Partner
BAS ZWART
About ME
My career has been built inside large and mid-sized, complex organisations undergoing constant structural change from a global consumer and healthcare multinational to advisory work with businesses navigating acquisition, integration, implementation and scale.
Across two decades, I’ve moved from hands-on change delivery to leading change as an enterprise capability. Building and running a global function of more than fifty change professionals supporting transformation across regions and business units. That experience has given me a particular expertise: diagnosing why well-designed transformations stall in the messy middle after the strategy is set and the operating model is drawn, but before the organisation has actually changed how it works. All of this always balancing the Science and Art driving behavioural change that realizes desired outcomes.
I’ve applied this across major implementations, integrations, shared-services build-outs, and enterprise-wide capability programmes, and I now bring that same diagnostic and execution rigor to a broader range of clients as part of Kennedy Fitch.
Based in: The Netherlands
Languages: Dutch, English
Focus Areas
UPLIFTING THE WORLD OF WORK
The stereotype of change management is the laminated poster and the mandatory town hall. Activity dressed up as progress, delivered by people who’ve memorised a methodology but never had to defend it against a genuinely hostile stakeholder. I work differently: I treat every objection to change as a testable claim, not a feeling to be managed. This means I’m as likely to tell a client their plan is wrong as I am to help them execute it. That takes rigor: sourcing objections systematically, tracing the outcome chain, piloting disputed elements before scaling and the willingness to say a chain of logic doesn’t hold, even when it’s uncomfortable. One client who’s been challenged is worth more to me than ten who’ve simply been agreed with.
– Bas Zwart
How I can help YOU
As Partner Change & Transformation at KennedyFitch, I close the gap between the transformation you’ve designed and the one that sticks. I treat resistance as evidence about where the design may be wrong. An incentive that quietly rewards the old behaviour, an operating-model assumption that only works on paper, and test disputed elements before scaling them, rather than discovering at rollout that the KPI doesn’t hold. This comes from nineteen years leading change at enterprise and mid-sized scale: building a global change function of fifty-plus professionals, and steering post-merger integration across multiple markets. Whether it’s a shared-services rollout stalled after go-live, a post-acquisition integration, or adoption that never took, I connect every intervention back to a business outcome, not an activity count.
YOU.ME.
WE.
What WE can achieve together
I bring both the challenge and the delivery experience to back it up: I’ll question a brief before executing it, and I’ll say plainly when I’m not sure. I test assumptions, mine and the client’s, before we scale anything. Whether that’s an incentive structure, a KPI, or an operating-model design choice everyone has agreed to but no one has actually pressure-tested. I’m explicit about what’s outside my remit, so scope stays honest rather than getting renegotiated after the fact. Change holds not because everyone was convinced in the room, but because we found out, ahead of time, what was likely to break and fixed it before the organisation had to discover it the hard way, at scale, after the budget was already spent.