A CIM-qualified communications and marketing consultant, providing independent advice on change communications, digital strategy and transformation, based in Birmingham, UK.

Internal communications can be used to support organisational change by empowering employees with clarity, context and a shared sense of purpose. When we communicate well inside an organisation, we don’t just “announce” change – we activate it. We build the confidence people need to adopt new ways of working, and we nurture the psychological safety that makes genuine transformation possible.

At its best, change is a narrative we write with people, not for them. This is something I’ve explored often on chloeingram.com – from the importance of communicating timelines for change in transformation programmes, to the limitations of frameworks such as the Kübler-Ross curve, to the ways we can use data insights to understand our audiences more deeply. Behavioural change is no different: people shift when they feel informed, respected, and included. And that requires thoughtful, strategic, multi-channel internal communications.

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If you work in change communications, you’ve almost certainly sat through a presentation where someone wheels out the Kübler-Ross curve. Shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance parade across the slide deck, offering a simple way to describe how “people react to change”. It’s tidy, familiar and reassuringly linear.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the Kübler-Ross model was never intended for use in organisational settings. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed it in 1969 to help terminally ill patients and their families understand the emotional journey of receiving a life-ending diagnosis. It was a compassionate tool for navigating unimaginable distress, not a behavioural framework for corporate restructuring, system implementation or merger integration. As frameworks go, it’s a long way from where we need to be in modern transformation environments.

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