What Pasta Cooking Can Teach Us About Change Management

The best time to add salt to the pasta is when the water is boiling.

This was a piece of advice Antonino Canavacciuolo, a 3-Michelin-star chef, shared on a live TV show in Italy.

As a fellow Neapolitan, I couldn’t help but draw a parallel between this advice and the timing of introducing a change manager (CM) into a project.

Just like adding salt too late makes it hard for it to stick, bringing in a CM too late can  reduce the effectiveness of the entire change effort. 

Too many organizations still see change management as something that can wait. But by the time a CM is involved, key decisions may already have been made, communications may already have gone out, and resistance may already be building across teams. 

At that stage, the CM is no longer helping shape the change proactively — they’re trying to recover momentum while navigating tension, uncertainty, and internal dynamics that should have been addressed earlier.

Can the CM still help? Absolutely. 

But the energy required to bring things back on track becomes significantly higher. Delays increase. Employees become frustrated. Some disengage completely. And organizations often end up paying for it through lost time, rework, additional support efforts, and missed objectives. 

Think about it like bringing in a mediator after months of unresolved tension between two people. Trust takes time to build. People need time to open up, process concerns, and start changing behaviours.

Projects, however, rarely have that kind of time.

Deadlines are tight. Go-live dates matter. And once resistance becomes embedded, changing direction becomes much harder. 

So, to wrap up: add the salt when the water is boiling.

Because once the pasta is cooked, it won’t stick anymore.