The Problem with Change

The Problem with Change Plot Summary

Introduction

Stability and change exist in constant tension within our organizations. While we often celebrate disruption, innovation, and "moving fast," we rarely acknowledge the profound toll these elements take on humans trying to navigate their work lives. Many of us have experienced the vertigo of organizational change—the sudden restructuring, the leadership departures, the strategy pivots, and the sense that we're perpetually living in what could be called "the blender." These experiences aren't merely uncomfortable; they actively undermine our ability to contribute meaningfully to our work. Through extensive research and real-world examples, we journey into the fascinating psychology behind our need for predictability, agency, belonging, place, and meaning. These foundational elements, far from being optional workplace luxuries, constitute the very essence of human productivity and well-being. When organizations treat humans as interchangeable "SKUs" rather than complex beings with psychological needs, they inadvertently sabotage the very performance they seek to enhance. The evidence suggests we need a radical rethinking of how we approach organizational life—one that acknowledges stability not as resistance to progress, but as the essential platform from which genuine innovation and contribution can emerge.

Chapter 1: The Human Cost of Continuous Change in Organizations

Life inside many organizations today feels like an endless procession of upheavals. Each new initiative reshuffles the pieces into some supposedly more desirable configuration, unleashing another torrent of change. This "life in the blender" has become so commonplace that it's rarely questioned. Mergers are announced abruptly, followed by reorganizations. Leaders depart unexpectedly, replaced by new ones with different visions. Strategies shift, priorities change, and technologies are swapped out with dizzying frequency. The stories from those experiencing this perpetual change reveal a troubling pattern. Robin watched her leadership evaporate person by person until, after a full year of uncertainty, she was made redundant. Sergei, a country leader, learned his company had been acquired through an email announcement, then spent weeks trying to locate his new boss on LinkedIn before receiving his first instruction: identify which of his 2,000 employees should be fired. Peter's bank retrained his team to handle unfamiliar responsibilities without proper training, leading to "arguing, debating, fighting, defending—with colleagues—as opposed to doing my job." These are not isolated incidents. One executive coach reported that leaders frequently mention feeling lonely amid constant change. Niamh jokes that productive work is only possible during three months of the year, with the rest consumed by organizational changes, holiday preparations, and fiscal year-end pressures. Linda tracked forty-four significant changes across twelve companies over twenty-four years. Judith had nineteen supervisors in ten years, while Julie's company cycled through four CEOs in a single year. The human response to this constant change is remarkably consistent. People develop coping mechanisms like Roberto, who watches his managers' communication patterns: "If I start to not see them, or to not hear them for a week or two weeks, then I start to worry. It is like before a tsunami, when the water goes." Others, like Melissa, simply burn out: "I just one day burst into tears. I said to myself I think I'm done." What connects these experiences is the profound toll that constant change takes on people's psychological well-being and their ability to perform. When we examine the patterns in these stories, we find that change is rarely a discrete event but rather an ever-present feature of working life—we're always either embarking on a new change initiative or still digesting the last one. And remarkably, in none of these stories did leaders reconsider their course of action once begun. Change, once triggered, takes on a life of its own with little regard for its human impact.

Chapter 2: How Uncertainty and Lost Control Undermine Human Performance

The simplest way to understand change's impact is to view it as a series of severings—it severs our relationship to the future (creating uncertainty), our ability to shape that future (challenging our agency), our relationships with others (imperiling belonging), our connection to surroundings (causing displacement), and the link between what we do and what results from it (upending meaning). Uncertainty is profoundly disquieting for humans. When researchers place people in experimental conditions with electric shocks, they discover something counterintuitive: those receiving unpredictable shocks experience significantly more stress than those receiving a greater number of predictable shocks. This points to a critical distinction between fear and anxiety. Fear has an object and therefore an ending—when the threat passes, fear subsides. Anxiety, however, lacks a specific object and thus remains unbounded. Psychologist Martin Seligman demonstrated this through an experiment with lab rats. One group received shocks preceded by a reliable signal, while another received random shocks. The first group learned that when there was no signal, there would be no shock—they could resume normal behavior when safe. The second group, unable to predict safety, developed "chronic fear or anxiety" and "massive stomach ulcers." This led to Seligman's safety-signal hypothesis: "In the wake of traumatic events, people and animals will be afraid all the time, except in the presence of a stimulus that reliably predicts safety." Beyond physical distress, uncertainty makes us less rational. Psychologists Arie Kruglanski and Donna Webster found that under heightened uncertainty, we "seize on information appearing early in a sequence and freeze on it, becoming impervious to subsequent data." This explains many cognitive biases: overconfidence, anchoring, confirmation bias, and status quo bias can all be understood as attempts to reclaim certainty. The loss of control compounds uncertainty's effects. When we're confronted with change we didn't choose, we experience a psychological response similar to what Seligman termed "learned helplessness." In his famous experiments, dogs exposed to inescapable shocks eventually stopped trying to escape even when escape became possible. This pattern holds true for humans: when repeatedly deprived of agency, we stop trying. The consequences aren't merely psychological—lack of control correlates more strongly with heart disease than smoking does, impacts our immune systems, and even increases mortality. Organizations today seem designed to maximize both uncertainty and helplessness. Change initiatives rarely provide credible safety signals, as promises that "things will stay the same" or "the worst has passed" frequently prove false. Similarly, the participatory elements of change—town halls, listening tours, feedback sessions—rarely result in actual changes to the planned course of action. The inputs from employees serve primarily to smooth implementation, not to shape decisions. The psychological impact of this approach is profound, creating precisely the conditions under which human performance and well-being deteriorate most rapidly.

