Change management is broken and it’s not just the CAB’s fault
We were promised stability without stagnation. Governance without gridlock.
But in most enterprise IT shops, change management is a bad joke everyone’s forced to sit through. It’s the TPS report of infrastructure—necessary in theory, soul-crushing in practice.
The real problem? We’ve mistaken bureaucracy for control. And we’ve been doing it for decades.
The broken machinery of “control”
Let’s start with the sacred cow: the CAB (Change Advisory Board).
Theoretically, it’s a safeguard—a review mechanism to prevent disruptions. In reality? It’s often a theater of the absurd. Weekly meetings where rubber stamps are handed out like Halloween candy, and actual risk discussion is either glossed over or ignored because nobody wants to be the one who delays a change request in Q4.
Some CABs don’t even pretend anymore. They batch-approve tickets without discussion, as long as you check the right boxes. It’s process theater: the illusion of control with none of the substance.
Worse, the entire system is built around fear, not flow.
Change forms are padded with boilerplate risk assessments no one reads. Approval chains span more tiers than the app they’re trying to update. By the time a change gets the green light, the team who submitted it has already pivoted, been reorg’d, or burned out.
That’s not governance. That’s institutionalized lag.
Here’s what nobody’s admitting
Most change management frameworks are built on assumptions that no longer apply. They assume:
Change is rare
Change is risky
Change is centralized
All three are lies in today’s stack.
Change is constant. Tools like Argo CD, Terraform, and GitHub Actions mean you can make, deploy, and monitor a change within minutes. Good teams deploy dozens of times a day—not because they’re reckless, but because they’ve made change safe through automation and observability.
The real risk isn’t speed. It’s opacity.
When something breaks, the question isn’t “Who approved this?” It’s “Why didn’t we see this coming?” And too often, the answer is: because we were too busy filling out forms instead of instrumenting systems.
Yet we still treat each deployment like it’s a mainframe upgrade from 1994. That disconnect is costing teams velocity, morale, and credibility.
Stakeholders keeping the farce alive
Let’s talk about incentives.
Security teams cling to change control as a security blanket—not because they trust it, but because they don’t trust devs.
Middle managers love the paper trail. It proves they did something, even if that something was useless.
Auditors only care that controls exist. Whether they’re meaningful? Not their problem.
So we keep the charade going. Ticket in, CAB out, rinse, repeat.
Meanwhile, high-performing teams are bypassing it entirely. They:
Automate controls
Embed policy as code
Use guardrails that catch issues in-flight—not in some Thursday meeting nobody wants to attend
The irony? These teams are safer and faster. But they’re still the exception.
What needs to change about change
We don’t need to burn down the house—but we do need to gut the drywall.
Here’s what comes next:
Kill the CAB, keep the context
Ditch the meetings. Replace them with automated peer reviews, change impact forecasts, and real-time visibility. Let systems warn, not gate.
Policy as code, not policy as meetings
Define your thresholds, approvals, and risk triggers in YAML. Treat compliance like infrastructure: testable, versioned, and traceable.
Observability over approvals
If you can’t answer “what changed and why?” in five seconds, it’s not a governance problem—it’s a visibility one.
Decentralize trust
Push approval power to the teams closest to the code. Pair it with automated guardrails and fast rollbacks. Trust, but verify—with logs, not meetings.
Make failure survivable
Don’t just prevent change failures—design for them. Canary deploys. Feature flags. One-click rollbacks. Make risk safe.
A final word: maturity isn’t meetings
Until we fix this, we’ll keep hemorrhaging velocity in the name of “maturity.”
But maturity isn’t about how many signoffs you collect. It’s about how quickly you can adapt without losing control.
If your change policy reads like a novella and still doesn’t prevent outages, it’s time to admit the obvious:
That’s not innovation. That’s inertia.
And it’s costing you more than uptime.
It’s costing you your best engineers.