Change Management in Ukrainian Companies: Why Classical Approaches Do Not Work Under Conditions of Permanent Crisis

Classical Western change management methodologies—Kotter, Lewin, McKinsey 7S, and ADKAR—were designed for environments in which an organization can be deliberately moved out of its comfort zone, transformed, and then stabilized in a new state. In the Ukrainian corporate landscape, which operates under a permanent existential threat, applying these algorithms “as the textbook says” leads to process paralysis, team exhaustion, and latent sabotage. Around 70% of organizational change initiatives worldwide fail even in stable markets (Prosci, McKinsey); in Ukraine, where businesses operate in war-adapted mode, that figure is likely higher. Successful transformation of Ukrainian business today requires a radical shift in paradigm: from creating artificial “urgency” to designing psychological anchors of stability and decentralized trust governance.

The problem is not weak implementation but the wrong model of the environment

The key mistake in most change implementation programs is the assumption that the organization still lives in a logic of sequential transition from one stable state to another. That is how many classical approaches are structured: there is a status quo, then a phase of unfreezing, then change, then refreezing. But a Ukrainian company in wartime usually lives differently: it is already inside continuous external destabilization while simultaneously trying to preserve operational viability. This means change is not introduced into a stable system, but into a system that is already spending a significant share of its resources adapting to the environment.

Hence the core managerial conclusion. When a leader tries to apply Kotter, Lewin, 7S, or ADKAR literally, what they often encounter is not “resistance to progress,” but a fundamental mismatch between the logic of the model and the logic of the environment. In other words, a change program may be professionally designed and disciplined in execution, yet still produce weak results because its internal assumptions do not match how the organization actually lives.

Why do classical change management models fail systematically in Ukrainian companies?

The main reason is an ontological conflict between the core assumptions of Western frameworks and the reality of Ukrainian business. Kotter, Lewin, and McKinsey 7S were built for organizations with a predictable external environment, stable staffing, and a baseline level of trust in hierarchy. None of these assumptions holds in the Ukrainian context of 2024–2026.

Western change-management architecture treats “change” as temporary turbulence between two states of stability. In Ukraine, transformation unfolds not on top of a stable foundation, but inside an environment that the OECD characterizes as “exceptionally uncertain.” Even academic reviews emphasize that the “linearity” of popular change approaches has limited empirical validity as a mandatory sequence of steps (Appelbaum et al., 2012, Journal of Management Development).

Lewin’s model: the illusion of “unfreezing” and the impossibility of fixation

Kurt Lewin’s three-stage paradigm—Unfreeze, Change, Refreeze—requires the leader to deliberately destabilize the status quo in order to overcome organizational inertia.

In the Ukrainian context, the corporate sector has been in a state of uncontrolled, exogenous destabilization since February 2022. Applying the “unfreeze” stage to a system that is already balancing daily on the edge of operational chaos under missile attacks, energy blackouts, and personnel losses inevitably provokes operational collapse. Employees functioning in a mode of severe conservation of cognitive and emotional resources interpret any additional artificial destabilization as a direct threat.

The final stage—“refreezing”—turns out to be physically unattainable. Institutionalizing behavioral norms requires at least medium-term team stability. Yet the Ukrainian labor market is deformed: high turnover, migration, and mobilization make static fixation of corporate culture impossible. The culture of Ukrainian organizations is itself in a phase of active transformation; to fix change “in culture” means trying to fix it in a moving target.

The toxicity of artificial urgency: the crisis of Kotter’s model

John Kotter’s model begins with an imperative: “Create a Sense of Urgency.” In European or American corporate governance, which often suffers from bureaucratic lethargy, this step is necessary.

Extrapolated to Ukrainian soil, however, it produces the opposite effect. When employees’ neurophysiological systems are already overloaded with real signals of danger, creating additional “urgency” through aggressive KPIs or hard digital-transformation deadlines triggers urgency fatigue. Research in organizational behavior under crisis conditions demonstrates a paradox: crisis can stimulate change, but it can also trigger threat-rigidity—a reinforcement of habitual routines and defensive behavior (Obłój & Voronovska, 2024, Business Horizons).

Kotter also assumes a “guiding coalition” built on formal positions. But in a country with a Hofstede PDI of 92—one of the highest in the world—and simultaneously low trust in formal institutions, real influence is concentrated in informal networks. According to Razumkov Centre data (March 2024), 76% of Ukrainians do not trust the state apparatus, 76% do not trust political parties, 74% do not trust parliament, 70% do not trust the courts. In corporate projection, this means a coalition made up of the “right job titles” but lacking informal authority is a dead structure.

