Making Elephants Out of Mosquitoes: Understanding Change Team Dynamics

The landscape of organizational change – whether it’s digital, operational, or cultural – brings energy and momentum. Teams stretch beyond familiar boundaries, and when fueled by commitment and passion, the results can exceed initial goals.

As a member of a change initiative team, you’re positioned to drive meaningful impact across your organization. The approaches your team selects for implementation, how you craft core messaging, and the way you target specific stakeholder groups all shape how effectively change gets embraced and sustained. There’s substantial groundwork involved. Teams invest countless hours refining methodologies and ensuring every decision is thoroughly vetted from multiple perspectives. The commitment runs deep – you might find yourself mentally mapping stakeholder networks during off-hours or rehearsing your pitch to that executive sponsor who holds the key to project endorsement. In your imagination, they always give the green light.

With so many moving parts demanding attention in a transformation initiative, change teams sometimes overlook one fundamental component: their own internal dynamics and how the team operates.

Without upfront investment in understanding how team members communicate, their individual working styles, and personality differences, change teams risk friction when critical decisions need to be made. Teams can find themselves at odds over priorities, pursuing misaligned outcomes that leave people time-constrained, frustrated, and demotivated as the project progresses.

Change touches people deeply and unpredictably. This scenario reflects what Tuckman’s stages of group development identifies as the ‘storming’ phase—the period after initial formation where conflict and disagreement emerge. The name captures it perfectly. This is when teams build trust through tension. The goal is reaching resolution and advancing to the ‘norming’ stage, where the team works cohesively toward shared objectives.

Unfortunately, not every team successfully navigates out of storming, and when they don’t, the entire change initiative faces risk.

People handle the storming phase differently. Some team members advocate forcefully for their preferred direction. Others take a more reserved, thoughtful approach to expressing disagreement. Consider a time when you’ve worked on a team where personalities weren’t meshing. What happened? How did conversations progress? Did the project benefit? Were you comfortable with how work got done? Did you feel genuine psychological safety?

Now that you are thinking about the situation, think about what this might mean for the project and its’ outcomes.

One of the most significant risks when a team remains stuck in storming is misallocated effort – resources get burned and timelines slip.

There’s an expression about making mountains out of molehills, describing how minor challenges get exaggerated until they consume everyone’s attention. The Dutch phrase it more vividly: making elephants out of mosquitoes.

When teams are in conflict, emotions escalate. To demonstrate progress or justify their position, people elevate minor details that should remain low-priority into major discussion points. Soon enough, the room fills with elephants.

In these moments, it’s essential to step back, pause, and question whether that elephant deserves its size. Should it actually be a mosquito? More often than not, these conversations build trust and help teams transition toward norming. Left unaddressed, your elephant herd will keep charging through with minimal progress on actual change deliverables. Eventually, resources deplete and objectives go unmet.

Every team requires a customized approach to move from storming through norming and ultimately reach the high-performing state. That said, you can take incremental steps daily, particularly if you recognize any of the patterns described above, to strengthen team functionality.

Remember that people drive every change initiative – listening to each other and offering constructive challenge creates meaningful progress. Team leaders should explore concepts around psychological safety and trust, working to understand what concerns and emotions team members are experiencing. Most critically, allow time and resist rushing. This is one situation where you definitely want more mosquitoes in the room than elephants.

If you’d like to learn more about how Afiniti helps clients design, implement and sustain transformation solutions, and how we can support your change initiatives, send us a message and we’ll respond promptly.