Types of Change

When someone tells me their organization is suffering from "change fatigue," it sparks my curiosity.

In my experience, the term "change" is often a conflation of two very different things, and it's important to distinguish between them:
- Working on new things: adding initiatives, shifting priorities, taking on more.
- New ways of working: changing how your team operates, communicates, plans, and delivers.

Too much of the former exhausts people through volume and context switching. Never being able to fully finish a project because there are new priorities, not having the ability to focus and deliver quality results. This is what drives people to confusion and burnout. The mitigation: ruthless prioritization, protecting focus time, and being honest about what you're asking people to stop doing before you ask them to start something new.

Too much of the latter, done poorly, creates skepticism. You asked people to work differently, it didn't actually make their work easier, and now they don't believe you when you say the next change will. If you're genuinely trying to shift how people work, the most common mistake I see is not allowing the change management curve to settle into a new baseline before layering on the next initiative. Adoption takes time. Integration of new norms takes time. Skipping that step doesn't accelerate transformation. It just creates the conditions for the next round of fatigue.