The collapse of McKinsey 7S and the limits of ADKAR

The McKinsey 7S model requires rigid, synchronous alignment of all seven elements. Under Ukrainian uncertainty, this is impossible: the “Staff” element is exposed to uncontrollable demographic fluctuations, while “Systems” require radical re-adaptation depending on the physical availability of infrastructure. According to Deloitte (Global Human Capital Trends, 2026), a significant share of organizations in Ukraine acknowledge that their traditional functions have become the main barrier to organizational agility.

The individualized ADKAR framework (Prosci) focuses on how a particular person moves through change. The problem is that under wartime conditions, the transition from Awareness to Desire is blocked not by a lack of arguments, but by a lack of cognitive capacity. Employees may fully understand the need for change, yet their nervous systems refuse to generate the desire to participate, opting instead for emotional distancing.

What features of the Ukrainian environment make standard approaches unworkable?

This is not a matter of some “special mentality.” It is a specific combination of cultural, institutional, and operational parameters that radically changes the mechanics of trust, motivation, and execution.

Shrinking planning horizons and war-adapted mode

According to AmCham/Citi (January 2026), 90% of chamber member companies remain fully operational after four years of full-scale war. In July 2025, 84% of respondents expected revenues either to grow or remain stable by the end of 2025, although about half of the companies had suffered direct damage to assets. At the same time, 53% of respondents planned to continue business “as usual”—business had already fully shifted into war-adapted mode.

This optimism is based on adaptation already achieved. The strategic planning horizon has narrowed to a matter of months, and change-management instruments must now operate not with three-year road maps, but with scenario plans—Plan B, Plan C.

An unprecedented talent shortage

According to KSE Institute (Human Capital Chartbook, 2025), Ukraine has 10.2 million pensioners for 10.7 million people in employment. The number of veterans has reached 1.7 million—2.4 times more than in 2021—and the number of internally displaced persons has reached 4.6 million. The structure of the labor market has changed radically: employment in public administration and defense has grown to 2.6 million people, while employment in the industrial sector has fallen by 37%.

According to AmCham (2025), the main business challenges are employee safety (83%) and reservation of draft-liable staff (66%). For change management, this means companies physically lack the organizational slack required to perform operational work and integrate innovation in parallel.

Regulatory volatility

Law of Ukraine No. 2136-IX “On the Organization of Labor Relations Under Martial Law” liberalized a number of rules by simplifying the conclusion of fixed-term contracts and introducing a mechanism for suspension of employment contracts. However, as of March 14, 2026, amendments entered into force under Law No. 4412-IX, strictly limiting the maximum period of suspension at the initiative of one party to 90 calendar days. After that period, the employer must either allow the employee to return to work or adopt another lawful decision.

For change management, this creates chaos when forming a “guiding coalition”: a key expert may be mobilized, while their backup may be in suspended-employment status and require reactivation after 90 days.

Trust architecture: institutional vacuum and bypass culture

In the Ukrainian context, trust is delegated not to a position or procedure, but to a specific leader and their practical record of fairness. Deeply rooted bypass culture emerged because, under the historical dysfunctionality of formal institutions, Ukrainian society developed an ability to use informal ties and flexibly ignore rigid regulations. If a formal communication cascade is pushed top-down without engaging local trusted nodes, it loses by default to informal channels.

What impact do war, stress, and uncertainty have on people’s behavior during transformation?

The key lies at the intersection of organizational psychology and neurobiology. When the external environment generates a permanent existential threat, the cognitive mechanisms of information perception are fundamentally distorted. This is not a “soft” HR factor—it is an operational precondition without which any transformation is doomed.

The scale of the problem

According to KMIS (2024), 87% of Ukrainians faced at least one extreme stressful situation over the past year. According to WHO assessments (2025), more than 70% of adult respondents reported symptoms of anxiety, depression, or severe stress; 68% reported a deterioration in health compared with the pre-war period; yet only one in five sought professional help. PTSD prevalence is estimated at up to 25%.

According to AmCham, 55% of executives consider employees’ mental health one of the major challenges.

Neurobiology: the “amygdala hijack”

Under prolonged stress, the brain shifts information processing away from the prefrontal cortex—which is responsible for reflection, long-term strategy, and emotional intelligence—and toward the amygdala and basal ganglia, which govern basic survival responses and automatic habits. When top management aggressively pushes implementation of a new ERP system, the brain of an employee already in a state of amygdala hijack due to nightly air-raid alerts and mobilization news interprets the innovation as an additional threat.

