14 May Please, no more change: The impact of organisational change on people

Every organisation is a system of systems, moving at speed, sights set on some distant target that is rarely reached before being moved again. New objectives, a need to reset values, tackling growth/stagnation/decline, the drivers for change are often familiar and almost always fuelled by risks or opportunities.

With the Captains steering the ship deeply focussed on the outcomes, the process to get there and the plan, the passengers (the people) are almost always the subject of well-meaning discussions around the need to ‘take our people with us’, but rarely do organisations commit the time, resources and expertise to make this happen. And they pay the price.

It is a brutal fact that as many as 70% of all change initiatives are doomed to failure¹ and this is almost exclusively down to a failure to truly understand the complexity and effort involved with engaging the most important part of the system – the people. That would suggest that organisations aren’t very good at ‘taking people with them’.

We must ask why. Here are a few of the key reasons we see:

A failure to predict and mitigate the human response

For any system to instigate and ‘freeze’ a successful change, the psychology of change has to be understood by those in power to an extent that allows them to understand and accommodate behaviours associated with change. Fisher² identified the complex range of emotions associated with various stages of change including anxiety, fear, threat and guilt. A people-centred change initiative would be ready for each of these response types from different people at various stages, and have the expertise to mitigate if it wants to maximise the chances of a successful transition. This is rarely the case. If there is an attempt to mitigate, it is often off the back of engagement surveys which often means it’s too late – the damage has already been done.

Change fatigue

Last year NHS England began work on a new 10-Year Health Plan. This isn’t the first long term plan that has been proposed. I’ve counted over ten NHS long-term plans (5 years or longer) initiated over the last two decades; each lasting for only a fraction of the planned time span and each replacing another long-term plan.

In fact, the average 10-year health plan is unlikely to survive for half of that time. The reasons aren’t surprising; changing government priorities, fiscal constraints, rapid developments in technology/treatment. However, the impact of this constant change on the people involved is a sense of being overwhelmed, with approximately two-thirds of workers globally feeling overwhelmed by the rapid pace of change, and with almost half fearing being left behind³. We are in the foothills of an AI revolution that is no doubt going to exacerbate this sense of weariness even further.

It’s certainly not just the NHS. Many, many other organisations, public and private, suffer the same curse of ‘initiative fatigue’ and the exhaustion it causes their people.

Desire for stability

We don’t like change as a species. That’s for sure⁴. It can trigger a sense of threat, especially in those having change ‘done to them’ and not being in a position to influence the situation they find themselves in. A staggering 75% of workers express a desire for greater stability in their working environment⁵. Where there is instability, people will try to stabilise as best as they can. This can sometimes mean change initiatives are defeated by inertia, emanating from people passively or actively resisting change. It is clear that the law of diminishing returns is at play here. Too much change too frequently will lead to a point where any potential positives of a transformation are outweighed by the impact on the workforce.

Us and them

For those at the top of an organisation, the need for change is often clear to see. It is difficult, especially in large organisations, for senior leaders to truly understand the impact of the change on those at other organisational levels. On the other hand, a wider workforce rarely understands the drivers for change at a senior level often leading to resistance at lower levels and frustration at senior levels. The answer of course is good communication for starters, but senior leaders need to go further than just briefing the reasons consistently, often and well.

Deloitte talk about the concept of ‘stagility’ in their recent Human Capital Trends report. The idea that leaders must create organisations with a ‘firm base’ from which they can pivot at speed. Keep the things you can the same, and only tweaking those areas that you must when you must. Like taking a shot from a stable platform rather than a moving vehicle, you are more likely to hit the target before it moves.

References

[1] Beer & Nohria (2000)

[2] Fisher (2012)

[3] Deloitte Human Capital Trends (2025)

[4] Rehman et al (2021)

[5] Deloitte Human Capital Trends (2025)

Written by Matt Johns
Matt is Managing Director of Fieri Leadership and Development Ltd, a company that helps organisations transform their workforce through a range of training and consultancy services. They have recently entered a partnership with Edinburgh Napier University and Innovation UK to develop the use of Artificial Intelligence in people development.