Successful transformation is not just about having a clear strategy, the right technology, or a strong leadership team—it is about managing organisational energy effectively. Like a marathon, transformation requires a well-paced approach, allowing for the right breathing space at key milestones. Without careful attention to energy levels, organisations risk burnout, disengagement, and failure to sustain long-term change.
Understanding Organisational Energy
Organisational energy is the collective capacity of employees to take action, drive change, and sustain momentum. It encompasses physical, emotional, and cognitive dimensions, each playing a critical role in how teams navigate transformation. Unlike resources such as time and budget, energy is dynamic—it can be depleted through excessive demands or replenished through strategic interventions.
The Marathon Mindset: Pacing and Breathing Spaces
Transformation is a long journey, not a sprint. Like seasoned marathon runners, organisations must be intentional about pacing and ensuring adequate recovery points along the way. Leaders often push for rapid results, but sustained transformation requires:
Phased Implementation: Breaking down transformation into manageable phases with defined milestones.
Strategic Pauses: Allowing teams to absorb changes, reflect on progress, and recalibrate before moving to the next stage.
Energy Checks: Regularly assessing engagement levels, stress indicators, and feedback to adjust the pace accordingly.
Neglecting these aspects leads to fatigue, resistance, and disengagement—ultimately derailing transformation efforts.
Awareness of Existing Capabilities and Change History
Before embarking on a transformation journey, organisations must understand their baseline. Awareness of existing capabilities, ways of working, and historical transformation experiences provides predictive indicators of how change should be approached.
Key Considerations:
Past Change Successes and Failures: What has worked and what hasn’t? Understanding past patterns helps anticipate potential resistance or enablers.
Current Workload and Fatigue Levels: Are employees already stretched with existing initiatives? Overloading teams will compromise focus and execution quality.
Organisational Culture: Some cultures thrive on rapid change, while others require gradual adoption. Aligning transformation efforts with cultural realities is critical.
By assessing these factors, leaders can tailor transformation strategies to fit the organisation’s energy levels and capacity.
Building Organisational Stamina: Start Small, Scale Up
Just as athletes build endurance through progressive training, organisations must strengthen their transformation muscle over time. This means introducing smaller changes first to test resilience and capability before scaling up to more complex shifts.
How to Build Organisational Stamina:
Start with Pilot Initiatives: Test new ways of working in controlled environments before expanding.
Gradually Increase Complexity: Move from small process improvements to larger-scale changes, ensuring teams adapt successfully at each stage.
Celebrate Early Wins: Recognising progress builds confidence and motivation to tackle bigger challenges.
Provide Learning Opportunities: Equip teams with skills and tools that enhance adaptability and readiness for change.
Leaders who adopt this progressive approach foster a resilient workforce that can sustain transformation efforts over time.
Teams with good change leaders or those teams with significant experience with change tend to be more able to work with greater volumes of change as well as greater complexity of change. With each change initiative, with the right structure, routines (including retro), the team’s capability can be built to be ready for larger, more complex transformations.
Balancing Focus and Intensity
Attention is a finite resource. When teams are bombarded with multiple initiatives, priorities become diluted, and execution suffers. Managing focus effectively is essential to maintaining high performance during transformation.
Strategies for Maintaining Focus:
Limit Concurrent Initiatives: Prioritise the most critical changes and sequence others to avoid overload.
Establish Clear Priorities: Ensure alignment across leadership to prevent conflicting demands on teams.
Monitor Workload and Stress Levels: Pay close attention to employee well-being and adjust intensity as needed.
Encourage Deep Work: Create space for teams to focus without constant distractions or shifting priorities.
When focus is scattered, transformation efforts lose momentum. By managing cognitive load, leaders enable employees to fully engage with and execute changes effectively.
The Importance of a Clear Plan
While agile methodologies emphasise adaptability, having a structured plan provides essential clarity for employees navigating complex change. Transformation without a roadmap leads to uncertainty, anxiety, and resistance. This does not necessarily mean that plans are locked in stone and cannot be changed. In contrast to this, having a plan provides a frame of reference, and expectations can be set that details including timeline may shift but that the high level approach remains the same.
Why a Clear Plan Matters:
Provides Direction: Employees need to know where the organisation is headed and how they fit into the journey.
Reduces Uncertainty: Even if adjustments are made, a baseline plan offers reassurance and stability.
Enhances Engagement: When people understand the “why” and “how” of transformation, they are more likely to commit.
Prepares for Change: Last-minute changes create confusion and stress—early planning allows for smoother transitions.
