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Featured 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.

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Enabling Global Scale · Financial services · Global

Connecting regional intelligence into one global engine

A global firm with brilliant regional businesses, each solving the same problems independently, with no way to share what worked.

Before

Brilliant regional businesses, each solving the same problems in parallel, with their own products, brands and budgets. One region’s breakthrough never reached the others. Everyone agreed more collaboration would help, and had been agreeing for years. Agreement wasn’t the bottleneck; a structure for actually doing it was.

Prototyping

Rather than write a global operating model on paper, we ran one. We brought cross-functional regional leaders together to write a shared mission in their own words, then made collaboration real through a recurring forum: bimonthly 90-minute sessions and an annual five-day event, hosted somewhere different each year. Each session produced something usable. The forum wasn’t a meeting about the new way of working; it was the new way of working, in working form.

After

Working globally stopped feeling like political theatre and became the faster way to solve a problem. Solutions built in one region showed up in others, redundant investment dropped, and cross-regional teams formed without a reorg. The shift that mattered most: people started reaching across regions instinctively, because they’d learned it worked.

Why it matters

A global model written on paper is an argument. A global model you run is a habit.

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Virtual Collaboration · Banking & technology · 7 time zones

Prototyping financial resilience for small business

Senior banking and technology leaders with real expertise, and no clear way to get it to the small businesses collapsing around them in lockdown.

Before

Spring 2020. Small businesses were collapsing in real time, and the people best placed to help were stuck at home on tools they barely knew, with no way to reach them. The ideas and the will existed. What didn’t was a way to turn a Zoom call into something a small business owner could actually use.

Prototyping

With banking technology partner Temenos, we prototyped what most organizations were still only talking about: fast, virtual, cross-company design work. Twenty-five experts, seven time zones, eight 90-minute sessions on Zoom and Mural — they learned the tools by using them. They interviewed small business owners across 12 industries to ground the work in what was actually happening. Two regional teams generated 150+ ideas and built two solution concepts.

After

Most organizations had spent a decade trying to build the conditions for this kind of collaboration. It happened here in three weeks, by volunteers, during a pandemic. Two concepts ready to plug into existing platforms, a confirmed pattern across both continents, and proof of something bigger: you don’t need a perfect setup to do meaningful cross-company work. You need a small container and a real problem.

Why it matters

Building it small first wasn’t a compromise. It was the only way in.

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Product Innovation · Banking software · SME market

Seven prototypes for a market the company knew it should serve

A banking software company that could see a growth opportunity in SMEs, but couldn’t agree what to build, or how to build it fast enough to matter.

Before

They knew the opportunity and had the market research for months. What they couldn’t agree on was what to do with it: which problems mattered most, which solutions would land, how to move fast enough. The internal debate was rich on hypotheses and thin on evidence.

Prototyping

We prototyped two things at once: a set of new products, and a new way to develop them. For the first time, the people who’d use the products were in the room while they were built. Sixty-four people — banking leaders, technologists, and small business owners — working a structured design-thinking process over two days. Customers interviewed live; ideas tested for desirability, viability and feasibility as they emerged. Everything designed to keep the group out of slide mode and in build mode.

After

Forty-five customer interviews, 200+ ideas, seven prototyped concepts each with a marketing strategy and lean business plan — one became a new digital banking product for the SME segment. But the deeper change was how the firm and its clients saw each other: not vendor and buyer, but partners who build together.

Why it matters

The product was the visible output. The relationship was the lasting one.

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Brand Activation · Non-profit · Lynn, MA

A non-profit reconnects with the community it serves

A community arts non-profit doing good work, but quietly losing its connection to the people it existed to serve.

Before

You can run great programs and still have your community keep its distance. The board could feel the gap. They’d talked about it before, with good intentions, but the conversation kept circling the same assumptions, and nobody in the room was the community. What was missing wasn’t another discussion about the brand. It was direct contact with the people the brand was meant to serve.

Prototyping

Instead of a traditional brand-strategy process, we designed an intervention that helped the board listen before deciding. In a one-day retreat, board members ran coached empathy interviews with local residents, business owners, police officers, civic leaders, and the mayor. Not everything they heard was comfortable, and that mattered. Then they worked directly from what they’d learned: shared problem statements, a SWOT, an elevator pitch, the first draft of a manifesto. Their own words, built together in the room.

After

The brand wasn’t announced. It was rebuilt by the people who lead it, in a single day, from real evidence instead of internal assumption. They left with a clearer understanding of the community, language they could use the next morning, and a direction that finally felt like theirs, because this time the community had been in the room.

Why it matters

You can’t rebrand your way back to a community you’ve lost touch with. You have to put them in the room.

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Community Engagement · Non-profit · Oxford, UK

A Parkinson’s support community finds the people it was missing

A U.K. non-profit run largely by people living with Parkinson’s, stretched thin, and struggling to reach the newly diagnosed.

