The year 2020 was arguably a year like no other. Leaders and organizations faced a series of overlapping crises, any one of which would have presented substantial difficulties in a normal year. Together, they created unprecedented challenges requiring responses not found in the playbooks or crises past. The global pandemic, economic downturn, social unrest, and the deep political divide interweaved to force leaders to confront organizational assumptions, fundamental structures, and underlying systems relied upon in the past. Leaders were forced to implement changes at speed and often without a full appreciation of how deep and wide the tentacles of these crises would extend. And as we have seen since the pandemic began, even the best calculated response could be upended by new changes or could still result in the dissolvement of a business, both small and large.
While 2020 brought a pandemic, for several years prior, leaders were facing a macroenvironment filled with an unprecedented level of active “stressors.” The landscape of the 21st century is characterized by increasing complexity, chaos, technological advances, economic shifts, intense competition, hyperchange, a 24/7 “always on” expectation, and a more nomadic workforce (Völpel 2003; Youngman 2020). Add to these tides the overwhelming nature of endless data and information, both real and misleading, the ability to make decisions in the speed required in this century has become more difficult than ever before. We are in an era which Google Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, called the “age of acceleration,” where globalization, technology, and financial markets instill a need for newer, better, faster products and services (Friedman 2016, 187). We have regarded organizations as “systems” that change, grow, or move and in which the variables they must navigate are interacting and changing constantly in response to these interactions, which makes it difficult to predict the outcome (Clegg, Kornberger, and Pitsis 2011; Guastello 2013).
Denning (2018) labeled this environment an “unstoppable revolution.”
The revolution is very simple. Today, organizations are connecting everyone and everything, everywhere and all the time. They are becoming capable of delivering instant, intimate, frictionless value on a large scale. They are creating a world in which people, insights and money interact quickly, easily, and cheaply. For some, the revolution is uplifting and beautiful. For others it is dark and threatening.
Organizations and leaders are also under intense scrutiny from a variety of external and internal stakeholders including customers, suppliers, employees, regulators, community activists, and governance officials. There is also systemic impatience in our “instant” environment, driven by unprecedented access and reach fueled by technological advances (e.g., the rise of social media). The age of Amazon has brought about a global expectation of services and goods “immediately.” While some businesses have been able to pivot to this expectation, others have not with many facing the end of their time.
The presence of the noted stressors, intense scrutiny, and systemic impatience compels leaders to adjust to meet these conditions. The demands of the organization’s stakeholders and market forces create pressure on the management to act. Leaders must launch change initiatives to meet the challenges they must navigate. So how does this change take place? If the playbooks of past are not as handy as they used to be, what will be the playbook of the future?
Many prescriptive change models treat change as linear, one dimensional, simple, and static. We have learned in 2020 that the actual change experience is nonlinear, complex, messy, three dimensional, and dynamic due to the continuous and overlapping stream of environmental demands.
Well intentioned, but poorly positioned and executed change management prescriptive programs may contribute to organizational dysfunction because leaders frame or position change inappropriately. Or, under pressure to deliver results, leaders launch iterations of the change initiatives if the expected results are not experienced quickly enough. On the immediate receiving end of such drastic change is the company itself, its workers, and middle management. The adage “change is the only constant” is often used to accept, justify, or normalize the rapid change, even poorly executed change initiatives. Such rapid change has negative cost associated with it—an environment where disorientation, shifting priorities, and rapid responses can lead to a condition we have labeled as “Change FatigueTM.”
In this new reality, organizations have to change how they change and match the pace of change in a manner both responsive yet sustainable. They need to increase their organizational agility, increase flexibility, and infuse into the culture a continuous focus that makes change a natural part of the cultural fabric (Kelley 2016). The fatigue that comes from continuous change will both tax the system and confuse the customer base. Imagine a restaurant that changes its menu almost daily in response to different variables—customer tastes, trendy dishes, supply of ingredients. While in some ways this can be viewed as responsive and agile, the toll it takes on staff, waiters, and the confusion caused to customers looking for consistency is a cost to the business that is not always factored into change decisions.
In 2008, IBM conducted a study with global CEOs (Kelley 2016) and found that the following were factors that presented challenges to an organization’s ability to embrace change:
• Changing mindsets and attitudes (58 percent)
• Corporate culture (49 percent)
• Underestimating complexity (35 percent)
• Shortage of resources (33 percent)
• Lack of commitment of senior leaders (32 percent)
• Lack of change know-how (20 percent)
• Lack of motivation of employees (16 percent)
What stands out in the prior list is that with the exception of a shortage of resources, the rest are human trait challenges—from human disposition, emotional inclination, behavioral motivation, and skills development.
In 2014, Forbes found that “despite the life-or-death stakes, only 50% of executives say their companies adapt well to new technologies or processes, or are well versed in transformation.”
The biggest barrier to overcome is conflicting visions among executive leadership or decision makers, cited by 33% of respondents. This is followed by a lack of internal talent to spearhead or execute business change (28%) and resource/budget constraints (25%).
While it might be easy to read the above and surmise that the failure is in leadership, recent studies have shown that leaders themselves are feeling the effects of continuous change. Segal (2021) noted that:
• Nearly 60 percent of leaders reported they feel used up at the end of the workday, which is a strong indicator of burnout.
• Approximately 44 percent of leaders who feel used up at the end of the day expected to change companies in order to advance; 26 percent expected to leave within the next year.
• Only 20 percent of surveyed leaders believed they were effective at leading virtually, a key element in today’s changing landscape.
Brower (2020) captures the need to lead change in this environment: “Change is constant and as a result, people, teams and organizations must build their skills in managing change and fostering flexibility.”
Given the systemic impatience in many of the organization’s stakeholders, the pace of the environment and the advances in technology, leaders must be able to embed resiliency into the organizational culture and to reposition change as a natural organizational process. It is true that “change is the only constant” will lead to some level of fatigue. But what happens if we take that as a given but prepare organizations to lead within the context of continuous change? If your restaurant must change its menu frequently to keep up with diners’ tastes and preferences, how can the owners of the restaurant “retrofit” these changes so as not to cause undue fatigue to everyone involved? With these factors and our high-speed future in front of us, we are proposing a new approach to change in this text (the C6 Change Leadership Framework), as a means to mitigate “change fatigue.”