This Could Have Been An Email: A Guide to Communicating Change At Work

By Andrew Babington

Only 5% of generative AI trials are succeeding in businesses. Only 30% of all change and transformation initiatives are fully adopted. How do you ensure your business is in the small minority of success stories?

This Could Have Been An Email is a book for anyone who needs to sell change to a workforce, whether it's a restructure, a new standard operating process, an AI tool or more.

If you manage people, you're stuck in the middle of the sandwich. You have to juggle people telling you to get your employees to do new things, to do more, but you also have those same employees coming to you with a myriad of problems, stresses and reasons why change can't work right now, so how do you make change compelling?

This book explains why employees in workplaces really embrace new things: not because they're told to, not because they're 'marketed' at, but because they tell themselves they need to do new things.

Drawing on behavioural science, narrative storytelling, and years of frontline change management experience, This Could Have Been An Email argues that it's not through surprise all-staff meetings and executive demands, off-site planning days, or impressive-sounding corporate jargon change is embraced and adopted. It's through actionable, credible, and emotional strategies and tailored messages using the principles of storytelling.

Whether you're restructuring, changing processes, rolling out new AI tools, ensuring people follow cybersecurity policies, or more, this book will help. In this book, Andrew introduces the ACE Model and explains how you can use it to best frame and sell change and transformation to workforces, to influence behaviours to follow through with new things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible.

You'll learn to:

Draft powerful communication strategies to sell difficult and complex change so people absorb the information and act.Create peer-to-peer momentum with messages so contagious the need for change spreads effortlesslyMake any workplace change feel personally beneficial and purposeful even to employees resistant to change, or fatigued by everything else going on.Build influence and rapport with key leaders and partners through turbulent workplace changes.

When businesses manage change effectively, they draw the most value out of their people, innovate ahead of the market, save time, and have the most admired executive leaders. If you're a forward-thinking, innovative, and highly effective people leader, human resources, information technology, or project manager, This Could Have Been An Email is your new playbook for building a change-ready culture at scale, before your workforce tunes out for good.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0646733451
• ISBN13: 9780646733456
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Andrew Babington
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"