Before

Oxford Parkinson’s is run mostly by people who live with Parkinson’s themselves, committed and already stretched beyond what the work required. They knew their resources weren’t reaching the newly diagnosed, especially in less-resourced communities, and lockdown made those people harder to find. The board was running on goodwill and exhaustion; discussion was running ahead of insight.

Prototyping

We prototyped a different way for the board to lead: from evidence, not instinct. Nine 90-minute virtual sessions across eight weeks, nobody leaving their living room. We prepared and supported them to interview people living with Parkinson’s, carers, physicians and providers. The patterns became a defined problem area, 165 ideas, and six concepts. Two were prototyped, tested with the community, and put into action; four more became a clear roadmap.

After

A leadership team came in exhausted and left energised, not from a pep talk but from hearing directly from the people they exist to serve. Two solutions live, a roadmap for four more, and a board decision in their own words: “embed the design-thinking way of working in everything we do.”

Why it matters

They didn’t adopt the method because we recommended it. They adopted it because it plainly beat what the usual conversation produced.

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Brand & Product · Social media start-up · Boston

A start-up’s growth catches up with its brand

A social media start-up racing to ship its MVP, with a product that was ready and a brand that wasn’t.

Before

The product had a spec and a launch date. What it didn’t have was a brand that matched what it actually was, and the visuals already going out were actively misleading new users about what the app did. The brand the founders carried in their heads hadn’t made it onto the screen, and time was running out.

Prototyping

We didn’t hand them a brand book. We treated each session as a small prototype: ship something, see how it lands, iterate. In short online sessions we helped them articulate their why, how and what, then see the app through a user’s eyes. Each iteration produced something tangible — a sharper logo direction, clearer messaging, a UX principle that made a hard decision easy. Nothing waited for the perfect version of itself.

After

A brand that finally matched the product, because it was built and tested in pieces, not announced in one go. A user-centred identity, guidelines future hires and developers could actually use, and UX maps that gave development and marketing a shared language. The founders ended up with a brand they’d made, not one designed for them, so they could explain it, defend it, and build on it.

Why it matters

A brand built in pieces, with the makers, is one they can keep building without asking permission.

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Innovation Practice · Banking software

Shifting a successful firm toward customer-driven development

A profitable banking software firm that could see the gap between where it was and where the market was going, and kept finding reasons not to close it.

Before

The hardest place to start a transformation is from success. Clients trusted them but called them traditional; digital products were slow to land. A new digital business needed to grow, and a new way of working with it. But the firm was profitable enough that the case for changing anything was always harder to make than the case for leaving it alone.

Prototyping

We didn’t propose a multi-year programme — nobody needed another one. With the firm’s digital leader, we prototyped the new way of working as a repeatable event people could experience before committing to it. Clients and associates side by side over one to two days, on real problems, with full event design down to the music. Each event was a self-contained experiment: if it worked, you ran another; if it didn’t, you found out fast.

After

You can’t mandate a new way of working. You let people experience it and trust what they feel to do the persuading. The firm left with a repeatable, customer-driven approach they could run themselves, a repositioning from solid vendor to strategic partner, and direct client insight feeding product and sales. And internal energy, from associates who’d now done the thing. Those people became the argument for continuing.

Why it matters

You don’t persuade a profitable firm to change with a memo. You let a few people feel the better way, and let them carry it.

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Problem Definition · Asset management · UK

Competitors agree on a problem worth solving together

Asset and wealth managers each spending heavily to solve the same data problems in isolation, and a firm that wondered what would happen if someone finally named it.

Before

Across the U.K., asset and wealth managers were quietly spending fortunes building the same custom solutions to the same data problems, in isolation, year after year. Everyone suspected they had a shared problem. Nobody had ever put it on paper together, because nobody wanted to be first.

Prototyping

We prototyped something the industry had never done: competing firms openly defining a shared problem together. We built a hypothesis sharp enough to argue with, then tested it — three 90-minute virtual sessions bringing data-management experts from competing firms into the same room, with exercises designed to validate it or break it. We weren’t looking for consensus on a solution. We were looking for a shared, evidence-based definition of the problem. Much harder, much more useful.

After

Survey results that set a baseline, a categorised set of problematic data patterns, a data-entity map of who provides and consumes the data, and a shared problem definition owned by the people closest to the work, not written for them by a consultant. Plus a credible, evidence-based case for handing the next stage to the cross-industry bodies whose remit it actually is.

Why it matters

Sometimes the win is making sure the right people own the right problem. The only way to prove it belongs elsewhere is to do it small first.

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Digital Transformation · Financial services · Europe

Making digital real in two countries, then watching the rest pull it toward themselves

A global provider with a clear vision for digital B2B relationships across Europe, and not nearly enough of what it would take to make it real across 15 markets.

Before

A clear vision, and not much else: no team to build it, no tech stack to support it, no delivery approach that could survive 15 markets. This is how most digital transformations end — the vision is good, the deck is great, the product never reaches a customer.

