We Prototype Change®
Prototyping Change is what we do. Change Muscle is what you keep.
Most organizations don’t lack strategy. They struggle to make it real before they scale it.
The evidence
Change succeeds when people help make it real, not just receive it.
How we work
We Prototype Change
Build the smallest real version, test it with the people who’ll live it, scale what works.
Change Muscle
What you keep: the standing ability to keep changing on your own.
Built, not handed down
Change built with people sticks. Handed down, it stalls.
Proof — VIB
VIB prototyped five new services with its members in six months, and now runs the capability itself.
Services
Wherever you are — starting, scaling or sustaining.
The team
We’re ChangeUp Global — a team that’s led change from the inside.
Services
One size fits one.
Every engagement is built around your problem, or your opportunity. Never a cut-and-paste solution handed to your competitors. It can’t be: we haven’t met you yet. What stays constant is the method — we prototype the Change.
Involving people nearly doubles the odds a Change succeeds (34→58%, Gartner 2023). So we build it with your team, not for them.
Inspire Change
Inspiration ignites the ideas that cultivate Change.
For a stalled or unconvinced team. We make the Change tangible fast, and you leave with energy, buy-in and evidence.
Enable Change
Change isn’t about words. It’s about delivering something tangible.
When leaders agree on the ambition, not the how. We build the capability with you, into a testable way of working your teams can run alone.
Sustain Change
Make Change your day job, not a side hustle.
To make Change outlast the project. We turn prototyping into a routine, then step back, leaving Change Muscle behind.
Not sure which fits? Most engagements start the same way: one Change, and a conversation. Let’s find the first thing worth prototyping.
Our approach
Build small. Test with people. Learn. Adapt. Repeat.
One loop, applied to almost anything — the way Change gets real before it scales.
How we work
We prototype Change.
A new service, operating model or way of working — we don’t hand you a finished plan. We build the smallest real version with your people, test it for real, and scale what proves out.
Why it works
People own what they help build. Ownership comes from having a hand in the work, not a better explanation.
Showing beats telling. A working version can be tried and improved in a way a slide never can.
Being wrong gets cheap. Testing small reduces the big risk before you take it.
It ends a false trade-off. De-risking a Change and winning people over become the same move.
Where Re:Solve fits
We run this inside a simple structure. The framework keeps the work grounded; the prototyping makes it real.
What you’re left with
More than a solution: Change Muscle your team can use on the next challenge, without depending on us.
Our work
Change with a body
before it has a rollout.
Different industries, different scales — the same pattern: something made real, and tested with the people who’d live it, before anyone tried to execute it.
Flagship case study
VIB — From representing members to building with them
How an association of international banks prototyped its way into a new mission.
Before
In 2025, VIB — the Association of International Banks in Germany — set a bolder ambition: to actively develop new services for its members, not just represent them. None of it could be settled on paper. This was the kind of Change where the right answer has to be discovered, not predicted.
Prototyping
So rather than write a strategy and roll it out, we prototyped. Over six months we built the smallest real version of each idea and put it in front of members — something they could use and react to. Their responses, including the unwelcome ones, reshaped each concept within weeks.
After
Two services are now live (the VIB Expert Panel and VIB Connect), two more launch in 2027, and one was deliberately stopped when its prototype disproved its assumptions — a success in itself. The lasting result wasn’t the services. It was the capability: VIB now runs its own development routine, funded by a new revenue stream. VIB had built Change Muscle.
More of our work
Different industries, different scales — the same pattern underneath. A few more we keep coming back to.
Enabling Global Scale
A global company with regional leadership, products and budgets, turning parallel effort into shared global efficiency.
COVID drives Virtual Collaboration
Banking and technology volunteers prototyping financial resilience for small business, in three weeks across seven time zones.
Prototyping Opportunity
A software company addressing the real needs of small businesses through product innovation.
Brand Activation
A non-profit reconnecting with the community it serves — rebuilt by its own board in a single day, from real evidence.
Re-envisioning Community Engagement
A non-profit finding new ways to reach and serve the audience that needs it most.
Building a Change Practice
A software firm shifting to customer-driven development while building its own internal innovation practice.
Defining a Problem Space
A cross-industry asset-management effort to build a shared, deep understanding of a common problem.
Turning Vision to Value
A digital product established across 15+ countries in under seven months.
Design Thinking to Initiate Change
A firm institutionalizing design thinking, with hands-on, experiential learning as the catalyst.
Insights
What we’re learning
about Change.
