The pace problem: why organisations push change faster than people can absorb it

This is part of a series of ten posts exploring the questions behind The Sticky Change Sense Check, a free tool for leaders navigating organisational change. If you haven’t read our introduction, When change energy goes unmanaged: the human cost, that’s a good place to start.

How often do you hear people in organisations say that everything is moving so fast?

It’s one of the most common things people say during change. Sometimes they mean it positively i.e. decisions are being made (finally 😊) and there is a general sense of momentum. But sadly, we tend to hear the other version rather too often, where people are trying to keep up with so many things at once that they’re no longer entirely sure what they’re supposed to be keeping up with!

Fast has somehow become the default. Driven by the needs of the project and the project outcomes rather than what people can actually absorb. And saying that you think things should slow can make you feel dangerously close to admitting that you’re not ambitious enough, agile enough or sufficiently committed to the change, particularly when everyone else appears to have their foot firmly on the accelerator.

Because the reality is that we don’t usually decide the pace of organisational change by asking how much change people can realistically absorb. We decide it according to the project plan, the board deadline, competitive pressure, financial necessity or, sometimes, a leader who is understandably feeling all this pressure and keen to get on with it.

And while these pressures may be completely legitimate, unfortunately, people don’t acquire an extra 30 per cent capacity simply because the deadline is terribly important.

And we think this is where organisations get themselves into difficulty. The people implementing a change still have their day jobs to do. While they’re learning a new system, adapting to a restructure or working out what the new strategy actually means for them and their teams, the emails continue to arrive, customers still need looking after and somebody still has to deal with whatever went wrong that morning. So at the same time as being asked to let go of how they have always done something, they are desperately trying to manage the anxiety of what’s already in the Inbox.

It can be a big emotional (over)load. Managers, especially, may be wondering what the change means for their job, their team or their future while trying to reassure everyone around them. They can find themselves implementing a change they haven’t completely got their own heads around yet, while helping their teams make sense of it and carrying on with everything they were doing before. We seem to have developed an extraordinary faith in the expandable middle manager!

Eventually, something starts to give. You might see more mistakes, poorer decisions, shorter tempers, missed deadlines or people simply doing enough to get the latest initiative over the line. Sometimes we call that resistance to change. Sometimes people are just knackered.

And there’s another problem. Push change hard enough and an organisation can actually make itself slower. The time apparently saved at the beginning ends up coming back as rework, confusion, disengagement and even more concern as to why the change isn’t working. It’s a vicious circle.

Change fatigue has a memory

Change fatigue is often talked about as though it’s temporary, something that happens in particularly intense periods but will resolve itself once things settle but we think that this underestimates the full impact.

People don’t arrive at each new organisational change with a clean sheet. They remember the previous system that was launched and never really worked. Or the restructure that happened before the previous restructure had even settled in or the decision that was reversed when it became clear that it was a really bad idea and no one was intending to follow it anyway!

This is the context that is everyone’s reality when the next announcement is made.

So, when somebody thinks, ‘Here we go again,’ they may not be cynical by nature or one of those mythical people who simply “doesn’t like change”. On the contrary, they may have paid attention, but experience has taught them that organisational enthusiasm for launching things can sometimes be rather greater than its enthusiasm for finishing them.

Which is why finishing things properly is important.

People need to know when a change has genuinely become how the organisation works. It helps, too, when leaders acknowledge what the last change asked of people, how hard it was, before moving on to the next one. Otherwise, unfinished changes start piling up, with each new initiative joining a small archaeological layer of previous initiatives that are technically complete but somehow the people have not changed the way they do things.  The messages are absorbed and the organisation’s appetite for change may be limitless but its patience for letting change stick is not.

Pacing is a strategic decision

Thinking properly about pace doesn’t mean doing everything slowly. Sometimes organisations really do have to move quickly. Regulators tend not to move their deadlines because everyone has had a difficult quarter. A serious financial problem may need urgent action and sometimes there simply isn’t another six months available to bring everybody gently along with you. But speed has consequences.

Katy Milkman’s research, brought together in How to Change, makes the case that lasting behaviour change needs repetition, reinforcement and the opportunity for new behaviours to become established. If people barely have time to practise one new way of working before another arrives, it shouldn’t come as a huge shock when the first one doesn’t stick.

What we notice is that those conditions are undermined, rather than supported, by moving too fast for people to consolidate what they’ve learned. Real change, the kind that outlasts the initial introduction, needs time to become habitual. Moving quickly past that consolidation window doesn’t save time. It just moves the cost elsewhere, usually into the next change programme, when people arrive already exhausted.

Practically, this means making deliberate decisions about what comes first, what can wait and what needs to settle before the next thing begins. It means being honest about capacity, particularly in the middle of the organisation where the change load is often heaviest and most discreetly carried. And it means resisting the pull to launch the next initiative before the current one has genuinely stuck, even when the pressure to do so feels entirely reasonable.

Ask the people carrying the change

One of the most useful questions a leader can ask about pace is a simple one:

If I asked the people carrying this change whether they have enough time and capacity to do it well, what would they actually say?

And we probably wouldn’t rely entirely on the answer from the town hall.

We’d be interested in what people say afterwards. What are managers hearing in their one-to-ones? What keeps cropping up in team meetings? Where are people creating workarounds? What are they no longer doing because something else has had to take its place?

If people are consistently saying they can’t sustain the pace, that doesn’t automatically mean everything has to grind to a halt while we all go and have a nice lie down. It does mean there is a need to understand what is creating the pressure.

We’d also want to know what people have been told they can stop doing as new work is added. In our experience, organisations are generally much better at adding things than removing them. We launch, introduce, create and improve with considerable enthusiasm; stopping something seems to require an archaeological dig, three committees and someone very senior saying, “Do we actually still need this?”

And then there’s the slightly more uncomfortable possibility that some of the pressure is coming from the leaders. Leaders are under pressure too, and visible activity can be reassuring. A full programme plan looks like progress. Launching something feels like progress. Announcing the next phase certainly looks like progress.

But the people carrying the change may be having a rather different experience of it.

So before adding the next initiative, we’d want to know this:

If the people responsible for this change right now were completely honest with you about whether the pace is sustainable, what do you think they would say?

Their answer won’t tell you precisely how fast the organisation should move. There are too many competing pressures for it to be that simple. But if the people doing the work are repeatedly telling you that the pace is unsustainable, we’d be wary of treating that as a problem with their attitude to change.

They may be telling you something useful about the way you’re leading it.

If this has made you curious about what is happening in your own organisation, The Sticky Change Sense Check is a free, ten-question tool for senior leaders, HR and OD professionals who want to understand how change is actually being experienced across their organisation, rather than relying solely on what the programme plan says should be happening.

Download The Sticky Change Sense Check

Reference

Milkman, K. (2021). How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. Portfolio/Penguin.