I recently sat down with Andy Temte on his podcast, The Balancing Act.
He asked me something I haven't stopped thinking about.
Why do so many change initiatives still get planned as if the world holds still while we carry them out?
It's a fair question.
Most of the change models still taught inside organizations were built for a slower pace of business.
Plan. Communicate. Execute. Repeat.
That structure assumes you get a beginning, a middle, and an end before the next thing starts.
For a long time, that assumption held up well enough.
It doesn't anymore
The Middle Doesn't Wait Anymore
Change used to arrive in a sequence.
Now it arrives in a stack.
A new tool rolls out before the last process has settled. A strategy shift lands mid-quarter, on top of a reorg that isn't finished.
Nobody planned it that way.
That's how change moves now, and AI has sped it up further by changing tools and workflows inside organizations at a pace most teams can't match.
When I talk with leaders about this, their frustration is rarely about any single change.
They're frustrated that they never get a clean stopping point.
A model built around phases has nowhere to put change that won't pause.
What Doesn't Change: The Emotional Response
This is the point I made to Andy, and I'd make it to any leader dealing with this.
The pace of change has changed.
The way people resist change hasn't.
People still ask the same questions they always have when something shifts:
- Will I still be good at this?
- Do I understand what's expected of me?
- Can I trust the people steering this?
Leaders can't automate those questions away or rush past them.
You can move fast on technology and still owe people time to work out what it means for them.
When your last new tool went live, how much time did your team get to absorb it?
What This Means for How You Lead
That's why we built the Change Enthusiasm® framework around three steps: Signal, Opportunity, Choice.
It doesn't replace a project plan.
It sits underneath one.
The emotional reaction to change is the Signal.
Understanding what it's telling you is the Opportunity.
Deciding what to do with it is the Choice.
Andy and I also talked about something leaders don't say out loud enough: change fatigue.
When change stacks up with no pause, people still have the skills.
What they lose is the capacity to use them.
Naming that honestly does more for a team than another well-designed rollout plan.
Where This Leaves Us
Change isn't going back to tidy phases.
A strong plan on paper won't carry an organization through.
The ability to keep leading well when the plan changes halfway through will.
That's the work we do inside the Change Growth Accelerator™.
Build it before your next change lands on top of the one you haven't finished.