In the corporate environment, this shows up as mass presenteeism: an employee is physically present at a strategic session, but their neurobiological productivity is minimal—they are physiologically incapable of assimilating complex concepts of reorganization.

Why do employees resist change differently from how textbooks describe it?

In Ukrainian conditions, “resistance” is more often a form of self-protection and risk management than an unwillingness to “learn something new.” It is an entirely rational, evolutionarily grounded response to the environment. Most classical texts describe resistance as a consequence of fear, loss of control, personal interests, or ordinary inertia. In Ukraine, that description is too simplistic. Here, resistance usually appears not as rejection of the new, but as a form of self-protection by an overloaded system.

That is why the same team can adapt brilliantly to an extreme external shock and at the same time sharply slow down implementation of a CRM system, a new reporting line, or a new procedure. When the threat is obvious and immediate, the psyche mobilizes reserve energy for survival. But when change looks like an investment in a more distant future, the system begins to conserve resources. Internally, this is experienced not as “I am against change,” but as “now is not the time,” “this is not the priority,” or “do not touch what is still holding together.” In organizational behavior, this appears as presenteeism, formal agreement without adoption, quiet postponement, and hidden sabotage.

Hence an important managerial conclusion: if resistance is treated as mere irrational inertia, the logical response is to increase pressure. But if resistance is a diagnostic signal of overload, lack of trust, or erosion of basic supports, more pressure will only deepen the problem. In a Ukrainian company, change management must begin not with a persuasion campaign, but with a test of whether the system can survive one more change without losing functionality.

The paradox of adaptability

The enormous adaptability of Ukrainian companies under acute existential shocks sharply contrasts with their total resistance when management tries to introduce planned, systemic changes.

Nova Poshta case. After delivery volumes fell to 2% of pre-war levels in February–March 2022, the company radically transformed its management model. Decisions were made at lightning speed; top management ran a corporation with thousands of employees from a 150-square-meter room. The company deployed generators, 650 Starlink systems, restored volumes by September 2022, and simultaneously launched international expansion (PwC Ukraine, 2023). This is an example of change through operational decomposition, not through classical sequential phasing.

Metinvest case. The company is building an ecosystem for veteran reintegration: physical and psychological rehabilitation, retraining, preparation of teams for the return of colleagues, around 4,000 vacancies in technical roles, and wage indexation above forecast inflation.

GlobalLogic case. With more than 5,500 engineers in Ukraine, the company has successfully integrated AI tools into its software development processes. The foundation is real support: more than 400 specialists serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and more than 100 have returned to work thanks to a specialized Demobilization Kit and a mentoring program.

The explanation for the paradox is as follows: total mobilization of effort to overcome an extreme threat—the physical destruction of the business—is fully understandable to the brain and justifies enormous energy expenditure. But as soon as the situation stabilizes into a “protracted wartime routine,” and the company launches an abstract optimization project, the employee’s brain assesses those planned changes as non-vital and therefore as a dangerous, pointless drain on scarce energy. Obłój & Voronovska (2024, Business Horizons) recorded this dynamic: business in wartime first demonstrates a threat-rigidity response and then moves toward adaptive strategies.

Which elements of the classical models are still useful, and which are not?

Rejecting direct application does not mean ignoring them entirely. Classical models remain useful as an analytical scaffold and a professional vocabulary, but their tactical instruments require strict selection.

There is no need to abandon Kotter, Lewin, 7S, and ADKAR completely. But they should be used as a library of components, not as a linear route.

From Kotter, it is useful to retain short-term wins, the leadership signal, and the very idea of a coalition. But the coalition must be rebuilt: not only around formal roles, but around actual legitimacy within micro-groups. From Lewin, it is worth preserving the logic of transition, but refreeze must be reinterpreted as stabilization of rhythms and rules rather than an attempt to lock in a final state. 7S should remain a diagnostic framework, and ADKAR a way to understand where acceptance of change breaks down at the individual level. But in the Ukrainian context, one more mandatory layer appears before these models: operational and psychological stabilization.

Research by Doeze Jager et al. (2022, Applied Psychology) shows that organizational trust directly—and indirectly through lower resistance to change—strengthens employees’ proactivity and adaptability. This means trust is not a “nice bonus,” but execution infrastructure.

What change-management frameworks are actually applicable in Ukrainian companies?

What works is not a “major change program” in the classical sense, but managed adaptation through stabilization anchors, micro-segmentation of leadership, and short implementation cycles with an explicit right to roll back. The adapted model inverts the priorities: first stability and trust, then change. That sequence is the one that emerges as most viable.