Chapter 3: The Fallacy of 'SKU-Man' Thinking in Human Resource Management

The fundamental problem underlying dysfunctional organizational change is our flawed model of humans at work. This model, which we might call "SKU-man thinking," treats people as essentially interchangeable units with certain attributes that can be measured, managed, and manipulated—like Stock Keeping Units in a warehouse. This view of humans pervades corporate practice, from how we design organizational systems to how we implement change. SKU-man thinking emerged from several converging forces. Milton Friedman's 1970 doctrine that "the social responsibility of business is to increase shareholder value" cemented the primacy of financial measures in corporate decision-making. This financification made it difficult to value people-related concerns except when translated into monetary terms. Our corporate scorecards can measure dollars with precision, but our measures of human experience remain loose and imprecise. Beyond this financial framework, we've developed peculiar theories about what motivates people. When asked about our own motivations, most of us emphasize intrinsic factors like doing meaningful work or developing our skills. Yet when we think about others' motivations, we assume they're primarily driven by extrinsic rewards like compensation and promotion. This "Extrinsic Incentives Bias," as researcher Chip Heath termed it, fuels a mechanistic carrot-and-stick approach to management. These dynamics are exacerbated by the growing separation between executives and employees. The ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation has expanded from 20-to-1 in 1965 to 399-to-1 today. Information flows poorly up the corporate hierarchy, with bad news filtered out as it ascends. Meanwhile, those in power experience what Dacher Keltner calls the "Power Paradox"—they become "more impulsive, less understanding of others, and worse at listening." Martin Seligman's research offers another insight: the effects of change vary depending on whether someone is in charge. Those controlling a change experience many fewer negative effects than those on the receiving end. This creates a fundamental disconnect between how leaders experience change (as manageable and necessary) and how employees experience it (as disruptive and threatening). The result is a corporate environment that treats humans as SKUs with certain attributes—performance ratings, skill inventories, promotion readiness flags—while ignoring the essence of what makes us human: our individuality, intrinsic motivations, relationships, rituals, and sense of place. Our enterprise software systems encode this view, tracking extrinsic factors like pay and grade while failing to capture what work activities someone enjoys most, what causes matter to them, whom they work best with, or when they feel in their element. This SKU-man thinking stands in stark contrast to what humans are really like. We arrive already motivated from within. We enjoy learning and mastering skills. We thrive when we can share our competence with others. We grow fond of places and establish meaningful routines. We cherish our social groups and yearn for certainty. Most importantly, we are deeply motivated to leave things better than we found them. These qualities don't need to be installed in humans; they need to be supported and unleashed. The gap between how organizations see people and how people actually work creates the conditions for perpetual disruption. When we design organizations from the top down rather than from the people up, we inevitably create environments that work against human nature rather than with it.

