Change programmes have become increasingly sophisticated at measuring readiness.
We assess stakeholder sentiment, map resistance and build communication plans. We identify change champions, measure adoption and create training programmes to track whether people are using the new processes, systems and behaviours we’ve introduced… so when adoption isn’t happening quickly enough, we often ask some version of the same question:
Why are people resisting the change?
But perhaps we’re asking the wrong question here…
What if they simply don’t have any capacity left for it?
The Minimum Viable Human
The phrase Minimum Viable Human started as a joke but after spending rather too much time working recently, I realised I’d reached the point where showering, shaving, eating properly and occasionally leaving the computer were beginning to feel like legitimate measures of success.
Minimum Viable Human achieved.
It’s funny because most of us probably recognise some version of it but… it also points towards something organisations frequently overlook during transformation.
Think about it for a minute - that new CRM isn’t the only thing happening to them. People don’t experience change programmes in isolation. In fact, they don’t experience work in isolation.
If you consider that they’re dealing with customers, deadlines, meetings, recruitment gaps, budget pressures, performance targets, restructures, leadership changes, new processes and systems that don’t work properly… but they’re also dealing with everything happening outside work.
Children, ageing parents, relationships, separation, money worries, illness, bereavement, moving house - the list is endless!
Sometimes the accumulated mental load of ordinary life is enough and sadly most of this is invisible to the organisation.
Then another transformation programme arrives and asks for a little more… sometimes not just a little.
Learn this system, attend this workshop, change this behaviour, understand this new structure, adopt this process… you get the idea…!
Individually, none of those requests may be unreasonable.
Collectively, they may be asking for capacity that simply isn’t there.
And somewhere in all of that, we simply assume they’ll have enough capacity left to care.
Readiness and capacity aren’t the same thing
Someone can understand why a change is necessary - they can agree with it and they can believe it will ultimately make their job easier.
They can even actively want it to succeed but still struggle to adopt it… that isn’t necessarily resistance.
It may simply be overload - yet organisations often interpret the visible symptoms of overload through the language of change resistance.
- People don’t attend workshops.
- Engagement falls.
- Training gets postponed.
- New processes aren’t followed consistently.
- Teams revert to old ways of working.
The instinct is often to increase the change activity: more communications, more training, more engagement sessions, more reminders.
But if the underlying problem is capacity, adding more change activity may actually make the problem worse.
Change has a cumulative cost
This becomes particularly important when we stop looking at transformation programme by programme.
A leadership team may see five separate initiatives:
- A new ERP implementation.
- An AI adoption programme.
- A restructure.
- A new operating model.
- A customer experience transformation.
Each may have its own business case, governance structure, programme team and change plan but the employee experiencing them doesn’t experience five programmes.
They experience one working day.
And every programme is competing for some portion of the same finite resource: their attention and this is where traditional change-readiness assessments can miss something important.
A team might be perfectly ready for your transformation while being completely exhausted by everybody else’s.
Perhaps we need another change metric
Alongside change readiness, perhaps organisations need to start thinking more explicitly about change capacity.
Not simply:
Do people understand and support this change?
But:
How much change are we asking them to absorb at the same time?
Of course, not all of this capacity can or should be measured. Organisations aren’t entitled to know everything happening in someone’s life, nor should employees have to explain their personal circumstances to justify feeling overwhelmed.
But organisations can understand the demands they’re creating themselves.
They can see how many programmes are landing simultaneously. They can understand existing workloads. They can identify competing demands. And they can decide what should stop before something else starts.
That means asking different questions.
- How many significant changes are currently affecting this team?
- How much time is genuinely available to learn new ways of working?
- Which existing activities are being stopped to create capacity for the new ones?
- Where are multiple transformation programmes competing for the same people?
- Are falling engagement levels actually resistance… or are they human exhaustion?
And perhaps the most uncomfortable question:
What have we removed from people’s workload to make this change possible?
Organisations are often very good at adding transformation but they’re considerably less good at removing anything to make room for it.
From change readiness to change capacity
None of this means organisations should stop changing - quite the opposite in fact.
The pace of technological, competitive and organisational change means the ability to adapt is becoming increasingly important but sustainable adaptability cannot simply mean asking people to absorb an unlimited amount of change.
Eventually even the most engaged, resilient and adaptable workforce reaches its limit and when that happens, another communication campaign probably isn’t going to fix it.
The challenge for leaders isn’t simply to make people ready for change - it’s to create enough organisational capacity for change to actually happen.
Because before asking whether your people are resistant to transformation, it may be worth checking something considerably more basic.
Are they still operating above Minimum Viable Human?
