Do you remember «Change mich am Arsch»? The German book by Prof. Dr. Axel Koch, published in 2018 by Econ Verlag. The title translates roughly to «Change me, my ass». The subtitle: «How companies wreck their employees and themselves through constant change».
If you have worked inside a larger organisation over the last few years, you probably know it. Or at least the title. It felt like a small liberation. Finally someone saying out loud what many were thinking quietly.
What Koch sees clearly
Koch is a business psychologist who spent years working as a trainer inside the very industry he takes apart. He knows it from the inside. Workshops, reforms, tools, vision statements, the next initiative every eighteen months. His finding: most change programmes do not change anything. They produce exhaustion, cynicism and a collective rehearsal of pretending.
He calls it «change fatigue». People learn that every new initiative disappears within a year and a half. So they nod, sit through the workshop, stick the post-it on the wall, and carry on as before.
That is true. It is observable. It is reality in every second company.
Where the book walks into its own trap
And still something is off.
Because the book does exactly what it criticises. It talks about change. It argues. It delivers studies, anecdotes, punchlines, 304 pages of them. It goes through the head. The head nods. And on Monday morning the same person sits in the same meeting with the same knots in the shoulders.
Because real change does not happen there.
A good book about change does not replace change. It replaces it disturbingly well, because the feeling of insight sits so close to the feeling of transformation that we confuse the two.
Why understanding is not changing
This is not a polemic against Koch. This is neurobiology.
Antonio Damasio showed in the 1990s at the University of Southern California that emotions are bodily states which the brain interprets only afterwards. The tightness in your chest was there before the word «pressure». The lump in your throat was there before you thought «I am afraid».
So when you read a book that convinces your head, you are talking to the interpreter. Not to the one who plays the music.
Candace Pert demonstrated at the National Institute of Health that neuropeptides store emotional information across the body. Not only in the brain. In the shoulder, the jaw, the chest, the stomach. A blockage has a physical address. And no argument in the world rings that doorbell.
Antonio Damasio (University of Southern California): The Somatic Marker Hypothesis shows that emotions are bodily states first. Consciousness follows 200 to 500 milliseconds later.
Candace Pert (NIH, 1997): Neuropeptides store emotional information distributed throughout the body. Blockages sit at concrete physical locations, not only «in the head».
Karim Nader (McGill University, 2000): Memories are reconsolidated upon recall. Anyone wanting to change an old reaction has to re-experience it in the body, not just talk about it.
What Koch should have thought through to the end
If change theatre fails because it is imposed from above and pushed through the head, then the next question is: where does change actually happen?
Answer: in the body. Nowhere else.
This is where Koch's argument tips over. He has the diagnosis. He knows the symptoms. But the therapy he offers is another book. Another reflection. Another invitation to the head to become smarter.
Real change looks different. It happens when your body stops pressing itself into the old shape. When the tension in the jaw lets go. When your breath deepens. When, in a moment where you would usually swallow, you suddenly stand still.
No book does that.
No TED talk does that.
And no, I cannot promise it to you by writing this text.
Two coordinates the body needs
We work with two coordinates. Not concepts. Places in the body.
The first: your desired feeling. Not what you want. What you want to feel when you arrive there. Your body knows this place. You find it faster than your head writes a strategy.
The second: the blockage. It has a concrete address somewhere in your body. Shoulder, stomach, jaw, chest. You do not know in advance where. You find it when you ask.
These two coordinates are enough. Less does not work.
Insight is head. Transformation is body. And the body does not read books.
What we do when a team has nodded enough
Sometimes a leadership team realises that the next strategy off-site will not solve it either. That the next book on the shelf will not change anything. That their people are smart, well-trained, well-paid, and still fall into the same reaction patterns the moment it gets tight.
That is when we come in with a FIVE MOVES workshop. One day, one room, twelve to thirty people. We do not talk about change. We do it. Every participant leaves with their own experience, one their body will not forget. Not a script for Monday. A memory that sits in the chest.
Anyone who wants to experience it for themselves books a start session with one of our guides. One hour to find the two coordinates. Afterwards, the FIVE MOVES app accompanies you for 40 days. Not a programme to work through. A short daily practice that helps your body stabilise the new state.
And anyone who wants to bring this into their own field, in therapy, consulting, leadership, care or education, can train with us as a FIVE MOVES guide. No certificate theatre. A method that holds, because it works through the body.
Koch was right. We walk through the next door.
If you closed «Change mich am Arsch» thinking «finally some plain talk, but now what», you are exactly where we start.
The diagnosis is correct. Change theatre is bullshit as long as it is played from the head.
But the door where real change knocks is a different one. It sits in your body, at a very specific place. You find it when you stop arguing and start sensing.
Your head has nodded enough. Your body is waiting.
Book reference: Prof. Dr. Axel Koch, Change mich am Arsch. Wie Unternehmen ihre Mitarbeiter und sich selbst kaputtverändern. Econ Verlag (Ullstein), 2018, 304 pages. Afterword by Prof. Myriam Bechtoldt. ISBN 978-3-430-20245-9. German original, no English edition.