Based on HBR’s “Leading Through Continuous Change” (2025)
For years, organisations treated change as something occasional. A new system, a restructure, a program every few years.
Today, change never stops.
HBR’s 2025 data shows the average employee is now involved in ten separate change initiatives at once, up from two in 2016.
When programs stall, many leaders still describe it as “resistance.”
But what we’re seeing isn’t resistance. It’s an overload.
Most organisations don’t have a change resistance problem.
They have a change capacity problem.
The Performance of Change
We often see what we call change theatre. The plans are polished, the comms are ready, and the talking points are rehearsed. Everyone looks busy with change.
Behind the performance, though, teams are tired. They’re juggling competing priorities, deadlines, and demands for attention. The outcome is plenty of activity but not enough absorption.
At Enable Change Partners, we’ve found that no amount of storytelling or training can fix a lack of capacity.
What’s Working and What’s Not
✅ What’s working: Leaders are more visible and intentional than ever. Many genuinely want transformation to succeed.
🚧 What’s not: Pacing.
People cannot absorb ten shifts at once. Even with clear communication and alignment at the top, saturation erodes trust.
When the volume of change exceeds people’s ability to process it, even good initiatives start to feel like noise.
A Better Way to Lead Change
We help organisations move from asking
“How do we make people change?”
to
“How do we make it possible for people to change?”
Our approach focuses on three core practices:
- Map the change load before you launch.
Identify where teams are already stretched and where there is space to absorb something new. - Sequence initiatives based on energy, not just technical dependencies.
Readiness is more than milestones. It’s about whether people have the focus and bandwidth to engage. - Build recovery time into the plan.
Reflection, rest, and recognition are part of delivery, not an afterthought. They create capacity for the next phase.
When leaders take this approach, people stop resisting. Not because they’ve been persuaded, but because they finally have room to participate.
The Leadership Imperative
If success is measured only by delivery speed, teams will continue to burn out.
If we start measuring absorption and capacity, we build resilience that lasts beyond a single program.
Change leadership today isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing what matters, at a pace people can sustain.
Stop performing change.
Start managing capacity.
Change rarely fails because people don’t care. It fails because they’ve run out of space to care.
If your teams are exhausted by constant transformation, maybe it’s time to focus less on momentum and more on capacity.