Short reads on prototyping Change and building Change Muscle — and what it means for you.
What prototyping Change actually looks like
The smallest real version, tested with the people who’ll live it, and reshaped before it scales.
Read more →What LEGO Serious Play taught us about Change
An idea from a learning theory and a pile of bricks: people commit to what they build, not what they’re told.
Read more →Change fatigue, and how to build energy instead
People aren’t against Change — they’re tired of how it arrives. Why prototyping adds energy where rollouts drain it.
Read more →What Change Muscle is, and why it compounds
The rarer prize isn’t the outcome — it’s an organization that’s gotten better at changing.
Read more →The trade-off you don’t actually have to make
De-risking a Change and winning people over feel like opposites. Prototyping does both with the same move.
Read more →The research behind our approach →
Follow ChangeUp on LinkedIn for the Research Digest — every two weeks.
What prototyping Change actually looks like
The smallest real version, tested with the people who’ll live it.
“Prototype Change” can sound abstract. In practice it’s simple. Build a small, real version of Change. Put it in front of the people who’ll live it. Let what happens reshape it, then run it again.
Not a slide about a new way of working, but a working piece of it. At VIB, the Association of International Banks in Germany, that meant real, early versions of five new services, in front of members. Their responses, including the unwelcome ones, reshaped each concept within weeks. Two are now live. Two launch in 2027. One was stopped when its prototype disproved its assumptions, a success in itself, because VIB learned before it invested.
Here’s what makes it work. The people who’ll live the Change help build it, so they own it. Showing beats telling. And because the version is real, it’s genuinely allowed to change the plan. If the answer is decided in advance, it isn’t a prototype.
You don’t have to transform everything to start. Take one Change you’re about to make and build a small, real version of it. Real prototyping is real work. But the first step is small, and it teaches you more than another round of planning ever could.
That’s how we work at ChangeUp. If there’s a Change on your desk, let’s prototype it together.
What LEGO Serious Play taught us about Change
People commit to what they build, not what they’re told.
One of the most useful ideas in Change work didn’t come from a strategy firm. It came from a learning theory and a pile of bricks.
LEGO Serious Play® was created in the 1990s by Johan Roos and Bart Victor (2019), and it’s built on constructionism, the theory Seymour Papert developed at MIT (Papert, 1980). The idea is simple: people learn most deeply, and commit most fully, when they build something they can see, handle and share. Not when they’re told about it.
We build that principle into how we work. When we prototype Change with your team, we’re doing constructionism at organizational scale. Instead of describing a new way of working, we build a small, real version of it, and the people who’ll live it help shape it. Understanding and ownership form in the same motion.
That’s why our workshops don’t feel like a presentation. People build something real, test it, and push on it together, and they leave owning it.
If you want your next Change built with your people rather than announced to them, let’s talk.
Sources: Seymour Papert, Mindstorms (MIT, 1980); Johan Roos & Bart Victor, “How It All Began: The Origins of LEGO® Serious Play®,” IJMAR 5(4), 2019.
Change fatigue, and how to build energy instead
Why prototyping adds energy where rollouts drain it.
Most people aren’t against Change. They’re just tired of how it usually arrives: as a finished plan, announced, with a request to get on board. Do that often enough and you get Change fatigue. It’s part of why only 32% of leaders get their people to adopt change in a healthy way, and why trying to inspire change now works far less well than making it a routine (Gartner, 2025).
When we prototype a Change with you, the energy in the room is different. Two things drive it. Tangibility: a working version people can try, not just hear about, turns an audience into contributors. And playfulness: a deliberate kind of play that lowers the guard, so people bring curiosity instead of caution.
There’s a quieter reason too. Fatigue grows when Change is done to people, and eases when it’s done with them. Give people a hand in shaping the thing, and the initiative that might have worn them out starts to give energy back, because now it’s partly theirs.
If your people are worn out by Change, the answer usually isn’t another campaign. It’s a different first move — one they help build rather than brace for. It starts with a conversation.
Source: Gartner, “Leaders Today Must Routinize, Not Inspire, Change” (2025).
What Change Muscle is, and why it compounds
The capability that outlasts any single change.
Most transformation programmes deliver an outcome and move on. The rarer, more valuable prize is what they leave behind: an organization that has gotten better at changing. We call that Change Muscle, and building it is what we’re really there to do.
The first time a team prototypes a Change, it feels awkward. The second time, less so. By the fifth, it’s simply how the team works. What builds up isn’t a framework on a shelf. It’s a capability inside your people: the confidence to start before everything is certain, the habit of testing with real users, the muscle memory of learning quickly and adjusting.
