You're Only Reaching Half the Room
Every time you make a purely positive case for change, you're leaving half your audience cold. And you may not know it.
Keith Laplante
Thirty-five years leading inside organizations (TD Waterhouse, BMO, HomeEquity Bank) and advising alongside them (Accenture, ExperiencePoint, The Refinery Leadership Partners). Facilitated leadership programs at Harvard, Duke, and Stanford. Read more about Keith
"They're not failing to engage because they don't care. They're failing to engage because you haven't said anything yet that engages the way they're wired."
July 28, 2026
You're Only Reaching Half the Room
Every time you make a purely positive case for change, you're leaving half your audience cold. And you may not know it.
I want to describe a common situation, and then I want to explain why it goes wrong more often than most leaders realize.
A change initiative is being prepared. The communication team is drafting the message. There's a meeting to review the draft, and somewhere in that meeting, someone says a version of what almost always gets said at this stage. "Let's keep it positive. Focus on the opportunity. Don't scare people. We want to inspire them, not stress them out."
The final message goes out. It talks about the exciting new direction. The opportunities for growth. The better future the change is going to create. It's professionally produced, thoughtfully worded, and lands with a certain kind of energy the organization is proud of.
And roughly half the people who hear it feel absolutely nothing.
That's the part that's easy to miss. Because the people who do respond to the positive framing are visibly enthusiastic, and their enthusiasm feels like validation that the message is working. Meanwhile, the people it isn't reaching don't complain, don't push back, and don't announce themselves. They just quietly disengage from the change, and leadership never knows why.
The two ways human beings are motivated
There's a well-established body of research in behavioural psychology on what motivates people, and it comes down to a distinction that leaders would benefit from taking seriously.
Some people are what psychologists call approach-motivated. They move toward things. They're drawn to opportunity, potential, upside, possibility. When you paint a picture of a better future, something inside them lights up and starts moving in that direction. They don't need to be pushed. They're pulled.
Other people are what psychologists call avoidance-motivated. They move away from things. They're activated by threat, risk, loss, and the possibility that something they value is going to be taken from them. When you paint a picture of a better future, they may nod politely, but nothing inside them actually engages. What activates them is a clear articulation of what they're going to lose if nothing changes, or what will be at stake if the change doesn't work.
Neither of these is better than the other. They're just different ways human beings are wired. And in almost any group of people, you'll find both types represented in roughly equal proportions.
Here's the part that matters for change leadership. A purely positive message reaches the approach-motivated half of your audience and leaves the avoidance-motivated half cold. A purely negative message reaches the avoidance-motivated half and turns off the approach-motivated half. Either extreme fails half the room.
Most change communication defaults to the positive extreme. Which means most change communication is systematically failing to reach half the people it's supposed to move.
The toxic positivity trap
The tendency toward relentless positivity in change messaging is stronger than it needs to be, and it's worth understanding why.
Part of it is well-intentioned. Leaders don't want to demoralize their people, and they've been told, often correctly, that negative messaging can be counterproductive. Part of it is defensive. Communication teams are often risk-averse, and framing anything in negative terms can feel like it invites problems. Part of it is cultural. Many organizations have built cultures that reward optimism and treat honest concern as weakness or negativity.
The result is a pattern I've seen in organization after organization. Change messages that are so unrelentingly positive they become almost unbelievable. Every initiative is exciting. Every direction is bold. Every future is bright. There's never any acknowledgment of what's actually hard about what's being asked, or what the honest risks are, or what people might reasonably be worried about losing.
And the avoidance-motivated half of the organization, who need honest engagement with what's at stake in order to activate, sits through message after message that never quite lands. They're not resistant. They're not disengaged. They're just not being spoken to.
What effective change communication looks like
The leaders who navigate this well do something specific. They talk about both sides of the picture. They articulate the opportunity, clearly and compellingly, for the people who move toward that. And they also articulate, honestly and directly, what's at stake if nothing changes. What the organization stands to lose. What individual people are already losing. What the cost of standing still actually is.
This isn't fearmongering, it's honest engagement with the fact that not changing has consequences too, and those consequences are often more visible to your people than you realize. The avoidance-motivated half of your audience is already thinking about what could go wrong. When leadership refuses to engage with that reality, they don't stop thinking about it. They just stop trusting the leadership that isn't willing to name it.
The other thing the leaders who do this well have in common is that they don't treat these two framings as sequential steps in a communication plan. They weave them together. In the same conversation, sometimes in the same paragraph, they'll articulate the opportunity and the risk, the possibility and the cost. That combined framing is what reaches the whole room, because different parts of the message activate different parts of the audience.
The mistake most leaders make isn't choosing the wrong emphasis. It's choosing only one.
The uncomfortable part
There's something uncomfortable about accepting this, and I want to name it, because I think it's part of why the pattern is so hard to change.
If you're a leader who's naturally approach-motivated yourself, and most leaders who rise to significant positions tend to be, the avoidance-motivated framing can feel unfamiliar, uncomfortable, even a little distasteful. It doesn't sound like how you'd want to talk about a change. It doesn't feel like the kind of leadership you want to model. So even when you understand intellectually that half your audience needs to hear the honest reckoning with what's at stake, something in you resists actually delivering it.
That resistance is worth pushing through. Because the alternative is that you keep talking to the half of the room that moves the way you move, and you keep wondering why the other half isn't engaging.
They're not failing to engage because they don't care. They're failing to engage because you haven't said anything yet that engages the way they're wired.
The practical takeaway
If you're preparing to communicate a change of any consequence, ask yourself two questions before you finalize the message.
First, what's the opportunity here, and am I making it clear enough to activate the people who move toward opportunity?
Second, what's honestly at stake if nothing changes, and am I articulating it clearly enough to activate the people who move away from threat?
Both questions matter. Both answers need to be in the message. And the message needs to hold them together, not in sequence, but as two facets of the same honest picture.
The leaders who understand this reach whole rooms. The leaders who don't reach half of one and spend the rest of the change initiative wondering where the missing half went.
They didn't go anywhere.
They just never heard anything meant for them.
