I’ve been arguing with the phrase “change fatigue” for years. People absolutely get exhausted. I’ve seen it.
What I’ve never been completely convinced by is that change itself is always the thing exhausting them.
We talk about it as if people eventually hit some invisible lifetime limit. Three reorganizations? Fine. Four? Still hanging in there. Five? Sorry, you’ve officially exceeded your annual change allowance.
Yet when I look back at the teams I’ve worked with, that’s rarely what I see.
I’ve watched people navigate acquisitions, leadership changes, new technologies, new operating models, shifting priorities, and the occasional strategy refresh that looked suspiciously similar to the strategy refresh from the year before. Somehow, they kept moving.
Which makes me wonder if we’re sometimes diagnosing the wrong problem.
Because when people say they’re exhausted, I don’t think they’re always exhausted by change itself.
Sometimes they’re exhausted from trying to understand how all the changes fit together.
The problem isn’t always the change
Most initiatives make perfect sense when viewed on their own.
A new system is supposed to improve efficiency. A process redesign should reduce friction. A culture initiative is meant to strengthen collaboration. A restructuring aims to create clarity. On paper, each one has a logical explanation, a business case, and usually a group of intelligent people working hard to make it successful.
The challenge is that employees don’t experience change one initiative at a time. They experience it as another Tuesday at work.
A new workflow gets introduced in one meeting. A different tool appears in another. An email arrives announcing a leadership priority that sounds oddly familiar to the one announced six months ago. Meanwhile, existing goals haven’t disappeared, customer demands haven’tslowed down, and nobody has figured out what should come off the plate to make room for everything that’s being added to it.
After a while, the hard part is figuring out how the new thing relates to everything else. Learning the new thing is the easy part.
When employees become the integration layer
People spend an enormous amount of energy trying to make sense of change.
And that work can’t be captured in a project plan, a status report, or a dashboard. It happens in people’s heads as they try to answer questions that sound so simple.
How does this connect to the initiative we launched last quarter?
Is this replacing something, or are we adding another layer?
Which priority matters most when they inevitably compete?
What’s coming off my plate now that that I have this new responsibility?
Organizations don’t always answer those questions directly, so people do what humans have always done when information is incomplete. They build their own story.
Sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they don’t. Either way, people need a narrative that helps them understand where they’re going and why. Without one, every new initiative starts to feel like a separate event instead of part of a larger direction.
One initiative asks people to move faster.
Another introduces three new approvals.
A third encourages managers to spend more time coaching and developing their teams.
A fourth reduces headcount.
Viewed independently, each decision may be completely reasonable. Put them together, and employees are left trying to solve a puzzle nobody has solved for them.
Does each initiative make sense on its own? Probably. But will they still make sense when they all arrive on the same Tuesday? Probably not.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that organizations are usually very good at managing individual initiatives. Each project has a sponsor, a steering committee, a communication plan, a training schedule, a project team, and a kickoff meeting where everyone genuinely believes they’re launching something important.
What I see far less often is someone responsible for connecting all those initiatives into a coherent experience.
Someone asking:
If I’m sitting in Operations, Finance, HR, or IT, does this all make sense together?
Do these changes reinforce one another?
Or am I expected to do the integration work myself?
Because that’s often what ends up happening.
Research in organizational psychology has shown that people experience change cumulatively. We don’t neatly separate one initiative from another in our heads. We carry them together, compare them, reconcile them, and try to understand how they fit into the reality of our work.
In practice, employees often become the integration layer between changes that were never integrated in the first place.
And when that effort becomes too heavy, people don’t all react the same way. Some become vocal. Some disengage. Some focus only on what feels immediately relevant. Others keep moving while quietly wondering whether any of it will still matter six months from now.
Human behavior is wonderfully inconvenient that way.
The leadership blind spot
Here’s the part I find most interesting. Fatigue doesn’t require bad intentions.
Some of the most exhausting environments I’ve seen were created by smart, committed leaders trying to solve legitimate problems.
Which is what makes it tricky. Nobody was trying to create confusion. Yet confusion emerged anyway.
They’re trying to improve performance, modernize systems, strengthen culture, increase agility, and solve legitimate business problems.
The intention is usually good.
The challenge is that every initiative is evaluated independently. Each one earns approval because it makes sense on its own.
Nobody intentionally designs confusion. But confusion will happen when dozens of sensible decisions collide in the daily experience of the people expected to absorb them.
That’s why I sometimes wonder whether we overuse the phrase change fatigue.
The label subtly places the problem inside the individual.
It suggests people are struggling to keep up.
Sometimes that’s true.
Other times, people may be reacting to something entirely different: competing priorities, disconnected messages, unclear sequencing, or simply too much effort spent figuring out how everything relates.
Maybe it’s feedback
Organizations are remarkably comfortable labeling something as resistance.
Resistance is neat. Resistance suggests the problem is sitting with the employee.
But not every drop in energy is resistance. Sometimes it might be, but other times it’s information.
Feedback on the other hand, is messier. Feedback forces us to consider that the experience we’re creating might be contributing to the reaction we’re getting.
A team that seems disengaged may be telling you that the story isn’t connecting.
A manager who appears frustrated may be dealing with competing priorities that nobody has reconciled.
A group that isn’t adopting the latest initiative may be trying to understand how it fits with the three that came before it.
Those signals usually are not captured in reports. Instead, they show up in delayed decisions, recurring questions, meeting silence, hallway conversations, and the subtle sense that people are spending too much time interpreting change and not enough time acting on it.
A different question
The next time you hear someone mention change fatigue, it might be worth getting curious before settling on an explanation.
Maybe people are overwhelmed. Maybe they’re tired. Maybe they’re resistant.
Or maybe they’re trying to solve a puzzle the organization hasn’t solved for them.
Because people can navigate an extraordinary amount of change when they understand where it’s leading.
What becomes exhausting is carrying five different transformations while trying to figure out whether they’re part of the same journey.
We call that change fatigue.
We call that change fatigue. But I’m not convinced people are tired of change itself. Maybe they’re exhausted by having to connect it all on their own.
About The Shift Series
Shift Happens is a series exploring how organizations can turn disruption into direction. We write about the real, human side of work, where change, technology, behavior, and leadership collide in ways no framework fully captures.
Every article follows one of the five currents that shape modern work:
The Human Side of Transformation, the heartbeat beneath the strategy.
Change Management as the Missing Discipline, the discipline hiding in plain sight, quietly determining who succeeds.
Technology, Tools + Human Behavior, the space where logic meets instinct, and where most rollouts live or die.
Organizational Structure, Power & Governance, the lines, ladders, and tensions that decide how work truly flows.
Leadership Micro-Shifts, Governance & Operating Models, the small shifts that create disproportionate impact.
We combine lived experience with practical insight. The kind you can apply the same day, not someday.
Shift happens! But with the right mindset, it happens through you.
If your organization is navigating a shift in technology, structure, or culture and needs practical, human-centered support, reach out.
This is the work we love! And the work we do best.