1. Psychological anchor-stability as the foundation

Contrary to Lewin’s imperative of destabilization, the Ukrainian context requires the prior creation of zones of absolute predictability. People are capable of absorbing professional change only when their basic operational foundation is protected.

Before launching any change, the company must fix five non-negotiable anchors:

1. The invariable rhythm of financial payments
2. Clarity of schedules and workload limits
3. Fixed decision rights
4. Transparent incident-escalation rules
5. Predictable managerial presence

Until these anchors are in place, teams will interpret change as an additional threat.

2. Micro-segmentation of leadership instead of cascade communication

The employee population should be analyzed and segmented not by department, but along four axes: criticality of the function to the business, burnout risk (level of cognitive resources), geography/work format, and level of trust in the local manager.

Specific clusters are then formed—for example, veterans in the acute phase of reintegration, relocated specialists, or exhausted key experts. For each cluster, a change ambassador is appointed—not necessarily by title; it may be an informal leader—who receives full autonomy to adapt the process to the needs of that group.

3. Agile cadence + uncertainty governance

Multi-year Gantt charts lose their meaning. The global change process must be broken down into micro-sprints of 14–21 days. The point is not the exact number, but a cycle length that is manageable: the team must be able to see a comprehensible segment of change. A short cycle makes it possible to maintain execution discipline without the feeling of endless reform. Each team should implement no more than one or two changes at a time.

For each change, the following must be defined: an owner/accountable person, success metrics, a rollback rule, and red flags for workload. The explicit articulation of negative scenarios paradoxically reduces anxiety and builds trust.

Critically, fatigue KPIs must be introduced in parallel with adoption KPIs: absenteeism, incident frequency, SLA breaches, pulse-trust, and undesirable turnover. If the project KPIs improve while the team’s functionality deteriorates, that is not transformation—it is borrowing against future failures.

4. Trust as basic infrastructure

The mistake of classical change management is to assume that trust will emerge after a series of motivational speeches by the CEO. In Ukraine, the logic works in reverse: first a de facto demonstration of fairness and care, and only then a request for additional effort.

A persuasive and verifiable case is GlobalLogic: the company successfully integrated AI tools into software development precisely because it had a strong foundation of trust built on real actions—an unprecedented veteran-support program, creation of a Demobilization Kit, and mentoring support. Metinvest demonstrates a similar approach—an ecosystem for veteran reintegration, wage indexation above forecast inflation, and preparation of teams for the return of colleagues.

5. The right to roll back and the right to pause

In the Ukrainian environment, rollback is not a sign of weakness, but a safety mechanism. The ability to test a new process with the option of returning to the previous one reduces the stakes and lowers reactive sabotage. The same applies to the “stop-cock rule”: if a major external shock occurs, change must be formally put on hold. It should not silently stall—it should be managerially paused. That is an important difference between chaos and disciplined adaptation.

What should the CEO / COO / CFO / HRD do in practice?

Delivering transformation under wartime conditions means managing an exhausted cognitive resource base with great precision. Postponing everything “until victory” is a fatal mistake: it accumulates culture debt, cements informal workarounds, and normalizes heroic micromanagement.

CEO: define the boundaries of promises, restore trust through predictability, and restore the legitimacy of change. Do not promise what is outside your control; publish what exactly is NOT changing—the anchors—and the logic by which workload is distributed. This is done not through inspirational rhetoric, but through clarity of boundaries. In an environment of low institutional trust, honestly defined limits of control are more valuable than sweeping promises.

COO: translate change into a delivery system. A 14-day rhythm, WIP limits (one or two changes per team), escalation and rollback rules, and synchronization of change with operational incidents. Change must become part of operational management, not a “parallel world of transformation.”

CFO: the CFO must act not only as budget controller but, as a financial architect, also provide a financial corridor for error. Most wartime transformations stall not because of a lack of ideas, but because there is no permission to experiment. In that case, change will either become excessively cautious or excessively politicized. The CFO should turn the change portfolio into options management: small bets, rapid learning, early elimination of non-viable paths, and clear stop-loss rules.

HRD: make psycho-emotional condition part of the operating model; move teams out of the zone of “soft topics” into the zone of operational architecture. At minimum, this means regular pulse measurement of overload, recovery rules, support for managers in difficult conversations, and work with presenteeism. An environment in which 70%+ of people report symptoms of anxiety or depression cannot scale change without an MHPSS logic. The company must build the capability to carry out change without destroying its resource base.

