The 2025 World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report1 says we’ve entered an era of “polycrisis.” This occurs when crises, from geopolitical conflict to economic instability to climate disruption, converge and compound, creating cascading risks that are harder to manage than any crisis alone. All 33 risks tracked by the organization, including misinformation, extreme weather, societal polarization, cyber insecurity, and interstate conflict, are expected to increase in severity over the next decade. Sixty-four percent of the 900+ experts surveyed across academia, business, government, and civil society anticipate a fragmented global order marked by ongoing competition and instability through 2035
Translation: We’re heading into more change, not more stability. The volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity that leaders are dealing with today aren’t temporary spikes. They define our new operating environment, warts and all.
You’ve probably noticed it too. Your team gets nervous and goes quiet when you announce a new change initiative. People who used to ask questions now just nod. Deadlines slip. Volunteers for extra work disappear. When you ask for feedback, you get crickets and awkward downward stares. You can feel the tension.
Most leaders see this as resistance. They assume people disagree with the direction, don’t trust leadership, or don’t want to change. While some of that may be true, there’s an additional problem senior leaders and executives aren’t prioritizing in 2026 but should.
What you’re seeing is chronic overwhelm; it’s a form of depletion driven by too much change. Your people have been adapting to new ways of working for so long that they’ve temporarily run out of capacity for change. As Dr. Jesse MacLean of the American Medical Association (AMA) observed, “When we came out of the COVID-19 public health emergency in 2023, many believed making decisions would be easier. Unfortunately, life only seems like it has gotten more complex” (Dr. Jesse MacLean, AMA: What doctors wish patients knew about decision fatigue).
Two forces are at work, and most organizations don’t recognize the impact they’re already having on their teams: change fatigue and change saturation.
Change Fatigue: What’s Happening Inside Your People
Change fatigue develops when people have been asked to learn new tools, adopt new processes, report to new leaders, and adjust to new priorities for months or years without settling into periods of stability. Change fatigue shows up as overwhelm, withdrawal, cynicism, and a quiet refusal to go above and beyond.
Seventy-one percent of employees now feel overwhelmed by the amount of change at work, with that number rising to 86% among workers aged 16 to 24 (Capterra, 2022: Change Fatigue in the Workplace), and that was before today’s AI disruption. This problem has grown so significant that Gallagher’s 2025 State of the Sector report now lists change fatigue among the top five barriers to success. Forty-four percent of HR leaders view change fatigue as a key battleground, making it the second most significant challenge after limited team capacity.
As one respondent put it: “It’s gone beyond change fatigue. It’s change exhaustion; disconnection; denial” (Gallagher, 2025: Change Fatigue Ranks in Top Five Barriers). The business impact is real: A leading consultancy found that among employees experiencing high change fatigue, only 43% plan to stay with their company, compared to 74% of those with low fatigue. Capterra research shows workers experiencing change fatigue are 54% more likely to consider finding a new job, with 48% reporting increased stress and 37% feeling less trust toward their employers (Capterra, 2022: Change Fatigue in the Workplace).
Change Saturation: What’s Happening in Your Organization
Change saturation is an organizational condition, not an individual one. It happens when you launch more change initiatives than your people, processes, and systems can absorb. Most projects don’t get the attention they need to succeed because there’s simply not enough time to do them all well.
The pace of organizational change has accelerated dramatically with geopolitical uncertainty, economic anxiety, layoffs, digital transformation, AI disruption, and multiple overlapping change initiatives inside organizations. In 2022, the average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes, up from just 2 in 2016. And that was before AI and recurring layoffs. The pace isn’t slowing: over 75% of corporations now revamp their business model every two to five years (WalkMe via Global Finance, 2023: Corporate Change Fatigue).
As Harvard Business Review put it in December 2024: “Poorly managed, unintegrated change can not only lead to reduced performance, but risks the well-being of employees as well” (HBR, Dec 2024: Are You the Cause of Your Team’s Change Fatigue?). When you stack too many changes at once, people burn out faster. When people are already depleted, even well-designed change initiatives fail to get traction.
