Every change management model I learned follows the same basic structure: current state, transition, future state. Unfreeze, change, refreeze. The assumption is that you start somewhere stable, move through a period of disruption, and arrive somewhere new and stable. Five months into 2020, I'm struggling to find the stable part.
What You Need to Know
- Classical change management assumes a defined starting point and destination. COVID removed both.
- Organisations are managing overlapping, concurrent changes with no recovery time between them
- The skills that matter now are adaptability and direction-setting, not detailed transition planning
- Change fatigue is real and compounding. Teams can absorb a lot of change, but not indefinitely.
The Classical Model's Problem
Kotter's eight steps. Lewin's three phases. ADKAR. Prosci. They all assume something that 2020 has broken: the existence of a "before" and "after" that are meaningfully different and meaningfully stable.
What we're seeing with our clients is something different. It's not one change. It's a stack of concurrent changes. Remote work. Revenue model shifts. Team restructures. Technology adoption. Customer behaviour changes. Supply chain disruptions. Each one would normally warrant its own change programme. They're all happening simultaneously.
71%
of employees experiencing change fatigue, up from 54% pre-COVID
Source: Gartner HR Survey, May 2020
Classical models tell you to communicate the vision, build a guiding coalition, create quick wins. That advice isn't wrong. It's insufficient. It assumes you have the luxury of managing one change at a time with enough stability to plan transitions. That assumption is gone.
What I'm Seeing
Parallel Change Overload
A client in the public sector is managing four simultaneous changes: remote work transition, a CRM replacement, a service delivery model shift, and organisational restructuring. Each change has its own project team, its own communications plan, its own timeline.
The employees, the actual humans absorbing all of this, don't experience these as four separate changes. They experience one continuous state of disruption. The carefully segmented project plans look orderly from a governance perspective. From the employee perspective, it's all one overwhelming blur.
Planning Horizon Compression
Pre-COVID, we could plan change programmes twelve to eighteen months out. We knew where we were starting. We had a reasonable idea of where we wanted to end up. The path between those points was manageable.
Right now, our planning horizon is four to six weeks. Beyond that, too many variables are in play. Will there be another lockdown? Will the client's revenue recover or drop further? Will the team that's supposed to adopt the new system still be employed in three months?
We've gone from managing change to navigating change. Right now, response is all we have.
Tim Hatherley-Greene
Chief Operating Officer
The Emotional Accumulation
Change management theory acknowledges that change causes emotional responses: anxiety, resistance, grief for the old way. But theory also assumes recovery time. People process the change, adapt, and reach a new equilibrium.
When changes stack without recovery time, the emotional responses accumulate. You don't process one change before the next arrives. The anxiety compounds. The resistance calcifies. The grief doesn't resolve.
I'm seeing this in meeting rooms (virtual ones, now). People who were engaged and adaptive in March are exhausted and resistant by August. Not because they're weak. Because they've been in continuous transition for five months without a stable platform to stand on.
What Might Work Instead
I don't have a new model. Anyone claiming to have a complete framework for this is selling something. But I have observations about what's working better than the classical approach.
Direction Over Destination
Instead of defining a future state in detail, define a direction. "We're moving towards digital-first service delivery" is more useful right now than a detailed target operating model. The destination will change. The direction can remain constant.
This feels uncomfortable for governance. Boards want specificity. They want milestones and KPIs. But a detailed plan built on unstable assumptions is worse than a clear direction with adaptive execution. At least the direction remains valid when the ground shifts.
Smaller, Faster Cycles
Break every change into the smallest deployable increment. Don't plan a twelve-month CRM migration. Plan a four-week pilot with one team. Learn. Adjust. Expand. The feedback loops need to be short enough that you can course-correct before the assumptions change underneath you.
Explicit Recovery Periods
This is the hardest one to implement and the most important. Between significant changes, teams need recovery time. Not downtime. Time where the rate of change reduces to a level they can absorb. Without recovery, you're running the engine past redline. It works for a while. Then it doesn't.
Acknowledge the Emotional Reality
Stop telling people "change is the new normal." It's true and it's unhelpful. Instead, acknowledge that the current pace of change is extraordinary, that it's reasonable to feel overwhelmed, and that the organisation is actively working to manage the load.
That honesty does more for change adoption than any communication plan I've ever written.
The Year That Changed Change Management
2020 might be the year that forces change management to evolve. The classical models aren't wrong. They're incomplete. They were built for a world where change was an event, not a condition. We're learning that change as a condition requires different tools, different leadership, and different expectations.
We don't know what those tools look like yet. We're building them as we go, with our clients, in real time. That's uncomfortable. It's also honest.