Balancing Planning with Agility
While plans must be flexible, abandoning structure altogether creates chaos. Leaders should:
Communicate a High-Level Roadmap: Outline key phases and milestones without overloading with unnecessary detail.
Adapt Plans Responsively: Incorporate feedback and lessons learned, adjusting course without losing sight of long-term goals.
Engage Employees in Planning: Co-creation fosters ownership and reduces resistance.
A well-structured transformation plan provides clarity and confidence, making it easier for teams to adapt and sustain change.
To ensure the optimal management of organisational energy, measurement is essential. Organisations need clear yardsticks to assess energy levels, performance, and transformation progress, allowing leaders to make informed adjustments when needed. Without measurement, it is impossible to determine whether teams are operating at an optimal pace or experiencing fatigue and disengagement.
Key Metrics to Track:
Change Impact Data: Understanding the magnitude of transformation on various teams helps adjust implementation approaches.
Balance Energy Demand and Supply: Leaders should prioritize work strategically, focusing on high-impact initiatives while minimizing unnecessary demands. Simultaneously, they should inspire teams by articulating a compelling vision that connects the various dots across changes
Change Readiness Assessments: Gauging employees’ preparedness for change ensures the right support mechanisms are in place.
Sentiment Analysis: Regular pulse surveys and feedback loops help identify resistance, concerns, and engagement levels.
Performance Metrics: Tracking productivity, efficiency, and key deliverables helps align transformation with business outcomes.
Adoption Rates: Measuring how well new processes, tools, or ways of working are being integrated ensures long-term sustainability.
By continuously monitoring these indicators, leaders can fine-tune transformation efforts, ensuring that momentum is sustained while preventing burnout and resistance.
Leading with Energy Management
The success of any transformation effort hinges on how well organisational energy is managed. Leaders must act as stewards of energy—pacing initiatives appropriately, building stamina, maintaining focus, and providing clear direction.
By treating transformation like a marathon—strategically balancing intensity with recovery, testing capabilities before scaling, and ensuring clarity—organisations can sustain momentum and achieve lasting success. Managing organisational energy is not just a leadership responsibility; it is the foundation for thriving in an ever-evolving business landscape.
Do We Really Need a View of Changes Across the Organisation?
As the pace of change accelerates, senior leaders are increasingly asking for a comprehensive view of changes happening across the organisation. However, not everyone sees the need for this. Some change practitioners focus solely on project-level implementation, while others concentrate on developing change capability or leadership. So, is a broad organisational view of change necessary? The short answer is yes—and here’s why.
Why is a View of Changes Important?
1. Understanding Change is Key to Improving It
Managing change effectively requires a clear understanding of what is changing. Without visibility into the scope and nature of changes, how can we improve them? Imagine if Finance attempted to manage an organisation’s finances without access to financial data. The same principle applies to change management—without insights into ongoing changes, making informed improvements to how change is managed becomes impossible or at least ineffective.
A holistic view also helps identify patterns and systemic issues that may not be visible when looking at changes in isolation. For example, if multiple teams are experiencing resistance to similar types of change, it may indicate an underlying cultural or structural issue rather than a problem with individual initiatives.
2. Avoiding a Myopic View
Many change practitioners operate at the project level, focusing on the change they are driving without visibility into other initiatives. This narrow focus can lead to conflicting priorities, resource constraints, and stakeholder fatigue. A fragmented approach often results in duplication of effort, where multiple teams work on similar initiatives without coordination, wasting time and resources.
A lack of visibility can also cause bottlenecks. For instance, two major transformation projects requiring input from the same group of employees may create undue pressure, leading to burnout and decreased productivity. With an organisational view, leaders can identify these risks in advance and implement measures to mitigate them, such as staggering implementation timelines or providing additional support.
3. Taking a Human-Centred Approach
A human-centred approach to change means viewing change from the perspective of impacted stakeholders rather than just from a project lens. Employees and customers experience multiple changes together, not in isolated silos. To design change experiences that work, we must understand the overall change landscape and how it affects people’s daily work and interactions.
Without a consolidated view, employees may feel overwhelmed by frequent, disconnected changes. This often leads to change fatigue, disengagement, and resistance. By considering how multiple changes intersect, organisations can design more coherent and supportive transition experiences for their people, improving adoption rates and overall satisfaction.
There are some who would rather not use the term ‘change fatigue’. Sure. Other labels may be used instead. However, not acknowledging its existence does not mean that it does not exists. We can choose to not label and not address the impacts of multiple changes. By doing this it will not magically go away. This is not going to help the business perform better and reach its targets.