Chapter 4: Creating Stability Through Team Support and Meaningful Rituals

Teams represent our most essential source of stability at work. Research from Cisco, analyzing nearly 900,000 survey responses grouped by team, reveals that our experience of work is fundamentally shaped by our immediate team environment. No matter how large or prestigious the organization, our daily reality is determined by our interactions with a small group of people with whom we work most closely. The data identified eight key elements of engagement, which fall into three categories: company experience (enthusiasm about mission, confidence in the future), team experience (shared values, mutual support), and individual experience (clear expectations, using strengths, being challenged to grow, recognition for excellence). While all these elements matter, the team experience proves most critical, both directly and as a mediator of the other experiences. Even our perception of the larger organization is filtered through our team experience. This research confirms what we intuitively know: teams are our homes at work. They provide stability in three crucial ways. First, teams make our idiosyncrasies useful by matching individual strengths to tasks. This "chance to use my strengths every day" is the single strongest predictor of team performance. Second, teams create belonging—what philosopher Edmund Burke called our "little platoon," the first link in our chain of social affiliation. When people are asked when they felt most secure at work, they invariably mention either their manager or their team—never the larger organization. Third, teams connect our individual work to broader meaning, helping us understand how our contributions fit into the larger whole. Rituals offer another powerful means of creating stability. Though we often think of rituals in religious contexts, they appear in every human society and serve multiple psychological functions. Michael Norton, a Harvard professor who studies rituals, notes that their essential characteristic is psychological—whether participants feel the activity is meaningful—rather than any specific physical feature. This psychological significance creates a "body-mind bridge" that has remarkable effects. Rituals provide a sense of control in uncertain environments, which is why "the extent to which athletes and fishermen engage in rituals is related to the unpredictability of their jobs." They help regulate emotions, whether calming anxiety before a performance or focusing attention before a competition. They enhance meaning, as researchers found that "group rituals can be employed as a simple yet effective intervention to imbue tasks with meaning... while leaving the task unchanged." And they bind people together, creating a shared identity and sense of belonging. At work, effective rituals might include weekly team meetings with consistent agendas, regular check-ins between team members and leaders, or celebrations of milestones and achievements. Whatever their form, rituals serve as anchors in time, creating predictable points in an uncertain future. They are particularly powerful when they emerge organically from team needs rather than being imposed from above. One HR professional described how, during a particularly challenging period, she established team rituals including a daily check-in and a weekly cross-global conversation that was "where you could see each other and be personal and kvetch." Despite their power, rituals are often overlooked or disrupted during organizational change. Yet they represent a key mechanism for creating the stability that humans need to thrive—not through stasis, but through rhythmic, predictable patterns that provide structure amid change. As one interviewee put it, when everything felt out of control, "what can I control? And what I can control is this, this, and this, and we just put into play some team rituals."

Chapter 5: Making Space: How Leaders Can Foster Agency Without Anarchy

Creating stability doesn't mean eliminating all change or preventing progress. Rather, it means providing the conditions under which humans can best navigate necessary changes and contribute meaningfully to improvement. A central element of this approach is what we might call "making space"—creating the environment in which people can exercise appropriate agency without descending into anarchy. Bob Woodward once wrote to his editor Ben Bradlee, thanking him for what mattered most in their working relationship: "running room." This concept—of freedom within boundaries—captures the essence of effective space-making. Unlike micromanagement, which pins people to the spot, space-making creates momentum and velocity while providing direction. Space-making leaders spend less time telling people what to do and more time explaining why something matters. They set objectives rather than dictating methods, and they trust people to find their own way toward shared goals. Orchestra conducting provides a fascinating model of space-making leadership. The conductor—the only person not making sound—creates the conditions for musicians to perform together by establishing timing, intention, and emotional quality, then getting out of the way at the crucial moment. Performance emerges from this combination of guidance and freedom, not from dictation. There are several practical approaches to making space. Listening (not talking) makes space for others' words. Sharing information (not instructions) makes space for others' decisions. Asking questions (not giving answers) makes space for collective problem-solving. Describing problems (not solutions) and describing ends (not means) both create space for individuals to bring their unique approaches to challenges. Subtracting (not adding) projects and initiatives makes space for focus and depth. Paradoxically, effective space-making also requires boundaries. Just as a snake needs a box to know its shape, humans need some constraints to experience freedom meaningfully. The metaphorical walls of our workspaces—values, standards, and traditions—define the arena within which we have running room. Space-making leaders define these boundaries clearly and then defend them from outside interference, protecting the time and space their teams need to contribute effectively. Traditional performance management systems often work against this space-making approach. Annual goals, performance reviews, ratings, and mandatory feedback all represent systematic erosions of agency. A different approach—the "check-in"—starts with the individual and their needs. In this model, team members regularly share what they loved and loathed about their recent work, their priorities, and what help they need. The team leader responds with attention rather than assessment. Research from Cisco, analyzing over eleven million check-ins, found that this approach meaningfully increases well-being, engagement, performance, and retention. The more frequent the check-ins, the greater these positive effects. What makes check-ins so powerful is their predictability (creating a consistent rhythm), their frequency (enabling timely responses), and their focus on attention rather than assessment. They invert the traditional relationship between team leader and team member by putting the latter in charge of the agenda. Making space requires leaders to surrender some of their own agency to create greater agency for others. This letting go can be challenging—it's hard to watch someone approach a task differently than we would—but it's essential. When Andrea's boss encouraged her to take on a challenging new role but then stepped back and simply asked "If you need anything, let me know," the impact was profound. "She saw me," Andrea said. "I felt seen." This combination of attention and space creates both the stability and the freedom that humans need to do their best work.

