Stop calling it “resistance to change”

Hi Everyone,

Six years ago, 74% of employees said they were willing to back the changes their company was making. By 2022, that number had dropped to 43%. Over the same period, the average employee went from absorbing 2 enterprise changes a year to 10.

The data comes from Gartner's longitudinal workforce research, and many leaders are misreading what it means. When teams resist a new tool, drag their feet on a reorg, or quietly opt out of an initiative, the instinct is to call it resistance. Gartner's data points to a different cause. Your team is at capacity.

We've put together a 10-minute capacity check you can run on your team this week, plus what to do when someone is already over capacity.

Why small changes hurt more than the big ones

Counterintuitively, the small day-to-day shifts (a new manager, a moved team, a tweaked process) cause more fatigue than the big company-wide rollouts leaders worry about. That comes from the same Gartner research. Each shift is small enough to feel reasonable on its own, and they accumulate without anyone tracking the total.

The cost shows up in two numbers. Change fatigue cuts intent to stay by up to 42% and reduces performance by up to 27%. The team that looks like it's dragging its feet on your new CRM rollout might also be the team you're about to lose.

73% of HR leaders told Gartner in 2024 that their employees are change-fatigued. 90% said managers aren't helping the people who are struggling with it. If you're putting more than one or two major changes on each person right now, you're probably contributing to these numbers.

A 10-minute capacity check

Set aside 10 minutes before your next leadership meeting. Open a blank doc and list every change your team is currently absorbing. Anything that asks someone to learn, adjust, or do something differently counts, small or big.

Include:

• New tools or systems people are still learning
• Process changes (how you run sprints, how you forecast, how you review work)
• Org changes like a new manager or a new reporting line
• Strategic shifts, such as a new market or pricing model
• Role changes that come with a new scope or expectations

We've built a Google Sheet that does this for you – it counts the changes for each person and flags anyone over the limit automatically.

Now go person by person on your team. For each one, mark which changes they're personally absorbing. Anything that requires them to learn something new, change a habit, or operate under different expectations counts.

If anyone is carrying more than two major changes like that at once, you're knocking on the door of a change capacity problem.

What to do when the list is too long

When you find someone carrying too much, here's what to try. Start at the top.

1. Cancel something you've already started: Pick the change with the lowest return on the team's attention and pull it back. This is the hardest option because most changes felt necessary the day you started them. Pick the one you'd feel relieved to be done with.
2. Delay the next thing: If you can't retire something current, hold the next change until something in flight actually finishes. Write down the specific date you'll revisit it.
3. Roll changes out one team at a time: If a change has to happen now, start with the team that has the lightest load and bring the others in later. This breaks the assumption that every initiative needs to launch everywhere at the same time.
4. Pick one success metric per change: Initiatives with multiple success measures are 40% less likely to succeed than those with one. When you do start something new, pick the one number that tells you whether it's working

Go deeper

👉 HBR / Gartner: Employees Are Losing Patience with Change Initiatives – the full Gartner data on the collapse in willingness to support change, and what HR leaders are doing to manage it

👉 BCG: How CEOs Can Beat the Transformation Odds – five things the 25% of companies that get change right do differently, including the finding on starting before performance dips

👉 Gartner: HR Leaders Can Reduce Employee Fatigue with Proactive Change Management – how psychological safety on a team cuts change fatigue by up to 46%

👉 First Round Review: Letting Go of Efficiency Can Accelerate Your Company – Adam Pisoni on building organizations that adapt continuously instead of running formal change programs

Coming up tomorrow

Tomorrow, we're breaking down the three-field decision log that compounds your knowledge and decision-making abilities.

That's it for today!

P.S. Send the Capacity Checker to your co-founder or COO before your next planning meeting. Comparing two counts is usually a useful conversation.