4. Supporting Leadership in Managing Business Performance
Leaders are concerned about how changes impact business performance. Without a consolidated view of what is changing, how those changes interact, and their organisational impact, it is difficult to provide meaningful insights. A structured view of change enables leaders to make informed decisions, mitigate risks, and optimise the overall change portfolio to support business objectives.
For example, if an organisation is rolling out a new customer relationship management (CRM) system while simultaneously restructuring its sales teams, leaders need to assess whether these initiatives will complement or hinder each other. Without this awareness, they may inadvertently introduce inefficiencies, such as duplicate training efforts or conflicting performance expectations.
5. Enhancing Organisational Readiness for Change
A key benefit of having a comprehensive view of change is improving organisational readiness. Readiness is not just about preparing individuals for a specific change but ensuring the organisation as a whole is capable of absorbing and adapting to continuous transformation.
An organisation that understands its change landscape can proactively assess its capacity for change at any given time. If several major initiatives are running concurrently, leaders can evaluate whether the organisation has the resources, cultural maturity, and leadership alignment to support them. Without this visibility, companies risk overloading employees and creating resistance due to excessive, poorly timed changes.
Furthermore, readiness assessments can identify gaps in capability, such as the need for additional training, clearer communication, or adjustments in leadership support. When organisations have a clear view of upcoming changes, they can put proactive measures in place, such as phased rollouts, targeted engagement efforts, or reinforcement mechanisms, to ensure smoother transitions and greater adoption success.
6. How an Integrated View of Change Supports Business Readiness
An integrated view of change enables organisations to move beyond reactive change management and embrace proactive change readiness. By mapping all significant transformations across the business, leaders can anticipate challenges, synchronise efforts, and prepare employees more effectively.
For example, if a company is implementing a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system while also shifting to a hybrid work model, an integrated change view allows decision-makers to assess whether these changes will create conflicting demands on employees. Instead of overwhelming teams with simultaneous process and technology shifts, adjustments can be made to stagger rollouts, align training programs, and provide tailored support.
Additionally, when businesses have a comprehensive perspective on change, they can implement readiness initiatives such as leadership coaching, employee engagement strategies, and resilience-building programs well in advance. This ensures that by the time changes take effect, the organisation is not just aware of them but fully prepared to embrace and sustain them. An integrated approach fosters a culture of adaptability, making the business more resilient in the face of continuous transformation.
Addressing Common Concerns: “It’s Too Complicated”
A frequent argument against establishing an organisation-wide change view is that it is too complex and resource-intensive. However, this does not need to be the case.
1. Start Small and Scale Gradually
Instead of attempting a whole-organisation approach from the outset, begin with a stakeholder lens. Understand how changes impact specific stakeholder groups, then expand to teams, departments, and eventually the entire organisation. This phased approach ensures manageable progress without overwhelming stakeholders.
One way to do this is by focusing on a single high-impact function, such as IT or HR, and mapping their change landscape before expanding outward. By demonstrating value in a contained environment, it becomes easier to gain buy-in for broader adoption.
2. Begin with Basic Data
There is no need to start with an elaborate data set. A simple list of initiatives is enough to begin forming a picture. Over time, additional data points—such as timelines, affected stakeholders, and interdependencies—can be added to enhance visibility and analysis.
Many organisations already have elements of this data scattered across different departments. Consolidating this information in a central repository can be a quick win that provides immediate value without requiring extensive new processes.
3. Take an Agile, Iterative Approach
Building a change view incrementally allows for continuous refinement and adaptation. By adopting an agile mindset, practitioners can deliver immediate value while progressively enhancing the data set. This approach ensures that the effort remains practical and sustainable while demonstrating benefits to stakeholders at each stage.
Using lightweight collaboration tools, such as shared spreadsheets or simple dashboard software, can help kickstart the process without significant investment in complex change management platforms.
Once you progress to a more sophisticated level where you need AI support and advanced dashboarding, check out Change Compass.
The Benefits of an Organisational View of Change
1. Improved Stakeholder Experience
By understanding the cumulative impact of multiple changes, organisations can better manage stakeholder experiences. Employees are often subject to change saturation when faced with numerous uncoordinated initiatives. A holistic view enables better sequencing and pacing of change to ensure smoother transitions.
2. Enhanced Risk Management
Without an overarching view, risks associated with overlapping initiatives may go unnoticed until issues arise. Identifying potential bottlenecks and conflicts early helps in designing mitigating strategies before problems escalate. Risks may include program delivery risk, operational risk, benefit realisation risk and various people risks.