Chapter 6: The Power of Roots: Why Belonging and Predictability Matter

Humans have a fundamental need to belong—to feel connected to others and to places in ways that provide stability and meaning. These connections act as our psychological roots, anchoring us during times of change and enabling us to grow and contribute meaningfully. Without them, we experience what might be called "transplant shock," struggling to establish ourselves in new environments. Our social connections form one crucial system of roots. Research from Cisco reveals a fascinating relationship between how employees describe their leaders and their confidence in the future. When examining thousands of words used by employees to describe fourteen senior leaders, researchers found three key patterns. First, the tighter the overall set of word clusters for a given leader, the greater the confidence of people in that leader's organization. Second, the tighter each individual word cluster, the greater the confidence. Third, the more people identifying a particular attribute of a leader, the greater the confidence of the entire group. These findings suggest that our confidence in the future depends less on what leaders say about it and more on how clearly we see the people who will step into that future with us. The more distinct and predictable a leader appears—the more their unique characteristics are visible and consistent—the more confidently we can predict how they will behave in various circumstances. Counterintuitively, this means that predictability in leaders comes not from blandness but from distinctness—from being more uniquely themselves, more often, and more clearly. As conductor Marin Alsop explains when teaching young conductors, "If you try to impose things, it's not really authentic, only derivative and imitative. So I think it's important to help them mine the depth of who they are." Rather than pushing people toward sameness, effective development intensifies their unique characteristics. "You can't hide who you are as a person," Alsop notes. "Sometimes it's difficult to confront who one is and be accepting of that. But you can't be untrue to it." Beyond our connections to people, our attachment to place provides another crucial system of roots. Research shows that our sense of place is intertwined with agency (we're more attached to places we control), belongingness (a greater sense of community predicts attachment to place), and security (the absence of uncertainty plays a role). The geographer David Seamon describes how we form these attachments through daily routines that he calls "body-ballet" (small subroutines like making coffee), "time-space routines" (larger personal routines like a morning commute), and "place-ballet" (the agglomeration of all these in a particular location). When we uproot any of these patterns—when we reorganize office layouts, relocate employees, or change the cast of characters moving through a particular space—we tear the invisible fabric of community. This explains why relocation is so harmful: "When forced to move," writes researcher Maria Lewicka, "people lose not only their social contacts or the familiar view from the window, but they must rearrange their entire set of daily routines and adaptions, and shift to entirely new habits. Some people, particularly older ones, may never achieve this." The languages we use at work can either strengthen or weaken our roots. When we communicate in "unreal words"—corporate jargon, exaggerated enthusiasm, abstractions, euphemisms—we drive wedges between reality and our descriptions of it. Into these gaps tumble our understanding, our ability to predict what happens next, our trust in leaders, and our sense that we can speak truthfully about our experiences. Real words, in contrast—particularly old, short words—connect us to reality and to each other, creating the clarity that builds confidence. Our human need for roots should inform how we approach change in organizations. Rather than constantly uprooting people through reorganizations and relocations, we should look for the "desire paths" they naturally create—the ways of working they develop themselves—and then formalize and support these. This approach builds on existing understanding rather than imposing solutions from above, recognizing that often "the people on the ground know more about a building's use, or about where they most often need to get to, than do the designers of a space."

