The fastest way to kill a company’s renewal effort is to let “change management” become somebody’s permanent job.
You can see it in AI councils, culture teams, and transformation offices. They start as emergency measures. Then they become a class apart: people who convene the rituals, define the language, and govern everyone else’s adaptation without owning real operating risk.
Cincinnatus cuts through the confusion. Rome gave him extraordinary authority for a specific crisis. He took it, did the job, and went back to the plow. That is the rule. Authority in a rupture is temporary, bounded, and borrowed from ordinary work. No one gets to live in the temple.
If the people running your resets, postmortems, or AI adoption program never have to go back and carry a quota, ship a product, or run a team under the new rules, you are not building renewal. You are building a priesthood.
Make stewardship a tour, not a caste. Then send them back to the field.