3. Better Resource Allocation
Organisations often face resource constraints, whether in terms of budget, personnel, or time. A consolidated view helps leaders prioritise initiatives effectively, ensuring that resources are allocated to high-impact changes while minimising inefficiencies.
4. Strengthened Leadership Decision-Making
Leaders require data-driven insights to make informed strategic decisions. A comprehensive change landscape provides clarity on what is happening across the organisation, empowering leaders to align transformation efforts with business objectives.
Practical Steps to Establish an Organisation-Wide Change View
Step 1: Identify Key Stakeholders
Begin by engaging stakeholders across the organisation to understand their concerns and expectations. These may include senior executives, department heads, project managers, and frontline employees.
Step 2: Map Current and Upcoming Changes
Compile a list of all ongoing and planned initiatives. Categorise them by business function, timeline, impacted teams, and strategic priority. This will create an initial snapshot of the change landscape.
Step 3: Identify Interdependencies
Assess how different initiatives interact with each other. Are there overlapping resource requirements? Do changes in one area impact another? Recognising these dependencies enables better coordination and minimises disruption.
Step 4: Develop a Change Portfolio View
Use visualisation tools to represent the collected data in a meaningful way. Heatmaps, Gantt charts, and stakeholder impact matrices can help illustrate the overall change picture.
Step 5: Implement Governance Structures
Establish governance mechanisms to continuously update and refine the change portfolio. This may involve periodic reviews, a centralised change coordination team, or designated change champions within each department.
Step 6: Communicate Insights Effectively
Share findings with stakeholders in a digestible format. Providing clarity on how changes align with organisational priorities fosters engagement and encourages proactive collaboration.
Future Trends in Organisational Change Visibility
1. Increased Use of Digital Tools
Advanced analytics, AI-driven insights, and dashboard visualisation tools are making it easier to track and analyse change across an organisation in real-time.
2. Integration with Business Strategy
Change management is increasingly being embedded within broader business strategy execution and performance metrics tracking, ensuring alignment with long-term goals.
3. Greater Focus on Employee Experience
Organisations are recognising the importance of measuring change from an employee perspective. This includes sentiment analysis, real-time feedback loops, and adaptive communication strategies.
A comprehensive view of change across an organisation is not just a ‘nice-to-have’—it is essential for effective change management. It enables better decision-making, reduces unintended consequences, and enhances the overall employee experience. While establishing such a view may seem complex, taking a pragmatic, step-by-step approach makes it achievable and valuable.
For experienced change and transformation professionals, this shift in perspective is not just about managing change—it’s about leading it effectively in an increasingly dynamic world.
Change saturation is one of the popular search items when it comes to measuring change management. How do we effectively measure change saturation without resorting to personal opinions? And how might we formulate effective recommendations that are logical and that stakeholders can action immediately?
Use this recipe to measure change saturation using The Change Compass.
Change Saturation is a concept that describes our capacity for change as limited … like a cup. We have a limited amount of capacity for change. When there is too much change going on the cup spills over and there is ‘change saturation’. When this happens with too much change then there is stress in the impacted stakeholder groups.
It could be that there is intense increase in workload or work complexity. Performance could drop as a result. When frontline staff experience change saturation it could be that they don’t have the capacity to support all the customer enquires leading to longer customer wait times. Customer satisfaction levels could be impacted. Employee satisfaction could also be impacted.
What causes it?
There are 3 causes for change saturation
1. There are too many initiatives going on at the same time. The totality of changes across multiple initiatives leads to the cup being overfilled. This is the reality of corporate life. There aren’t many organizations that are only executing one initiative at any one time. However, it also depends on the level of impact within each initiative and not just the number of initiatives in total. If every initiative has very little impact it could be smaller in total than a very large complex change initiative with very high impact. It will take a lot of peanuts to fill up a jar, versus a few large biscuits.
2. The change initiatives are occurring too fast. We have all been through highly agile initiatives that have short sprints, that pivot quickly and implement the change quickly as well. Often due to discoveries and learnings along the way there are project delays as the project figures out how to get itself on track. However, the original go-live date has not been changed so as to meet senior stakeholder expectations and to manage project cost. What this means is that the impacted business suddenly has much less time to get ready for the change compared to the original timeline. This condensed timeline to go through and embed the changes leads to increased change saturation.