Chapter 7: Balancing Change with Human Needs: A New Leadership Approach

The quest for stability in organizations isn't about preventing all change or maintaining stasis. Rather, it's about creating what we might call a "centrifugal governor"—a mechanism that, like James Watt's invention for steam engines, doesn't stop motion but instead regulates it to maintain an equilibrium of smooth progress. This dynamic stability doesn't resist movement but enables it to be more focused and productive. The first principle of this new leadership approach is simple: do less change. Given the poor track record of large-scale change initiatives and their human costs, organizations should be much more skeptical about the assumed benefits of organizational change and much more hesitant to trigger it unnecessarily. When contemplating a new organizational construct or transformation, the first question should be "Should we really?" rather than "When do we start?" When change is truly necessary, the second principle is to go slow. Nokia demonstrated this approach during a major layoff, giving employees a year to find new roles and providing support for their transitions. Similarly, one company planned a CEO succession over two years, announcing the internal successor a full year before the change would take effect. This deliberate approach recognizes that stability has a time dimension—building relationships, learning where to go for help, establishing routines—and allowing things to evolve more slowly lessens the risks inherent in sudden disruption. The third principle involves radicalizing how we think about human resources. Rather than seeing HR as an implementation arm of management priorities, we should recognize its fundamental accountability for employee needs and experiences. This means expanding the overlap between business interests (market share, better products, growth) and employee interests (meaningful work, supportive teams, growth opportunities). Practically, this would involve several shifts. HR would invest in more detailed, reliable, and real-time data about people's experiences, moving beyond annual surveys to more frequent, representative sampling. HR professionals would be matched not just to senior leaders but to every team leader in the organization, providing direct support rather than remote guidance. And HR would develop rigorous approaches to selecting and training team leaders, recognizing that this role is central to organizational performance, not a side hustle. The fourth principle involves focusing organizational attention on teams rather than individuals. Companies today know remarkably little about their teams—how many they have, how long-lived they are, what size works best, which are performing well and why. Yet research consistently shows that teams are the fundamental building block of organizational health and performance. They provide the context for individual contribution, the locus of belonging, and the connection to broader meaning. When teams are broken up through reorganizations, we lose all the time and effort invested in building shared language, understanding, and trust. The fifth principle is to focus on roots—the connections that anchor people and enable them to weather change. Like plants, humans suffer when uprooted, experiencing a kind of "transplant shock" that diminishes their vigor and contribution. The roots that support us—our relationships, agency, ability to make sense of things, and confidence in the future—take time to develop and are easily damaged. When we understand the importance of these roots, we become much more careful about disrupting them unnecessarily. Finally, leaders must learn to "pave the desire paths" that people naturally create. Rather than imposing solutions from above, they should look for the ways people have already found to make their work easier and more effective, and then formalize and support these approaches. This means recognizing that when employees find workarounds or create new methods, they are often demonstrating commitment to the common good, not unruliness. By paving these desire paths—making the methods people have created for themselves more resilient and accessible—organizations can build on existing wisdom rather than constantly starting from scratch. Together, these principles offer a new vision of leadership—one that creates the conditions for human flourishing rather than disrupting it. By balancing necessary change with fundamental human needs, organizations can achieve both stability and progress, enabling people to contribute their best work in a world that respects their humanity.

Summary

Stability represents not stagnation but rather the essential platform from which humans can contribute meaningfully and navigate necessary change. The critical insight emerging from extensive research is that our psychological roots—predictability, agency, belonging, place, and meaning—are not luxuries but the very foundations of human performance. When organizations treat these elements as optional or secondary to business imperatives, they undermine the very productivity and innovation they seek to enhance. A new leadership paradigm becomes possible when we recognize that change and stability exist in dynamic tension. Rather than worshipping at the altar of disruption, this approach acknowledges humans as living creatures with psychological needs that must be addressed for both ethical and practical reasons. By making space for agency, forging undeniable competence, sharing meaningful stories, embodying predictability, speaking real words, honoring rituals, focusing on teams, and radically redefining HR's mission, organizations can create environments where people flourish even amid necessary change. The path forward lies not in pulling harder on the seedlings to make them grow faster, but in creating the conditions—the soil, the light, the consistency—that enable growth to happen naturally and powerfully.

About Author

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Ashley Goodall

I’m an executive, leadership expert, and author, and have spent my career exploring large organizations from the inside. I look for the lessons from the real world that help people and teams thrive, and that make work a more human place for all of the humans in it. I’m the co-author, with Marcus Buckingham, of Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, April 2019), and of two cover stories in the Harvard Business Review: The Feedback Fallacy, (March/April 2019), and Reinventing Performance Management, (April 2015). My first experiences of teams and leadership were as a student musician and conductor. I was fascinated by the unspoken understanding between people playing together and carried this fascination into the corporate world. I currently serve as the Senior Vice President of Leadership and Team Intelligence (LTI) at Cisco, an organization focused entirely on serving teams and team leaders. I live in Montclair, NJ with my wife and son. Music has been inside me for as long as I can remember. I revel in the rhythms of words, songs, and human interactions. I look for humor in everyday situations. I love what makes people weird. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter (@littleplatoons), or Instagram (@ashley_goodall). And if you’re someone who believes, as I do, that work can be better, for all of us, than it is today, then join The Freethinking Leader Coalition to learn more at freethinkingleader.org.

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