HookThe week KFC ran out of chicken
In February 2018, KFC switched its UK delivery contract from the specialist Bidvest Logistics to DHL, which planned to serve the whole country from a single depot in Rugby — replacing the six warehouses Bidvest had used. Within days of the cutover the network seized: at the worst point around 700 of KFC's roughly 900 UK outlets were closed because a chicken shop had no chicken. The company salvaged its reputation with the now-famous ‘FCK’ apology advert, and within weeks had quietly handed part of the contract back to Bidvest. A routine, cost-driven supplier change had become a national news story and weeks of lost revenue.
Notice what actually failed. Not the idea — plenty of firms consolidate logistics — but the MANAGEMENT of the change: a big-bang cutover with no parallel running, a single point of failure, and, reportedly, warnings from people who understood the old network going unheeded. B3.6 is the theory of not being KFC that week: why change happens, what decides whether it succeeds, and how scenario planning turns ‘what if the worst happens?’ from a shrug into a rehearsed procedure. Change is constant; competence at change is optional — and it shows.
MechanismCauses and effects of change — where the pressure comes from
Edexcel groups the causes. Internal: changes in organisational size (growth strains systems built for a smaller firm; takeovers bolt cultures together — Morrisons' staff got new owners, new debt and new priorities overnight in 2021), poor performance (M&S's clothing arm spent two decades being restructured because decline forces change on you), new ownership and transformational leadership — a Dave Lewis arriving with a mandate to rip up the strategy. External: shifting market conditions, technology, regulation, and shocks nobody votes for — the March 2020 lockdown closed every Greggs in the country, roughly 2,000 shops, inside a week.
The effects examiners want traced run through three channels. People: change breeds insecurity, resistance and sometimes an exodus of exactly the staff you need. Competitiveness: managed well, change is how firms regain it (Tesco 2015–19); managed badly, it hands rivals customers — KFC's lost weeks fed every chicken shop near a closed branch. Finance: change costs money before it saves any — redundancy, retraining, systems, consultants — which is why half-funded change programmes fail at the halfway point, the most expensive place to stop.
ModelKey factors in change — culture, size, speed, and the people saying no
Four factors decide whether change lands. Organisational culture: a task-culture agency absorbs change weekly; a role culture built on procedure experiences the same change as an attack. Size: supertankers turn slowly — a 900-outlet network amplifies any error 900 times, where a single restaurant could improvise. Time and speed: incremental change (pilot, learn, roll out) is slower but self-correcting; step change (big-bang cutover) is fast and unforgiving. KFC chose step change on its supply chain with no pilot region and no fallback — the speed was the failure. Sometimes, though, step change is right: a genuine crisis leaves no time for pilots.
Managing resistance is the fourth factor, and Kotter and Schlesinger give you the frame. People resist for four reasons: parochial self-interest (the change costs THEM something), misunderstanding and lack of trust, low tolerance of change, and — crucially — different assessments: they think the plan is wrong. The matched responses: education and communication, participation and involvement, facilitation and support, negotiation. The evaluation the mark scheme loves: resistance is information. The logistics staff who doubted a one-depot model were not change-averse; they were right. Firms that treat all resistance as obstruction silence their own early-warning system.
ModelScenario planning — rehearsing the bad day before it happens
Scenario planning asks: what plausible futures could hit us, how hard, and what would we do? It starts with risk assessment — for each risk, estimate likelihood and impact, and prioritise the top-right corner of that grid. Then build contingency plans (pre-agreed responses: if the depot fails, switch to suppliers X and Y at these prices), maintain business continuity arrangements so critical operations survive disruption (backup sites, dual suppliers, tested IT recovery — precisely what KFC's single-depot design lacked), and cover succession planning for the risk firms find easiest to ignore: the sudden loss of key people. A business with one irreplaceable founder is one heart attack from chaos.
The honest evaluation: planning costs real money for events that mostly never happen, and no plan survives contact with a genuinely novel shock. The discipline is expected value, not prophecy — spend where probability × impact justifies it. And even when the specific scenario is wrong, the REHEARSAL builds capability: firms that had practised disruption of any kind pivoted faster in March 2020 than firms that had never rehearsed anything.
A restaurant chain assesses its distribution risk: a 5% chance in any year of a supply failure costing £40m in lost sales and recovery. Expected annual cost = 0.05 × £40m = £2m. Running a second supplier and holding buffer stock costs £1m a year. The contingency pays for itself twice over in expected-value terms — before counting the reputational damage a collapse inflicts, which the £40m understates. Now the counter-case: if the failure probability is truly 1%, expected cost = £400,000, and the £1m plan looks extravagant. Scenario planning decisions inherit the decision-tree problem from B3.3 — the answer is only as good as the probability estimate — which is why prudent firms err towards insurance on risks that could kill them outright.
CaseMarch 2020 — the scenario nobody's plan named, and who coped anyway
Covid is the stress test every B3.6 answer can draw on. No UK retailer's risk register said ‘all shops shut by law this month’. Yet outcomes diverged wildly, and the divergence tracked exactly the factors above. Supermarkets — which run permanent contingency planning for supply disruption — re-engineered themselves in weeks: Tesco more than doubled online delivery capacity from around 600,000 to some 1.5 million slots a week by mid-2020. Greggs, with all its shops shut, leaned on a strong balance sheet and a trusting culture to hibernate and reopen. Firms with high gearing, single sales channels and no rehearsed alternatives — much of casual dining — went under or were rescued by creditors.
The synthesis worth writing in any 20-marker: scenario planning did not predict the pandemic, and it still separated winners from losers, because its real product is not the plan but the CAPABILITY — dual suppliers already contracted, decision rights already clear, teams that had practised improvising. Change management and scenario planning are the same discipline pointing in different directions: one manages the change you chose, the other the change that chose you.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
B3.6 appears on Paper 2 and is a Paper 3 favourite, because the pre-released context usually features an industry mid-upheaval — and the exam wants change theory APPLIED to that specific firm, not recited. Anchor answers in the four key factors (culture, size, speed, resistance) and pick the one or two that bite hardest in the case: for a small agile firm, culture and speed; for a national chain, size and single points of failure. Name Kotter and Schlesinger, but spend the marks matching a cause of resistance to its response — participation for different assessments, education for misunderstanding — rather than listing all eight items.
On scenario-planning questions, bring the quantitative frame: likelihood × impact gives an expected cost you can set against the price of the contingency, turning ‘planning is good’ into an actual argument. The reliable evaluation moves are cost-versus-benefit (planning consumes resources for events that mostly never occur — justified for existential risks, wasteful for trivial ones) and the rehearsal point (the plan's value survives even when its specific scenario never arrives). Strongest answers end with a conditional judgement: how much this firm should spend on planning depends on its gearing, its margins and whether the risk in question could kill it.