3. Business circumstances have lead to the cup being overfilled. In the case of COVID19, most businesses are going through challenging times. Some are struggling to cope with increased customer volumes, whilst others have lost significant business and can no longer operate. During these times businesses revert to survival mode, or their business continuity plan. The top focus remains to delivery its core services with all other priorities to take a back seat. The very nature of this environment means that a large part of the organisation is under immense pressure to perform. The cup is saturated even before any additional planned initiatives. To read more about Planning for change during COVID19 click here.
How to measure it
Every part of the organization may have a different level of change saturation. This is because different teams play different functional roles by definition. As a result one department may be impacted by the same change differently compared to another.
Therefore it is important to be able to measure the change saturation point for a part of the business if we are aiming to manage it. Change saturation should not just be a point of discussion just based on feelings and perceptions.
How do we measure the change saturation point for one part of the business? Measuring change saturation is not purely a science but more of an art.
Take for example, you have been working closely with the call centre team and have monitored their business performance across different initiatives over the past few months. Last month you noticed that they had reached a point where there were more initiatives being implemented than previously.
On top of this you noticed that some of their performance metrics that may be linked to change saturation were negatively affected. These included increased call waiting time, decreased customer satisfaction, increased staff turnover, and challenges for planners to schedule sufficient resources to cover shifts and undergo allocated initiative activities such as training. Team leaders also provided feedback that there was too much change going on and managing workload was challenging.
You can then calculate this change saturation by assigning a weighting to each change initiative in terms of its change impacts on the business. Then adding the various change impacts for last month will give you a total factor of change saturation. Last month your assessment, together with the call centre business, is that there was definite change saturation. So, if you see this level of change approaching in your planning coming up, then this would be a red signal for you to start to work with your stakeholders on managing this upcoming Change saturation.
Here is an example of measuring change saturation with The Change Compass.
The green line depicts change saturation for this department
It is important to note that some businesses may be calling out that they have change saturation simply to lower the expectation bar. By lowering the bar expected to undergo change volume, it is then easier for them to meet their performance targets. This is why it is important to measure change saturation. Anyone can claim that their cup is overflowing with change without data to support.
How to manage it
There are 2 main ways to manage change saturation. Either you reduce the change saturation level or you increase the change capacity (increasing the size of the cup).
Short term – Reduce change saturation
1. Stop all change initiative roll out during COVID19. If your organization is undergoing significant challenges and it was deemed that the cup is already overflowing in terms of capacity, then work with your business to determine how long of a period would there need to be a hold of any change implementation. This decision may be reviewed on a monthly basis or fortnightly basis to enable careful monitoring of the development COVID19 impact on the organisation.
2. Delay the roll-out of change initiatives to reduce change saturation. Work with your stakeholders to re-prioritise certain initiatives and push out others to better manage the change saturation. During COVID19 your organization may have a significantly reduced level of change tolerance, whether its because everyone is adjusting to working from home or its ‘all hands on deck’ in serving the customer. Work with your stakeholders to understand what initiatives are critical in order to meet any shorter or medium-term business objectives or deemed a priority by senior managers. Then determine the roadmap of implementation taking into account business change capacity.
3. Use a scenario approach to model the period in which COVID19 may be impacting your organisation and therefore model the recommended change implementation sequences. This approach requires that you have a good awareness of the existing planned initiatives across the business. You may need to adopt a logic-based approach to assess the change saturation points if you have not collected historical data. Here is an example of a scenario planning feature from The Change Compass where you can visually model likely scenarios of change roll-out sequences.
Initiatives may be dragged around to model different change scenarios
Long term – Build change capacity and resilience
1. Hire more people. For some parts of the organisation where there the change saturation is on frontline consultants servicing the customer. It may be possible to increase change capacity to some extent by hiring more staff to serve the customer. However, this depends how effective the organization is in quickly hire and onboard frontline consultants to reach ‘time to performance’. For other parts of the organisation where the subject matter experts may be in short demand because of COVID19, leveraging potential business substitutes where available may be an option. This approach may be used in conjunction with other recommendations to reduce change saturation.
2. Improve the change capability of leaders. One of the most important levers in building change capacity and resilience is the effectiveness of leaders. We have all seen how some leaders who are engaging, open, actively make way for the change, and address any obstacles, have led teams to undergo significant change journeys. Other leaders may be undergoing the same change journey but somehow have not had the same success. Instead, they could be plagued with change resistance and stagnation due to the ability of its leader. Change leadership development of leaders is a long term play and not a quick win by any means.
3. Work on change maturity. Organisations that have higher change maturity have more capacity for change and are more resilient to constant changes. Change maturity measures such as change leadership capability, business change readiness and project change implementation maturity. This is also a long term play, requiring significant focus and time investment.
