Retail systems lessons from an 18th-century Frenchman

One of the most successful change management campaigns in history was all about FOMO

It is 1785. France is periodically crippled by famine. Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, army pharmacist, Prussian prisoner of war, and extremely stubborn botanist, is convinced he has the answer: the potato.

He has the science. He has the data. He has published papers, petitioned the Crown, and buttonholed every authority figure available to him. He is right about the potato in the same way you are right about your new system: completely, demonstrably, and frustratingly unable to get anyone to act on it.

The French cultural system had reasons stacked three deep to refuse. Religious authorities declared the potato unfit for human consumption because the Bible did not mention it.

Medical opinion linked it to leprosy. And most powerfully, the potato was Prussian peasant food, not the identity French society wanted to claim. Every logical argument Parmentier made activated deeper cultural resistance. The system had too many nodes all pointing in the same direction.

So he stopped arguing. He went looking for a leverage point.

He convinced Louis XVI to grant him a plot of land at Sablons and planted it with potatoes. Then he stationed heavily armed royal guards around the crop during the day with quiet instructions to accept bribes and look the other way at night.

No paper. No petition. No town hall. Just one signal, delivered in the language the system already spoke: this must be valuable, it is guarded. People began stealing potatoes. Theft created demand. Demand created cultivation. Within a generation, the potato was a French staple and a critical buffer against famine.

This story is not about potatoes. It is about where change actually happens.

What most project leaders get wrong about retail systems implementation

Most retail systems implementation programmes are designed around the destination: the new ERP, the new planning platform, the new way of working. Whether the label is ERP implementation, retail transformation, or a broader systems implementation effort, the energy goes into building the business case, the implementation plan, and the comms deck. The existing system is treated as the problem being replaced.

What gets missed is that the existing system is also a vehicle.

It contains the trust channels, the informal authority, the reward logic, and the cultural memory that will determine whether the new thing takes root, or quietly dies while your people route around it into spreadsheets.

The old process does not die because you turned off the old software. It lives in the habits, incentives, and deeply rational self-protective behaviour of the people who kept the business running before you arrived with a retail project management plan.

This is where many retail systems programmes fail. The technical implementation may be sound. The human system often is not.

Prosci’s longitudinal change management research is unambiguous on this: resistance is most acute when people perceive threat to job security, status, or identity. Not features. Not functionality. The human stakes underneath the interface.

Most change programmes address this with a communications plan that explains the what and the why, which is the equivalent of Parmentier publishing another paper.

Correct, but insufficient.

The problem is sharper still: the more authority and budget you deploy against a resistant system, the more it adapts. Compliance without adoption. Behaviour change that evaporates the moment the project team packs up. On paper, a go-live. On the floor, retail operations teams quietly filing the new system alongside every other initiative that did not stick.

“The system is not broken. It is designed to produce the behaviours you are getting, including resistance.”

Seth Godin calls the alternative elegant strategy: using the system to change itself, rather than fighting it directly. It is a description of what Parmentier actually did, translated into modern organisational change management and systems implementation practice.

And according to systems theorist Donella Meadows, whose 1997 essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System remains one of the most rigorous maps of how complex systems actually change, most organisations spend their change energy at exactly the wrong level: parameters, policies, and budgets, rather than the points that shift actual behaviour.

For leaders navigating ERP implementation, retail transformation, retail management complexity, or broader business transformation, that distinction matters.

A better approach to systems implementation and organisational change management

Meadows identified twelve leverage points. For retail leadership teams leading project management in retail, three are most applicable.

Information flows: what people see, when, and in what language

This is the Parmentier move. You do not need to change anyone’s values or authority structure. You change the signal.

A planning team that receives weekly variance data framed as “forecast error” behaves differently from one that receives the same numbers framed as “cash at risk”. Same information. Different signal. Different behaviour.

This is where retail systems implementation efforts often underestimate the power of information design inside retail systems.

The rules of the system: not the policy document, but the questions gatekeepers actually ask

When Miriam McLemore at Coca-Cola reframed her governance question from “Can we approve this?” to “What are the boundaries within which this team can operate?”, the people stayed the same and the system produced different outputs.

She did not fight the approval culture. She changed the question it was designed to answer.

This is what operational improvement often looks like in practice. Not bigger interventions. Better leverage.

