Every organisation about to go through a transformation or technology rollout already contains a small group of people who want the change to happen. Transformation directors, program sponsors, CIOs and CHROs preparing for a go-live tend to spot them early: the branch that built its own workaround years before the program existed, the team lead who keeps asking when the new system arrives, the person who volunteers before anyone has finished the sentence. Change champions are not a communication tactic to assemble after the kickoff. They are already there, and the question that decides whether a rollout gains or loses momentum is not whether you find them. It is what you give them to do before the sceptical part of the organisation has time to organise.

That question sits inside a bigger one about timing, which is the subject of why resistance hardens before go-live and how to move first. The short version: the willing and the sceptical are both waiting to see what happens after a decision is announced. Whoever gets evidence first wins the silence. Champions are the fastest way to produce that evidence, which makes them a mechanism, not a mailing list.

Your Early Adopters Are Already Here

Most programs treat champion identification as a recruitment exercise: a call for volunteers, a nomination form, a manager asked to put forward “someone enthusiastic.” This finds people who are willing to say yes to a program. It rarely finds the people who were already, quietly, trying to solve the problem the program exists to solve.

Picture three branches of the same business, none of them talking to each other, all frustrated by the same broken handover between systems, all three independently building a workaround spreadsheet to patch the gap. None of that shows up in a stakeholder map. It shows up if someone asks the right question: who has already built something to cope with this. A program’s instinct on finding those three branches is usually to standardise them away, since three different spreadsheets looks like exactly the inconsistency a new platform exists to eliminate. The better move is to make one of them the reference implementation. Those branches did the organisation’s thinking for free, months before the budget was approved. Treating that work as a liability to correct, rather than an asset to build on, is how a program tells its most willing people their initiative counted for nothing.

Why Champion Programs Go Flat

Most champion programs go flat for a simple reason: they give people a title before they give them a task. A person is named a champion, added to a distribution list, handed a slide deck and a lanyard, and asked to be an advocate. Advocacy without something to point to is opinion with a badge on it.

Enthusiasm without a task is a wasting asset. It does not sit still while the program finishes its planning; it converts, and it converts to cynicism faster than plain indifference does, because these are people who spent real social capital vouching for the change to colleagues who were watching to see if it was worth believing. When nothing visible follows, the champion is left holding the credibility gap, not the program office. Standing up a champion network feels like progress, and it is easier to measure than the harder question of what each champion should be doing differently this week.

How to Identify Change Champions Who Actually Move People

The identification question is not “who is positive about this.” It is “who has already changed their own behaviour, in a small way, in the direction the program needs.” That reframes the search entirely. Look for the people who built the workaround spreadsheet, the manager already running their team’s meeting the way the new operating model wants everyone to, the person quietly training a colleague on a better process. These people are not champions because they are agreeable. They are champions because they are already proof, and proof is what the middle of the adoption curve is waiting for.

That middle group, the largest part of most organisations, does not move because a slide deck told them to. It moves because someone they already trust, doing a job similar to theirs, is visibly doing something differently and it is working. This is what mobilising the middle looks like in practice: not a persuasion campaign, but a small number of credible, local examples the undecided can copy without taking the program’s word for anything.

What to Give Them to Do This Week

The same First 48 Hours discipline that governs a program’s opening days applies harder to a champions cohort, because champions are the one group genuinely able to act on it. They are willing before the platform is live, before the process is final, before the rest of the business has been asked to do anything, which makes them the fastest available proof mechanism a program has.

The task is simple to state and often skipped: give each champion one small, specific, dated thing that stops, starts or changes in their own team this week. Not a briefing to deliver. An action their colleagues can see. A meeting run the new way. A report retired. A question their team used to ask a manager that they can now answer themselves. When the organisation sees that change, it reads it as evidence, and it reads it from a colleague rather than the program office, which carries more weight than anything a comms plan can produce. What to say to everyone else, including the people with legitimate doubts, is a different job with a different answer, covered in how to get employee buy-in before an implementation starts. This article is about what the willing minority does; that one is about what leaders say to the whole room.

Designing a Change Champions Event That Produces Movement

A champions event is usually judged by the energy in the room. That is the wrong measure. The right measure is what each person is holding when they walk out: one action, dated, theirs, visible by Friday. A session that ends in commitment (“I’m excited to be part of this”) has produced a feeling. A session that ends in a named action (“I’m changing our Monday handover this week”) has produced evidence.

Designing for that outcome changes the shape of the day: less time on the program’s roadmap, more time on each person’s specific first move, and less time being told why the change matters, more time deciding, in the room, what will be different in their own team by Friday. This lines up with MIT Sloan Management Review on why a sense of agency helps people cope with change: people adapt to a change they have some control over the shape of, and stall on one that is handed to them finished and pre-decided.

A champions event is also the room where an outside voice earns its place most clearly. An internal sponsor cannot always give a champions group full permission to be candid about what has not worked before, without it reading as a judgement on colleagues or on the program itself. Someone from outside the organisation can name the pattern, why champion programs go flat, why enthusiasm dies without a task, without anyone hearing it as criticism of a person. That reframing, delivered well at the start of the day, often makes the working session that follows land as decisions rather than updates. It is one of the more specific ways an executive speaker for a change champions event is used differently from a keynote at a general kickoff: less framing for a large room, more permission for a working one.

Mobilising the Middle Without Persuading Everyone

None of this requires converting the sceptics, and trying to is usually where programs waste their best early weeks. The adoption curve does not move because every objection was answered. It moves because the willing produced visible proof quickly enough that the middle had something local and credible to copy, and the program stopped needing to argue its case in the abstract. Champions are not a persuasion channel aimed outward. They are the fastest, cheapest evidence a program has that the decision is real, and the only question worth asking eight weeks before go-live is whether each of them knows precisely what they are doing about it this week.

If a champions cohort is being assembled for an upcoming rollout and the kickoff or working session is still being shaped, that is the right point to bring in outside perspective before the agenda is locked in. Get in touch to talk through the format.

AJ Kulatunga speaks on Execution Intelligence™: the gap between what an organisation decides and what it actually does. His work with champion and super-user cohorts is about the same thing at close range, giving the people who are already willing permission and a specific task, so a rollout has visible proof before the rest of the organisation has decided what it thinks.