What if your organization’s next major transformation is almost certain to fail, not because the strategy is wrong, but because your people are too burned out to execute it? For the last decade or so, if you asked a researcher or consultant the likelihood of a big-ticket change program succeeding, they would have given you a bleak answer: a 70% failure rate. Last year, Bain & Company upped that failure rate to 88% and gave the burnout of “oversubscribed star players” as a contributing factor. But despite the odds of failure, organizations continue to plan for change projects, expecting different results from teams that are increasingly depleted by today’s uncertain operating environment. We need a different way of thinking about and leading change. We need to switch from change management to change fitness.
The Exhaustion Epidemic Hiding in Plain Sight
Walk into any organization today and you’ll hear a familiar refrain: “Once we get through this reorganization…” or “After this system implementation…” or “When things settle down…” The uncomfortable truth is that things aren’t going to settle down and we can’t always predict the next big change around the corner. This truth is so palpable that many feel the VUCA framework — Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous — is no longer sufficient to describe the times we live in, opting instead for futurist Jamai Cascio’s concept of BANI – Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible.
Today’s perpetual state of flux creates not just physical tiredness from working long hours, it’s a deeper, more insidious form of depletion. Teams are experiencing what Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan might term “cognitive overload,” where the complexity of their environment consistently exceeds their current capacity to make sense of it. The result? A workforce that’s not just tired, but fundamentally unable to engage with change in productive ways.
The traditional change management model—with its neat phases of “prepare, change, sustain”—assumes periods of stability between disruptions. But as leadership researcher Nick Petrie observes, “When leaders treat change as an event, they miss the reality: it’s now a permanent feature of work.” We’ve entered what he calls an era of “perpetual whitewater,” where the rapids never end and the calm water we’re paddling toward is a mirage.
Why Traditional Change Management Is Becoming Obsolete
So the change management playbook most organizations follow was designed for a different era: one where disruptions were episodic, boundaries were clear, and problems had known solutions. Harvard professor Ronald Heifetz’s distinction between technical and adaptive challenges illuminates why traditional approaches fall short. Heifetz says that technical problems, however complex, can be solved with existing expertise and established procedures. Need to implement a new software system? There’s a methodology for that. Adaptive challenges, by contrast, require people to examine and often abandon deeply held assumptions about how work gets done.
Think about the scope and scale of challenges organizations face today:
- Digital transformation with the potential to change business models rather than just tools.
- Ever shifting expectations and beliefs around how and where work should be done.
- Rapidly expanding use of artificial intelligence raising urgent questions about how tasks are divided between human and machine capabilities.
- Sweeping regulatory and policy changes which threaten to reshape entire industries.
- Generational shifts that question work-life boundaries.
Leaders should not think of these as a tick-list of problems to be solved, rather as ongoing workplace realities to be navigated. When organizations apply technical solutions to adaptive challenges, they create what we might call “change theater”—lots of activity and apparent progress, but little fundamental transformation.
The Science Behind Change Fitness
The answer is “change fitness” and the organizational capability to continuously adapt without depleting human resources.
Kegan’s research on adult development shows that we can develop greater capacity for complexity under the right conditions. His work reveals that many of us are operating at a level “in over their heads,” performing roles that exceed our current developmental capacity. Rather than seek to reduce complexity (that’s impossible in today’s world) the solution is to increase capacity.
Change fitness emerges when organizations create conditions for what Kegan calls “transformational learning.” That means more than acquiring new skills, but fundamentally expanding how people make sense of their world.
Building Change Fitness: Three Core Practices
Organizations that successfully build change fitness share common practices that can be implemented without massive budgets or complex programs. These practices transform how teams engage with ongoing change:
1. Continuous Sensemaking
Instead of waiting for clarity that never comes, change-fit organizations engage in ongoing sensemaking. They regularly ask:
- What’s actually changing, and what’s not?
- What feels uncertain? What feels stable?
- What patterns are we seeing across different changes?
This involves incorporating five minutes of sensemaking into existing routines. A team check-in might start with: “What’s one thing that’s different this week from last week?” Over time, this practice builds what researchers call “complexity capacity” and the ability to hold onto multiple, sometimes contradictory realities without becoming paralyzed.
2. Strategic Energy Management
Change fitness requires treating human energy as a finite resource that must be deliberately managed. This means:
- Identifying where teams are genuinely stretched thin versus where they’re operating on autopilot.
- Making explicit decisions about what to stop doing to create capacity for what matters.
- Building in recovery practices that don’t wait for the mythical “calm period.”
One practical approach: Before taking on any new initiative, teams must identify what they’ll stop doing or do less of. This forced trade-off prevents the accumulation of change debt that leads to burnout.
3. Learning from Navigation, Not Just Success
Traditional organizations celebrate successful change implementations. Change-fit organizations celebrate successful navigation of uncertainty. They regularly ask:
- When have we successfully navigated uncertainty before?
- What did we learn about our capacity to adapt?
- What’s one small experiment we could try to build our adaptation muscles?
This shift from outcome-focus to process-focus builds what Heifetz calls “adaptive capacity” and the ability to thrive in situations where the path forward is unclear.
The New Resilience is Expecting Change, Not Stability
Traditional resilience was about bouncing back to a previous state, like a rubber band returning to its original shape. But what happens when there’s no original shape to return to? When change is constant, resilience isn’t about bouncing back. It’s about becoming so adaptive that you no longer expect the world to stay the same.
This represents a shift in organizational psychology. Instead of seeing change as disruption to be managed, change-fit organizations see it as the medium in which they operate. The exhaustion comes not from the change itself, but from the futile effort to resist it.
As Petrie notes in his research, organizations must develop leaders and cultures that don’t just cope with complexity but thrive in it. This isn’t about working harder or being more resilient in the traditional sense. It’s about developing what he calls “bigger minds” and the capacity to hold complexity without being overwhelmed by it.
Your Organization’s Next Change Is Coming. Will You Manage It or Get Fit for It?
The 88% failure rate for transformation isn’t inevitable. It’s the predictable result of using yesterday’s change management tools on today’s adaptive challenges. Organizations that cling to episodic change management will continue to exhaust their people while achieving diminishing returns.
The alternative is building change fitness—developing the organizational capacity to navigate continuous adaptation without depleting human resources. This isn’t about adding more to leaders’ plates or creating new programs. It’s about fundamentally shifting how we think about and engage with change.
Your organization’s next change is already on the horizon. You can approach it with another change management plan, complete with phases and committees and communications strategies. Or you can use it as an opportunity to build change fitness—to develop the muscles of adaptation that will serve you through all the changes to come.