The goals the system believes it is pursuing

This is the deepest lever.

When people understand what is being preserved through a change (not just what is being replaced), the organisational goal shifts from “survive this disruption” to “carry what is important” into a better operating frame.

That is where business transformation becomes believable.

Every downstream incentive and behaviour adjusts accordingly.

This is where retail leadership maturity becomes visible.

The Netflix no-vacation policy case is worth sitting with here, because it illustrates what happens when elegant strategy gets copied without understanding the mechanism.

Reed Hastings abolished vacation tracking in 2003. The actual elegant move was not the policy removal. It was Hastings and his leadership team publicly modelling extended holidays, filling the informational vacuum with the signal that outcomes matter more than hours.

Companies that copied the form without the mechanism saw employees take less leave. They imported neither the benefit nor the understanding.

Retail transformation TL;DR: the power points that actually change behaviour

The hidden mechanism

Elegant strategy works because it changes the signals your system pays attention to, not just the tools it uses.

Diagnostic questions

Can you name what your organisation has actually rewarded for the past five years (not what is on the values deck)?

Do you know which three people hold the real trust channels that will make or break adoption after go-live?

Have you identified where the current system’s logic already breaks down, and who in your business already knows it?

Decision framework

Before you sign off on any major systems spend, choose explicitly: are you intervening in what people see (information flows), what they are allowed to do (rules), or what they believe they are there to achieve (goals)?

If you cannot link your project’s design choices to at least one of those three, you are funding a new interface, not a change in behaviour.

Your three-step retail project management sanity check

1. Read the existing retail systems before you design the new one

Four questions that matter more than your vendor shortlist:

1. What has the organisation historically celebrated? Promotions, CEO shout-outs, team folklore (write the actual pattern down).

2. What does a bad outcome look like to the COO, the Head of Ops, and the IT lead personally, not for the project, for them?

3. Where does everyone already know the current process is broken, and who quietly works around it every week?

4. Through which channels do people receive information they actually trust?

If you cannot answer these before committing to a path, you are navigating without a map.

This is where strong retail consulting and retail advisory work adds real value, before technology decisions harden into delivery assumptions.

2. Choose your change management leverage point deliberately

Decide, in writing, before the design phase:

Which of Meadows’ three levers is this project primarily pulling?

What is the specific signal (the guarded potato field) that will communicate the new logic in the first 90 days post go-live?

Who carries that signal, and through which trust channels?

Tie every major design and comms decision back to that answer.

If something cannot be linked to it, it is probably noise.

This discipline matters whether the initiative is a targeted systems implementation programme or a broader retail transformation effort.

3. Test for retail project management readiness, not just delivery capability

Before you sign off:

Can someone outside the project explain, in two sentences, why this change is rational from within their current reward structure?

Is there at least one visible, system-native signal that will make the new logic feel inevitable rather than imposed?

Have you invested as much thought in who carries the signal as you have in which vendor to select?

This is as relevant to retail project management as it is to executive leadership.

The diagnostic work behind successful retail transformation

The reason elegant strategy is rare is not that leaders are lazy or lack curiosity. It is that the environment works directly against it.

Boards and investors in 2026 expect technology investment to produce visible operational improvements inside 12 to 18 months. That timeline creates structural incentives to skip the diagnostic work and move straight to implementation, which is exactly where the most expensive failures begin.

Parmentier’s potato campaign took years. Google’s Project Oxygen ran for three years before publishing the findings that changed management culture at scale. Hastings’ no-vacation policy required consistent leadership modelling before it produced the intended behaviour shift.

Elegant strategy is not a slow strategy. It is a precise strategy.

The diagnostic phase is not delay. It is the work that prevents the far longer delay (and cost) of a change programme that activates the system’s immune response and has to be rebuilt from the ground up.

The organisations that move fastest will not be the ones that skip this work. They will be the ones that have learned to do it quickly: read the system, find the leverage point, and intervene with the precision of someone who has genuinely inhabited the logic of the system they are trying to change.

For organisations managing retail operations, navigating retail management complexity, or leading project management in retail, that discipline is often the difference between movement and theatre.

“The smartest project leaders do not fight their organisations.

They find the guarded potato field and leave the gate open at night.”

Retail improvement, made practical.
Leadership thinking that drives change.

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