Change Load & Fatigue Check

List everything that is asking your people to work differently, judge the load group by group, and make the subtraction decision that a new priority list alone never makes.

Practice, not research: the claims that change is now continuous and that fatigue explains much of what is called resistance (Masinter, 2025), and that the change approach should fit the situation (BCG, 2025), are consulting practice and have not been tested as stated. The research that does exist is on change readiness (Rafferty et al., 2013). Limits such as two or three protected initiatives are rules of thumb.

Use it when:

• You are about to launch a new initiative into groups that already carry several.
• "Resistance" is rising across unrelated projects at the same time.
• It is the quarterly planning moment and nobody holds the whole picture of what is landing on people.

Skip it when:

• Your question is whether one specific change is ready to launch: use 3.7 Change Context Scan.
• You need to understand why one group reacts to one change: use 3.8 Resistance & Support Map.

This check rests on consulting practice, marked as such. The practitioner claim is that change no longer arrives as separate projects with calm in between but as a continuous stream, and that much of what gets labeled resistance is fatigue from too many asks at once (Masinter, 2025). So leaders have to subtract as well as add: announcing priorities while stopping nothing changes nothing. A second practitioner claim is that the right approach depends on the situation, on the structure the change lands in, how influence spreads there and how deep the change goes, rather than on one house recipe (BCG, 2025).

None of this has been tested as stated, and the failure statistics often quoted around it are circular, so this page repeats none of them. The evidence that exists is on readiness, which has individual, group and organizational levels (Rafferty et al., 2013). The page starts with an inventory across all owners, because no single leader usually sees the whole load, and ends with a decision to stop or pause something.

List everything currently asking your people to change how they work: your own initiatives, central programs, system rollouts, reorganizations, new routines.

Strong answer: "New billing system (IT, central): customer service and billing teams; mid-rollout; new screens and a new error routine." Not: "Digitalization."

Illustrative example: the roles and the organization are made up.

A customer service director at a Swedish energy company runs the check before the year's planning.

Step 1: six initiatives touch her teams: a new billing system (central IT), a reorganization into regional teams (her own), a quality framework (group), two IT rollouts (chat tool, new phone system) and her own coaching program.

Step 2: frontline teams: six at once, cynicism exactly in the team labeled "resistant", the quality routine used by about half. Verdict: overloaded. Back office: three at once, strained.

Step 3: protect the billing system and the reorganization; pause the coaching program until billing is stable; take the combined inventory table to the steering group and get the phone system deferred by a quarter. Message to staff: what stops, what waits, and why.

Step 4: the quality framework is fundamental and lands in a flat, peer-driven organization, so it gets peer champions rather than a management cascade. Next review: before the next initiative is approved.