Decision Quality Suffers Too
Every change initiative asks people to make new decisions: Which process do we follow now? What’s the priority this week? Who owns this?
The average adult makes 33,000 to 35,000 decisions per day, most of them automatic (HBR, 2023: A Simple Way to Make Better Decisions). But layer change initiatives on top of that, and your people face dozens of additional significant decisions daily, each one drawing from a finite cognitive reserve.
Workplace Intelligence found that mental overload is now a leading source of work-related stress for 72% of employees (Workplace Intelligence, 2023: Decision Fatigue). When the number of decisions exceeds capacity, people start making worse choices or avoiding decisions altogether. Psychotherapist Zainib Abdullah describes what this looks like: “It can either show up as feeling depleted, having very little energy, feeling numb… or it could show up as a lot of stress activation in the system, a lot of anxiety and impulsive behavior” (Zainib Abdullah via CBC, 2024: Decision fatigue is a peril of modern life).
What You Can Do
Practice ruthless prioritization. Before you add anything new, ask what you can stop. List every initiative currently active across the organization (in other words, everything that impacts your team). Work with your team and colleagues to identify the highest priorities (based on customer value, business benefit, and feasibility) and which ones can be paused, combined, or ended.
In a polycrisis environment, you can’t do everything. The discipline is choosing the few changes that matter most and letting the rest go. One of the most useful things a leader can say is: “We’re going to stop (or pause) doing this so we can focus on that.”
Pace change to human capacity, not strategic ambition. Not everything has to happen at once. Build in gaps between major initiatives. Give people time to fully absorb one shift before the next arrives. Your strategy might call for ten changes this year. Your people might have capacity for three. You may be able to do three well, but you’ll likely fail across most of the ten. Align the timeline with what humans can actually sustain, or risk burning out your best people.
Name what’s staying the same. When everything feels like it’s shifting, people lose their footing. Identify the things that aren’t changing: your core values, your commitment to certain practices, and the parts of the work that will remain stable. Saying “this is staying the same” gives people a much-needed anchor.
Reduce the decision load. Change saturation often brings decision overload: new tools, new processes, new expectations. Standardize where you can. Reduce the number of tools and systems, if possible. Make the path forward obvious. Every unnecessary choice you remove frees up capacity for the choices that matter.
Protect your team’s peak cognitive windows. Our brains naturally cycle through 90-minute periods of high alertness followed by dips (HBR, 2011: A 90-Minute Plan for Personal Effectiveness). Deep work, strategic thinking, and complex problem-solving are best done during peak cognitive windows, ideally earlier in the workday before routine tasks erode decision quality. Help your team reserve their best 90-minute blocks for the highest-value work only they can do.
Say the “why” more than once. Research on management communication shows that employees often need to hear a message multiple times before it sticks, especially during stressful periods (Neeley & Leonardi, HBR, 2011: Effective Managers Say the Same Thing Twice (or More). Leadership requires repetition. If you’ve said it once, you haven’t said it enough.
Watch for early signals. Silence in meetings, missed deadlines, and declining participation aren’t just performance problems. They’re often signs of fatigue. Ask directly: “What’s on your plate right now?” and “What support do you need?”
The Real Question
Organizations that treat change fatigue as a passing problem will burn through their people. Organizations that build sustainable change practices will still have capacity when their competitors are scrambling to find their next employees.
The organizations that navigate constant change won’t be the ones that push hardest. They’ll be the ones that prioritize ruthlessly, pace themselves, and make adjustments based on their people’s real-time capacity.
Your people aren’t resisting. They’re secretly hoping someone will slow down long enough to notice what’s actually happening and choose the 2-3 highest-value priorities everyone can focus on together.
So, ask yourself: If you took two initiatives off your team’s plate tomorrow, which ones would they beg you to cut?
1 WEF, 2025: Global Risks Report 2025.
Michael O. “Coop” Cooper is the founder of High Performance Orgs and an executive coach with 26 years of experience working with over 3,000 founders, executives, and high-potential leaders. He helps ambitious, overwhelmed leaders stop winging it and start leading with better clarity, improved collaboration, and measurable results. Learn more at highperformanceorgs.com or connect on LinkedIn.