Like any muscle, it grows through use. Gartner finds the same pattern: making Change a routine is three times more effective than trying to inspire it, and what leaders should build are “change reflexes,” skills practised until they’re second nature (Gartner, 2025). So we don’t just hand over the Change. We run it with your team, so the capability stays when we leave.
And it compounds. Each Change your team prototypes makes the next one cheaper and less tiring. Over time the value becomes your organization’s growing ability to keep changing.
The best time to start is your next Change. Let’s prototype it together.
Source: Gartner, “Leaders Today Must Routinize, Not Inspire, Change” (2025).
The trade-off you don’t actually have to make
Why reducing risk and winning people over are the same move.
Every leader knows the feeling. You want to move fast and bring people with you, but the two seem to pull against each other. Play it safe and you lose the energy. Chase the energy and you feel like you’re loosening your grip on the risk. So it seems you have to pick one.
Prototyping quietly dissolves that choice, because it does both at once. Testing Change on a small, real scale is how you keep it safe: you find the weak assumptions before real money goes in. That’s the rigor.
And because the people who’ll live the Change help build that small version, they come to own it. Involving people in shaping a Change, rather than only communicating it, raises the odds it succeeds from 34% to 58% (Gartner, 2023). That’s the buy-in.
Same activity, both results. Prototyping gives you a safer Change and a committed team together, because they come from the same work.
If a Change on your desk feels like a choice between playing it safe and bringing people with you, it may not be. Let’s prototype it, and get both.
Source: Gartner (2023).
The research
The evidence behind prototyping Change.
Three numbers shape how we work. Here’s what each one means, and where it comes from.
70% — transformations still fall short
Around 70% of transformations fail to meet their goals — a rate that has barely moved in two decades, despite better tools, data and frameworks. The pattern across the research is consistent: the constraint isn’t strategy or talent, it’s execution. Change is designed on paper and rolled out, but never made real before it scales. That’s the gap prototyping closes.
Sources: McKinsey (2022); BCG (2024); Bain (2024), which found 88% of transformations fall short of their original ambitions.
34% → 58% — involving people nearly doubles the odds
When people help shape a Change, rather than just receive communications about it, the likelihood of success rises from 34% to 58%. Participation is what builds ownership, and ownership is what makes Change stick. It’s also why over-communicating a Change can backfire: people commit to what they help build, not to what they’re told.
Source: Gartner (2023).
$3.4T — the money riding on getting Change right
Global spending on transformation is projected to reach roughly $3.4 trillion in 2026. Yet most of it underdelivers. The gap isn’t budget — organizations are investing more than ever — it’s approach. The advantage goes to those who make Change real with the people who’ll live it, before scaling.
Sources: IDC (2026); McKinsey.
About ChangeUp
Built by people who’ve led
Change from the inside.
A boutique consultancy that knows what it takes to make Change stick.
Our story
We founded ChangeUp in 2018, after years of watching the same thing fail the same way: strategy that looked right on paper but never became real before it rolled out. So we built a firm to do it differently — prototyping Change with the people who live it, so it works before it scales. Hands-on operators, 50+ years of combined experience across the U.S. and Europe.
What connects everything we do
Prototyping Change is what we do. Change Muscle is what our clients keep. Each of us brings a different strength to that work.
What we believe
We favor collaboration over control. The best way to get it is to do it. We embrace the discomfort of trying something new, and we see Change as opportunity. Even if you don’t feel ready to start, start now.
At least 30% of our work is pro bono. There are no competitors when you’re trying to make the world a better place.
The team
Martin Schmidt-Sarno — Co-Founder · Head of Europe
25+ years connecting business and technology on high-stakes transformations, mostly from inside the organization. He leads our European work, including VIB.
Christopher Whitlock — Co-Founder
From illustrator to executive creative director; at Fidelity he helped scale design thinking across the enterprise. He makes the abstract tangible.
Julia Cichowski — Co-Founder
30+ years transforming complex financial institutions, including innovation programs at Fidelity. Change sticks, she believes, only when it’s co-created. She serves on the boards of the Oceanic Research Group and the Sea Save Foundation.
Boston · Frankfurt — a global network working across Europe and the US.
Contact
Let’s prototype it together.
Have a Change on your desk? Tell us what you’re facing. It starts with a conversation.
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Where we are
Boston · Frankfurt
A global network working across Europe and the US.
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