What rock climbing knows about organizational change
The three-point rule isn't about caution. It’s about physics.
Every climber learns the exact same constraint before they get more than a meter off the mat: Keep three points of contact. Two feet and a hand, or two hands and a foot. Only then do you move the fourth.
The rule is not about caution. Climbers are not a cautious population. The rule is not a brake applied to momentum. It exists because of how force works on a body suspended in space. Three anchored points distribute structural load. They give you the slack to reach out, test an uncertain hold, realize it’s useless, and step back with zero consequence.
Drop to two points, and the math changes. The reach becomes an irreversible commitment. Weight shifts, momentum takes over, and you aren't navigating a route anymore. You are managing a fall in progress.
This highlights the central paradox of organizational change: Security is not the enemy of velocity. It is its condition.
Watch an elite climber on a severe route. The movement looks continuous, almost effortless, not because they abandoned structural rigor, but because they never have to stop to recover from an unstable position. They move fast precisely because they are never insecure.
The four points of contact in a transformation
When a transformation programme lands on a person, it does not land on a role. It lands on a set of assumptions that person has been standing on, mostly without noticing, for as long as they have worked there. Four of them do the load-bearing.
Identity. Who I am here, and what I am known for. The person others come to with a particular kind of problem. The one who knows how the old system actually behaves as opposed to how the manual says it behaves.
Sense of belonging. Whose team I am on. Who notices when I am not in the room. The group whose standards I hold myself to and whose approval registers as approval.
Reassurance of self-value. The sense that what I am good at still matters here. Not that I am valued in the abstract, but that the specific capability I have spent years building is still currency in this organization.
Cause-effect certainty. The belief that if I do this, that will follow. That effort produces a predictable result, that good work is visible to someone, that the rules connecting behaviour and outcome are the ones I was told about.
These are the holds. Under normal conditions they are invisible, in the way a floor is invisible until it moves.
Why three of four…
A transformation, by definition, has to move at least one of them. That is what makes it a transformation rather than a project. New operating model, new structure, new technology, new metrics: each one reaches for a different hold.
If you move one and leave the other three anchored, people can stretch. They will test the new hold, find it awkward, complain about it, adjust, and settle. The discomfort is real but it is bounded, because the rest of the base is intact. Their identity survives the new system. Their team survives the new metric. Their expertise survives the reorganization.
Move two, and the reach becomes a commitment. People slow down and start checking before they act, because the cost of a wrong move has gone up and they can no longer test cheaply.
Move three at once, and you get the response that leaders almost universally misread. New reporting line, new toolset, new performance framework, all inside a quarter. Identity, belonging, and cause-effect certainty all off the wall simultaneously. What happens next looks like resistance and is not. It is freezing. A person with nothing to hold onto does not push back against you. They stop moving, protect what little they still have, and wait.
This is worth stating plainly, because it changes the diagnosis entirely. When your programme stalls, the question is not why are they resisting? The question is how many holds did we take away at the same time?
Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness
What this changes in practice
If you are leading a transformation, the discipline is not to slow down. It is to know, at any given moment, which point of contact is off the wall and to deliberately anchor the other three.
That means asking a different set of questions during design, not during recovery:
If the structure is changing, what stays constant about who people are known as? Can an expert in the old process be named the owner of the new one, so identity moves with them rather than against them?
If the technology is changing, can teams stay intact through it, so belonging carries the weight while competence is temporarily off the wall?
If roles are changing, what is the explicit statement about which existing capabilities remain valuable, and who says it out loud?
If everything is changing, what is the one rule about cause and effect that people can still rely on? Even a single dependable line: escalate a problem and you will be thanked, not investigated, restores a hold.
Sometimes you genuinely cannot move only one. Integrations, crises, and regulatory shocks move two or three whether you like it or not. In that case the work is to install temporary holds fast: a named team that survives the transition, a leader who stays put, a decision rhythm that does not change. Anything that gives people something to grip while the rest of the wall is being rebuilt.
The benefits, and where they show up
Organizations that manage transformation this way tend to see the same pattern.
Adoption arrives sooner, because people are testing the new hold rather than defending the old one. Resistance becomes useful information instead of a problem to be managed, since the objections you hear are about the change itself rather than about the fear underneath it. Experienced staff stay, and with them stays the undocumented knowledge that makes the operation actually work. Rework drops, because people raise problems while the problems are still small. And the next change costs less than the last one, which is the compounding benefit and the one that almost nobody forecasts.
Above all, you get speed. Not the speed of a programme plan, which is easy to write, but the speed of an organization that is never in recovery.
Change is not what exhausts people. Continuous insecurity is. A climber halfway up a route is in constant motion and entirely calm, because at every instant three points are holding and one is reaching. Nothing about that is slow.
The question for any leader in the middle of a transformation is simply this: right now, in your organization, how many points of contact are on the wall?
If the answer is fewer than three, you have not found a resistance problem. You have found a grip problem, and it is solvable.
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