When change energy goes unmanaged: the human cost
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
Earlier this year we wrote about Fire Horse energy – and what 2026 is asking of leaders. This is what happens when that energy goes unmanaged.
There’s a version of organisational change that looks, from the outside, like it’s working. Decisions are being made. Initiatives are launching. The slide decks are polished, the milestones are being hit, the communications are going out. Everyone is busy.
And yet something is quietly wrong.
The teams are tired in a way that doesn't quite make sense given how much progress is being made. People don’t seem to recognise that things are going so well. Conversations that used to be open have become careful. A few good people have left or started looking. The change is moving – but it doesn't feel like it’s landing.
This is what unmanaged change energy looks like. Not a crisis. Not a collapse. Just a slow, invisible erosion of the things that make change actually stick.
Momentum without meaning is exhausting to follow
The first thing that tends to go, when change moves faster than people can absorb, is the sense of purpose.
Speed has a particular quality to it. It feels like progress. It rewards activity. And in a high-pressure environment, it can quietly crowd out the questions that matter most: why are we doing this? Is it even the right thing to be doing?
When people don’t have a clear answer to these questions – when the change feels like movement for its own sake – something predictable happens. They keep going, because that’s what’s expected of them. But they do it with less, not more, of themselves. The discretionary effort, the creative thinking, the willingness to raise a concern before it becomes a problem, the readiness to mention that they are struggling: these are the first things to drain away.
Momentum without meaning creates activity, not progress. And sustained activity without meaning is one of the most reliable routes to the kind of exhaustion that doesn’t respond to a long weekend.
The plan and the experience are not the same thing
Most change programmes are designed to manage the plan. Timelines, milestones, workstreams, stakeholders. These things matter. But they are not the change.
The change is what’s happening in the room when people hear the announcement. It’s the conversation in the car park afterwards. It’s the manager who doesn’t quite know what to say to their team, so says something vague that leaves everyone more uncertain than they were before. It’s the person sitting with a fear they don’t think they’re allowed to name.
What goes unsaid during change rarely disappears. It goes underground – and tends to resurface later, at a point when there’s less room to deal with it. Or even when it too late.
In our experience, organisations that manage only the plan consistently underestimate the importance of this. Not because they don’t care about their people but because the plan is visible and the experience is not. The plan has owners and deadlines. The experience of change lives in one-to-one conversations, in the tone of a team meeting, in whether people feel safe enough to tell the truth about how things are actually going.
If you only manage the plan, you will miss the experience. And if you miss the experience, you will be surprised by the resistance. Perhaps might be better to say ‘overwhelmed by the resistance’??
Managers are absorbing more than anyone is acknowledging
There is a particular pressure point in most organisations going through change and it sits in the middle. Not at the top, where the vision is being held, and not at the front line, where the change is being felt most directly – but with the managers in between.
Managers are the emotional shock absorbers of change. (Something they don’t always get due credit for!) They are receiving the pressure from above and translating it for the people around them – often while carrying their own uncertainty about what the change means for them. And they are frequently being asked to do this without adequate preparation, without honest information and without enough space to process it before they pass it on.
When managers aren’t supported, the effects are both immediate and lasting. Teams get inconsistent messages. Questions go unanswered or get answered in ways that increase anxiety rather than reduce it. People stop bringing concerns to their manager – not because they don’t have them, but because they’ve learned it won’t help.
The irony is that managers are often the single most important factor in whether a change lands well. Not the communications strategy, not the leadership town hall – the person who manages you and how they show up in the day-to-day.
Pressure reveals the true state of trust
There is something telling about change at pace. It reveals to you, quite precisely, what your organisation is actually made of.
The trust that exists before a change is tested by the change. And the gaps – between what leaders say and what they do, between the message and the reality, between the stated values and the lived experience – tend to become visible under pressure in a way they don’t in quieter times.
Cynicism, when it appears in an organisation going through change, is rarely about the change itself. It’s almost always a signal about trust. People have been here before. They may even have been part of the conversation. They’ve seen initiatives launch and fade. They’ve heard the language of transformation and watched the behaviour stay the same. And now, when they’re being asked to change again, they’re drawing on that history.
This is not obstruction. It’s information. And the response to it isn’t even more communications – it’s the slow, consistent work of doing what you said you would do, acknowledging when you got something wrong and treating people’s concerns as worth taking seriously.
Pressure reveals the true state of trust. And the organisations that use that information well – that treat the cynicism as a signal rather than a problem to be managed – are the ones that come out of periods of rapid change with their culture intact.
The question most organisations don’t ask
We’ve worked with a lot of organisations through periods of rapid change. And there is one question that, in our experience, separates the ones who come through it well from the ones that don’t.
It isn’t, “are we on track?” It isn’t “have we communicated enough?” It isn’t even “is the strategy right?”
It’s “what is this doing to our people?”
Not as a wellbeing initiative. Not as a box to be ticked. But as a live, honest question that someone is actually responsible for asking – and acting on.
The organisations that ask this question, and build it into how they lead change, tend to move faster in the long run. Not because they slow down to be kind, but because they catch the things that would have derailed them before they do. They notice when trust is starting to erode. They hear the concern before it becomes a crisis. They keep the people they most need to keep.
If your people completed the Sense Check right now, where do you think they would score you differently?
If any of this resonates – whether you’re in the middle of a period of rapid change or sensing that something isn’t quite landing – The Sticky Change Sense Check is a good place to start.
It’s a free, ten-question self-scored tool designed for senior leaders, HR and OD professionals. It takes around ten minutes and helps you see clearly where your change energy is well-channelled and where it needs attention.
Comments