
“We are herd animals,” she says, “and therefore we become very loyal to the codes that these tribes sign up to.” Those codes are what she calls our oughts, the implicit ideas of how the world should be that quietly run our life. They act, in her words, as “bouncers on the doors of the nightclub of truth”, deciding which facts get let in and which are turned away at the entrance. Inconvenient data that contradicts what we already believe simply never reaches our attention.
Multiply that across a leadership team, a boardroom or an entire society, and the pattern is easy to recognise, from the entrenched positions of the Brexit campaign to the polarised politics Deborah writes about in the book. “Oughts divide the world,” she says. “They always make part of the world wrong.”
What "is" actually feels like
If oughts split the world into right and wrong camps, “is” asks for something more uncomfortable: to hold every perspective in the room as at least partially true, including the ones that unsettle us. Deborah offers a practical gauge for this, which she calls the eek factor, a simple gut check on how uncomfortable a piece of reality is making you feel. “If you are dealing with reality and truth, which might really challenge your thinking, you’re likely to feel a bit more uncomfortable,” she explains. “You’re out of your comfort zone.”
A team operating from “is” looks recognisably different in the room. There is more open-mindedness and curiosity, and people become willing to name not just their opinion but the loyalty underneath it, where does this view actually come from. “My truth might not be the whole truth,” Deborah says, “so please, everybody else, fill in the blanks as well.”
Left brain, right brain, and the ecocycle
One of the connections explored on the podcast is between Deborah’s ought/is distinction and Iain McGilchrist’s work on hemisphere difference, the idea that the left hemisphere narrows in, categorises and reasons in the abstract, while the right hemisphere sustains a broader, living attention to the whole of a situation. Deborah agrees there is real overlap. “The world of is, reality, our right hemisphere brain is so much better at comprehending truth and reality,” she says, “because it’s not putting prior categories onto the terrain.”
She is careful, though, not to let oughts off as pure left-hemisphere logic. “There’s an attachment beneath all of our oughts that comes from a place of deep love,” she says. “That’s why it’s so agonising to leave our oughts behind, because we fear that we’re going to betray perhaps a relationship to a previous leader.” Oughts, in her phrase, are “icky, squidgy, emotional stuff, not just abstract logic”.
This connects directly to a recent Arkaro Insights conversation with David Hurst on his ecocycle model, which distinguishes a front loop of complicated problems, maps and optimisation from a back loop of wicked problems, wayfinding and sense-making, a distinction Hurst also reads through McGilchrist’s lens. Deborah’s own account of organisational life follows a similar arc: as organisations mature, intelligence and attention tend to concentrate in the corporate centre, increasingly out of touch with what is actually happening at the periphery, with customers, on the front line, in the market. The task of change leadership, she argues, is not to diagnose a system from the centre and hand down a report. “A change leader’s task is to help the system see itself.”
Truth in the body, not just the mind
Perhaps the most striking thread in the conversation, and one that connects closely to an earlier Arkaro Insights episode with Linden Thorp on leadership presence and somatic awareness, is Deborah’s insistence that truth is felt before it is named. “Our whole body is an organ of perception,” she says, “not just what’s above our chin.” Emotions, she argues, register truth first; the brain then attaches a story or a judgement to what the body has already sensed.
She tells a striking story from her own consulting practice. In a workshop mapping the human cost of a major restructuring, a senior chemist, deeply sceptical of the whole exercise, was asked to walk around a room laid out with the different parts of the organisation facing closure. “He said, all right, I’ll get up and I’ll walk around and I don’t feel anything,” Deborah recalls. “But he just suddenly and very dramatically fell to the ground.” Over six feet tall, he collapsed, overcome with emotion he had not consciously anticipated. “It changed the future course of the change. It changed their decision-making, not to stop the decision, but how they went about the change, with far greater compassion, wisdom and acknowledgement of the price of the change, not just the prize.”
Where resistance fits in
This also connects to an earlier Arkaro Insights conversation with Professor Julie Hodges on people-centric change, that resistance is usually rational, and that the people pushing back hardest often have the most at stake and the most useful things to say. Deborah’s own reading, though, cuts the other way from how it might first appear. Resistance is not usually “is” breaking through an imposed “ought”. More often it is an ought holding on, a competing loyalty or commitment that has not yet been asked to speak, refusing to make way for a new reality that is already arriving.
