Change Fatigue Revisited: A New Framework for Leading Change

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The year 2020 was arguably a year like no other. Leaders and organizations faced a series of overlapping crises, any one of which would have presented substantial difficulties in a normal year. Together, they created unprecedented challenges requiring responses not found in the playbooks or crises past. The global pandemic, economic downturn, social unrest, and the deep political divide interweaved to force leaders to confront organizational assumptions, fundamental structures, and underlying systems relied upon in the past. Leaders were forced to implement changes at speed and often without a full appreciation of how deep and wide the tentacles of these crises would extend. And as we have seen since the pandemic began, even the best calculated response could be upended by new changes or could still result in the dissolvement of a business, both small and large.

While 2020 brought a pandemic, for several years prior, leaders were facing a macroenvironment filled with an unprecedented level of active stressors. The landscape of the 21st century is characterized by increasing complexity, chaos, technological advances, economic shifts, intense competition, hyperchange, a 24/7 always on expectation, and a more nomadic workforce (Völpel 2003; Youngman 2020). Add to these tides the overwhelming nature of endless data and information, both real and misleading, the ability to make decisions in the speed required in this century has become more difficult than ever before. We are in an era which Google Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, called the age of acceleration, where globalization, technology, and financial markets instill a need for newer, better, faster products and services (Friedman 2016, 187). We have regarded organizations as systems that change, grow, or move and in which the variables they must navigate are interacting and changing constantly in response to these interactions, which makes it difficult to predict the outcome (Clegg, Kornberger, and Pitsis 2011; Guastello 2013).

Denning (2018) labeled this environment an unstoppable revolution.

The revolution is very simple. Today, organizations are connecting everyone and everything, everywhere and all the time. They are becoming capable of delivering instant, intimate, frictionless value on a large scale. They are creating a world in which people, insights and money interact quickly, easily, and cheaply. For some, the revolution is uplifting and beautiful. For others it is dark and threatening.

Organizations and leaders are also under intense scrutiny from a variety of external and internal stakeholders including customers, suppliers, employees, regulators, community activists, and governance officials. There is also systemic impatience in our instant environment, driven by unprecedented access and reach fueled by technological advances (e.g., the rise of social media). The age of Amazon has brought about a global expectation of services and goods immediately. While some businesses have been able to pivot to this expectation, others have not with many facing the end of their time.

The presence of the noted stressors, intense scrutiny, and systemic impatience compels leaders to adjust to meet these conditions. The demands of the organization’s stakeholders and market forces create pressure on the management to act. Leaders must launch change initiatives to meet the challenges they must navigate. So how does this change take place? If the playbooks of past are not as handy as they used to be, what will be the playbook of the future?

Many prescriptive change models treat change as linear, one dimensional, simple, and static. We have learned in 2020 that the actual change experience is nonlinear, complex, messy, three dimensional, and dynamic due to the continuous and overlapping stream of environmental demands.

Well intentioned, but poorly positioned and executed change management prescriptive programs may contribute to organizational dysfunction because leaders frame or position change inappropriately. Or, under pressure to deliver results, leaders launch iterations of the change initiatives if the expected results are not experienced quickly enough. On the immediate receiving end of such drastic change is the company itself, its workers, and middle management. The adage change is the only constant is often used to accept, justify, or normalize the rapid change, even poorly executed change initiatives. Such rapid change has negative cost associated with it—an environment where disorientation, shifting priorities, and rapid responses can lead to a condition we have labeled as Change Fatigue™.

In this new reality, organizations have to change how they change and match the pace of change in a manner both responsive yet sustainable. They need to increase their organizational agility, increase flexibility, and infuse into the culture a continuous focus that makes change a natural part of the cultural fabric (Kelley 2016). The fatigue that comes from continuous change will both tax the system and confuse the customer base. Imagine a restaurant that changes its menu almost daily in response to different variables—customer tastes, trendy dishes, supply of ingredients. While in some ways this can be viewed as responsive and agile, the toll it takes on staff, waiters, and the confusion caused to customers looking for consistency is a cost to the business that is not always factored into change decisions.

In 2008, IBM conducted a study with global CEOs (Kelley 2016) and found that the following were factors that presented challenges to an organization’s ability to embrace change:

•Changing mindsets and attitudes (58 percent)

•Corporate culture (49 percent)

•Underestimating complexity (35 percent)

•Shortage of resources (33 percent)

•Lack of commitment of senior leaders (32 percent)

•Lack of change know-how (20 percent)

•Lack of motivation of employees (16 percent)

What stands out in the prior list is that with the exception of a shortage of resources, the rest are human trait challenges—from human disposition, emotional inclination, behavioral motivation, and skills development.

In 2014, Forbes found that despite the life-or-death stakes, only 50% of executives say their companies adapt well to new technologies or processes, or are well versed in transformation.

The biggest barrier to overcome is conflicting visions among executive leadership or decision makers, cited by 33% of respondents. This is followed by a lack of internal talent to spearhead or execute business change (28%) and resource/budget constraints (25%).

While it might be easy to read the above and surmise that the failure is in leadership, recent studies have shown that leaders themselves are feeling the effects of continuous change. Segal (2021) noted that:

•Nearly 60 percent of leaders reported they feel used up at the end of the workday, which is a strong indicator of burnout.

•Approximately 44 percent of leaders who feel used up at the end of the day expected to change companies in order to advance; 26 percent expected to leave within the next year.