Transformation Lead: create a Change Heatmap instead of a process audit. Map business units by level of trust in managers, geographic distribution, and fatigue. Track fatigue KPIs. Build a network of local translators—people who are genuinely trusted. The task is not only to drive the program, but also to see where change has already started to erode team resilience even though everything still looks fine on paper.

Five key actions for the next 2–4 weeks

1. Create a Change Heatmap. Map units by criticality to revenue, level of load and burnout, trust in the local manager, and geography/work format. This will show where change is realistic and where stabilization is needed first.
2. Fix the anchors. Payments, schedules, workload, decision rights, and management accessibility—put them in writing and make them uniform for everyone. Until that is done, change will be interpreted as a rise in uncertainty.
3. Launch a 14-day cycle. No more than two changes per team. Every change and every initiative must have an owner/accountable person, metrics, KPIs, and return rules.
4. Measure not only implementation, but overload as well. A weekly pulse should track trust, clarity and transparency, overload, incidents, and SLA degradation or losses. If the company sees only implementation and not the cost of implementation in terms of team functionality, it is managing blind.
5. Appoint local translators. Not only formal managers, but those whom people genuinely trust inside the unit. They will become the real implementation coalition—not by title, but by actual authority. It is through them that change earns the right to exist in everyday work.

What are the limits and risks of the adapted approach?

The adapted approach is not a universal solution.

When the approach does NOT apply:

• Survival phase: cash gaps, physical danger, breakdown of basic payroll—here what is needed is crisis management for containment, not transformational design.
• Organizations with toxic leadership: a trust-based design is impossible if leadership itself is the source of distrust.
• Companies with fewer than 50 employees: micro-segmentation is excessive; direct owner communication is sufficient.

Realistic timelines:

• Stabilization phase (predictability anchors): 2–4 weeks
• Trust formation through informal leaders: 4–8 weeks
• The first sustained wave of implementation: 8–16 weeks
• Partial institutionalization: 3–6 months

Every major external shock—a mass attack on infrastructure, a new mobilization wave, a sharp devaluation—sets the process back by 2–4 weeks. Success criteria for change in Ukraine must be more modest than in peacetime: not “full transformation according to the roadmap,” but “preservation of operational resilience while increasing manageability.”

FAQ

Should organizational transformations be started at all before the war is over?

Yes. Delay cements informal workarounds, heroic management, and bottleneck leadership as the new norm. That reduces capitalization, scalability, and readiness to attract investment. The global economy will not wait: competitors are implementing AI, and logistics chains are being redrawn.

Why do employees who adapted brilliantly to blackouts sabotage the implementation of a new CRM?

The “paradox of adaptability”: extreme shocks activate evolutionary survival instincts, releasing reserve energy. Planned corporate change in a state of permanent distress is perceived by the brain as a non-critical abstract threat for which the psyche refuses to allocate scarce cognitive resources.

What is urgency fatigue and why does it destroy initiatives?

Urgency fatigue emerges when management artificially stimulates employees with aggressive targets—in line with Kotter’s model—in an environment where the baseline level of anxiety already exceeds the norm. The result is cognitive paralysis, emotional burnout, and hidden sabotage.

How many changes can be run in parallel?

As a practical rule for war mode: one or two simultaneous changes per team in 14-day sprints, with a rollback rule. Greater parallelism in an exhausted environment sharply increases the risk of incidents.

Can the stage of psychological stabilization (PSS) be ignored?

Absolutely not. Investment in new software or consultants will not pay off if employees with signs of distress or PTSD are physiologically unable to fully absorb new protocols. In today’s reality, empathy is an instrument for maximizing financial results.

Conclusion

Classical change management models are a library of components, not a step-by-step instruction. But they can no longer be read as a step-by-step instruction for a Ukrainian company operating in wartime. They remain useful as a vocabulary, an analytical framework, and a library of components. Yet the sequence of actions itself must be different. The Ukrainian context requires an inversion of priorities: first stability and trust, then change. First people, then processes. First “what is not changing,” then “what is changing.”

Companies that master managed adaptation under permanent crisis today will gain a fundamental competitive advantage—a unique expertise that will be in demand both in the domestic market and in the international economy. That is the main conclusion. Change management in a Ukrainian company today is no longer a discipline of “implementing initiatives.” It is a discipline of managed adaptation in an environment where the price of overload is too high and trust has ceased to be a side effect of good communication and become the basic infrastructure of execution. Those who learn to change the system without destroying its residual resilience will gain more than a chance to pass through the current period in a stronger position. They will create a managerial capability that will outlive the crisis itself.

The author of the article is Sergey Lipatnikov

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