Prototyping

We didn’t roll the change out across 15 countries. We made it real in a few first. With the Head of Digital for Continental Europe, we put a six-month timebox around the work and made sure people could see what we were building, not just read about it. We built a proper cross-functional team, filled the capacity gaps, and kept scope tight — customer research drove the MVP, not internal politics. Seven workshops across five markets and three milestones with senior leadership kept everything transparent. The lead markets weren’t “pilots.” They were the change, in working form, that everyone else could see and learn from.

After

The other markets didn’t ask “what does this mean for us?” They asked “how do we do what they did?” New websites went live across 15+ markets on time, local teams got a toolkit they could use, customers got a personalised experience, and the business got a central/local operating model it could keep running. Digital became the number-one B2B priority for Continental Europe, not by declaration, but because the evidence was sitting in 15 markets, working.

Why it matters

Momentum from evidence people can see beats momentum from any announcement.

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Capability Building · Financial services · Europe

From a successful pilot to a firm-wide capability

A European financial services firm that had proven design thinking worked in one place, and now had to make it real everywhere.

Before

The pilot worked; the decision to institutionalise it was easy. The execution was the hard part: no internal coaching capacity, no rollout plan, and the predictable resistance when a successful organisation is asked to change how it works without disrupting work in progress. Everyone wanted the outcome; nobody had time to lead the change.

Prototyping

We treated the rollout itself as the prototype. With firm leaders, we identified 30 internal change agents chosen for their reach and disposition, and ran an immersive three-day programme on the Stanford d.school bootcamp format, tailored to the firm’s real customer problems: short bursts of instruction, long stretches of hands-on team work, then individual coaching to bridge back to day jobs. Those 30 became a working pilot of how design thinking could land at scale inside this firm.

After

Thirty trained, energised change agents, each with first-hand stories about how customer insight changed a solution and a bias toward action shipped work faster. A Design Thinking centre of excellence to support the broader rollout, and a roadmap to take the capability across the firm. They didn’t just learn a method; they became the argument for it, in every team, long after we left.

Why it matters

You don’t scale a method with a mandate. You scale it with people who’ve already lived it.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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).

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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).

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Why the most adaptable part controls the system

The Law of Requisite Variety, and what it says about Change.

There’s a principle from cybernetics — the study of how systems steer themselves — called the Law of Requisite Variety. It says that in any system, the part with the most behavioural flexibility, the most ways to respond, ends up exerting the most control over the outcome. Not the biggest part, or the strongest. The most adaptable one.

It’s a sharp lens for Change. An organization facing an uncertain market can’t control that market. What it can control is its own range of responses — how many moves it can make, and how fast it can try them. The wider that range, the more say it has over where it ends up. So in a changing system, flexibility isn’t the opposite of control. Flexibility is control.

Fixed goal, fluid method

This is why we hold the goal fixed and keep the methods fluid. The target stays clear; the route to it stays open to tools, ideas and behaviours we didn’t plan on. A plan with a single path has low variety — the moment that path is blocked, it’s stuck. A prototype has high variety by design: it’s built to change course the instant reality asks it to.

It starts with people, not the org chart

Real adaptability doesn’t begin in structure. It begins in people — in the capacity to solve problems creatively and stay steady when a plan has to change. You can’t restructure your way to it. You build it the way you build any capability: through use. That’s a Change Muscle, and it’s also what gives an organization its requisite variety.

So design Change to be shaped

Flexible control systems, in everything from broadcast to industrial automation, share one trait: they let people shape the environment rather than be constrained by it. We build Change the same way — modular and adjustable, not fixed and handed down. The more your people can adapt how a Change works, the more control they keep over how it lands.

The future won’t hold still, so the aim isn’t to predict it. It’s to widen your range of responses until you can meet whatever it brings. Let’s build that capacity together.

Based on W. Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (An Introduction to Cybernetics, 1956).

We don’t just assert that prototyping works. Three strands of research converge on the same conclusion: transformation rarely fails for lack of strategy or money — it fails because Change is never made real before it scales. Here’s the evidence, number by number.

Have a Change on your desk? Let’s prototype it →

Who we are

A boutique Change consultancy — hands-on operators who’ve led transformation from inside large organizations, 50+ years combined across the U.S. and Europe. We don’t hand you a deck and leave; we build the Change with your people and help you keep going once we’re gone.

Why we founded ChangeUp

We spent decades leading innovation inside big financial institutions, including Fidelity — and kept watching good strategies stall the moment they met the people meant to live them. Not because the thinking was wrong, but because no one had shaped it with them, or made it real enough to test first.

So in 2018 we left to do the opposite: build the Change small and real, with those people, and let what we learn reshape it before it scales.

What we believe

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, start now.

At least 30% of our work is pro bono — causes we believe in, at no fee. For example, we helped Oxford Parkinson’s reach the newly diagnosed people it was missing.