•Only 20 percent of surveyed leaders believed they were effective at leading virtually, a key element in today’s changing landscape.

Brower (2020) captures the need to lead change in this environment: Change is constant and as a result, people, teams and organizations must build their skills in managing change and fostering flexibility.

Given the systemic impatience in many of the organization’s stakeholders, the pace of the environment and the advances in technology, leaders must be able to embed resiliency into the organizational culture and to reposition change as a natural organizational process. It is true that change is the only constant will lead to some level of fatigue. But what happens if we take that as a given but prepare organizations to lead within the context of continuous change? If your restaurant must change its menu frequently to keep up with diners’ tastes and preferences, how can the owners of the restaurant retrofit these changes so as not to cause undue fatigue to everyone involved? With these factors and our high-speed future in front of us, we are proposing a new approach to change in this text (the C⁶ Change Leadership Framework), as a means to mitigate change fatigue.

CHAPTER 2

Context

The Speed of Now

Turbulence is occurring at a blistering pace, leaving many businesses unprepared and vulnerable to the chaos it brings.

—Kotler and Caslione (2009)

The world is changing all around us at an increasing rate and does not appear to be slowing down. The 2020/21 pandemic has added to the pace and complexity of change. That said, change has been increasing in pace for more than 50 years. Kelley (2016) noted that in the last 50 years the average lifespan of a S&P 500 company has dropped from 61 years to 18 years. It took the automobile 90 years to reach 90 percent of U.S. households but only 20 years for the mobile phone to attain the same level of utilization.

Garelli (2016) noted a study finding from McKinsey:

A recent study by McKinsey found that the average lifespan of companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years. McKinsey believes that, in 2027, 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 will have disappeared.

Garelli goes on to note:

As the life expectancy of companies drops, ours is increasing. Since the beginning of the century, 50% of the children born in advanced economies can expect to leave up to 100 years old. In addition, the retirement age will certainly increase. The new generation, the Millennials, will probably have to work longer and will do a lot of job hopping during their lifetimes.

It will imply more flexibility in the labor market and more mobility for employees. Also, an increasing number of people will work outside the traditional setup of corporate employment.

We are in the throes of an unstable environment, which for now appears will remain the status quo for some time to come. Organizations are struggling to increase business agility—their ability to quickly respond to change, adapt products, services, and processes, and potentially reconfigure themselves to meet customer demands (Hugos 2009; Kotter 2014; Friedman 2016).

This environment has been labeled as one characterized by VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity), where the rules and norms of the past no longer create results that organizations and their consumers desire. VUCA was used by the U.S. Army War College (Stiehm and Townsend 2002) to describe the post–Cold War global environment and has been applied to organizational survival (Bennett and Lemoine 2014).

Source: SEEDAdvisory (n.d.)

Simon Sinek (2019) describes this environment as an infinite game in his book with the same title. He notes that there are no exact or agreed upon rules, and winning is too narrow in perspective. In an infinite game, there is no finish line, but there are infinite time horizons. The primary objective is to keep playing. This speaks to the point that change initiatives should not be treated as events but more appropriately seen as a natural and ongoing daily process. It is a fairly human trait to think that if you solve a problem with an action, that that action will have solved the issue in perpetuity. But as every parent knows, just when you have your newborn in a sleep pattern that you think has stuck, you have to change tactics yet again when only part of that sleep training has stuck. As such, an infinite game, at least for a decade or so.

By its nature, most change is complex, iterative, and politicized (Buchanan 2003).

In times of ceaseless change, organizations that do not adapt, that do not challenge the status quo, are in danger of irrelevancy—or worse, extinction. Change is accelerating, uniformity is giving way to diversity, and complexity has become every leader’s biggest concern. As for businesses, globalization and a rapidly evolving workforce is redefining how we think about competence, creativity, productivity, and the structuring of organizations (Cisco 2011).

Kotler and Casilone, in Chaotics (2009), argued for the need to manage differently in what Alan Greenspan referred to as the age of turbulence. They noted, Change is the new status quo, leaving managers without firm ground from which to gaze at the onrushing future as markets, technologies, governments, consumers and products undergo constant change with blinding rapidity (p. 1). Kelley (2016) noted our recent environment was characterized as a tsunami of change.

Kelley (2016) also noted:

As far back as 2010, a study by IBM noted that CEOs were worried about the amount of change facing their organizations and not seeing any near-term decrease in change demand. Nearly 50% of the CEOs said they lacked confidence that their organizations had the ability to manage all the change they face. Prosci found in 2013, that 77% of organizations reported they were near the point of change saturation.

The Leaderocity™ (Dool 2021) research project, conducted in 2010 and 2011, explored drivers of the current and foreseen environment including: the emergence of chaotics, systemic impatience, turbulence as the new normal, the impact of globalization, and the compression of time and space, workforce trends, the digital workplace, the just in time workforce, the need to superstruct, and the culture of connectivity.

Drivers for the Speed of Now

The Emergence of Chaotics (Largely Derived From Kotler and Casilone 2009)

Leaders need to create chaotics management systems that allow for triple planning (short, mid, and long term), as well as early warning systems, active performance metrics, risk analysis, and information filtration systems. Our traditional strategy life cycles are most likely obsolete or at least under attack. The shelf-life of a strategy is certainly shorter for most organizations and leaders must be