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Change "always drives fear and territorial behaviours" and it "always feels personal", but it will fail if leaders are too afraid to break anything during the process, says workplace researcher Brené Brown.

Brown has spent years facilitating culture and performance transformations in global companies, and says she knows when an organisation needs small, incremental change, and when the only solution is to "break some protected but no longer useful shit" in order to "build something that allows you to seize new opportunities".

But many leaders call change "transformation" regardless of how major or minor it is, meaning the word is frequently misused and overused, she says in her new book, Strong Ground.

"Part of the overuse problem is that leaders use the term transformation to convey importance and urgency, even when the change is intentionally incremental or adaptive," Brown says...