The leader’s task, on this account, is not to overcome the resistance but to find the loyalty underneath it, to name it and acknowledge it openly. Reincluding what had felt excluded is what loosens the attachment to it. Only once that competing commitment has been given a place and a purpose, rather than argued out of the room, does a team find itself free to move towards the new “is”. Change done to people fails; change done with people, with both the new reality and the old loyalty genuinely in the room, has a far better chance of sticking.
What to do on Monday morning
Deborah’s practical starting point is refreshingly simple. She calls it spending a day in BED, an acronym for bracketing, equalising and describing. Bracketing means noticing, through an ordinary working day, when judgement and commentary are flooding into how you see a situation, and setting that commentary to one side. Equalising means deliberately giving space to the voices and the data you would normally discount, the awkward colleague, the inconvenient fact, the conversation you have been putting off. “If there’s an awkward voice in a meeting,” she says, “rather than give that person less attention, can you give everything a place and a purpose?” Describing means recording what actually happened, factually, the way an anthropologist would, rather than the story you have already told yourself about it.
“Spend a day in BED,” Deborah suggests, “bracketing, equalising and describing, and really notice where your oughts, your attachments, your loyalties, are perhaps coming in and drenching the perception that you’re bringing to your day.”
What this means for agriculture, food and chemicals
In sectors built on technical mastery and process discipline, the pull towards fixing change with a better plan, a clearer roadmap, a more rigorous project structure, is strong. Deborah’s argument is not that planning is unimportant. It is that no plan built on an ought that has not been tested against reality will survive contact with the people who have to live it.
At Arkaro, our “do it with you” approach starts from the same premise, that sustainable transformation has to be built on an honest, shared view of what is actually happening in a business, its culture and its context, before a single workstream is designed. Deborah’s book gives that instinct a rigorous, well-researched foundation, and a genuinely useful discipline for testing it, one uncomfortable, eek-inducing truth at a time.
About Deborah Rowland
Deborah Rowland is a leading thinker, speaker, writer, coach and practitioner in the leadership of large, complex change. Over a career spanning more than three decades, she has led change inside global organisations including Royal Dutch Shell, PepsiCo, Gucci Group and BBC Worldwide, and founded the Still Moving consultancy. She was named to the Thinkers50 Radar list of management thinkers changing the world of business and the 2021 HR Most Influential Thinker list. She is the co-author of Sustaining Change: Leadership That Works and the author of the bestselling Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change and the Still Moving Field Guide. Her latest book, From Ought to Is: Catalysing Change and Movement in a Polarised World, is out now.
Listen to the full conversation
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Deborah Rowland and Mark Blackwell explore the bouncers on the door of truth, the eek factor, McGilchrist’s hemisphere thinking and David Hurst’s ecocycle, somatic sensation and the collapse that changed a change programme, resistance as rational data, and a simple Monday-morning discipline for facing reality.
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Related reading from Arkaro
Engineer or Gardener? David Hurst on AI and the Ecocycle — David Hurst on the front loop and back loop, the map and the compass, and the McGilchrist-derived hemisphere thinking that Deborah engages with directly in this episode.
People-Centric Change: The End of Linear Thinking — Julie Hodges on why resistance is usually rational and change done with people sticks where change done to people fails, the direct companion to Deborah’s argument that “is” listens where “ought” imposes.
The Brilliant but Limited Mind: Leadership Presence — Linden Thorp on why truth is felt in the body before it is named by the mind, and why physiological safety cannot be read about, it has to be experienced.
The Neuroscience of Collaboration: The SPACES Model Explained — Hilary Scarlett on how the threat response shuts down exactly the thinking leaders need most, a useful companion to Deborah’s eek factor.
Transforming Change Resistance: A Four-Step Collaborative Approach — How Arkaro’s own methodology treats resistance as feedback rather than an obstacle to be managed away.
Human-Centric Supply Chain Leadership — Karen-Marie Katholm on the balcony and the dance floor, and the discipline of stepping back to see a system clearly before acting on it.
Why 95% of AI Implementations Fail: Neuroscience and Change — Why organisations that skip the reality-facing work, however sophisticated the technology, tend to fail at adoption.
10 Signs Your Organisation Needs VUCA Adaptation — Warning signs that a leadership team is operating from ought rather than is.
