Change Fitness: Why organisations need to stop treating change as an event

For years, organisations have treated change as something with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

You’ve been there - a transformation programme is launched, a roadmap is created, people are trained, and eventually, the organisation is declared “there”.

That mental model is now obsolete.

Not because leaders are failing to manage change properly, but because the conditions that made episodic change viable no longer exist. AI has simply exposed what was already true: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are not temporary disruptions, they are the operating environment.

The question for leadership now is no longer how to deliver change successfully, it is how to build an organisation that can keep functioning while change never stops.

That is the difference between managing change and building change fitness.

The Collapse of the Start-Transition-End Model

The traditional change model assumes two things:

• That there is a relatively stable “current state” to move from.

• That there is a definable “future state” to arrive at.

Neither assumption holds true anymore as technology cycles are shortening, strategies are being revised mid-flight, and AI tools update faster than training programmes can keep up.

What looked like a future state six months ago is already outdated.

In this environment, transformation programmes stack up on top of one another, and McKinsey describes the result bluntly:

The average employee now experiences around ten planned change initiatives a year, a fivefold increase over the past decade. Unsurprisingly, people are exhausted.

This is not because employees are resistant to change, it is because organisations keep asking them to sprint in ten different directions at once.

When change becomes everything, everywhere, all at once, it stops being energising and starts becoming noise.

That is not a resilience problem, it is a leadership design problem.

Change fatigue is a leadership failure, not an employee one

Harvard research points to an uncomfortable truth.

Leaders have little control over the external competitive environment, but they have extraordinary influence over the internal performance environment; that includes engagement, morale, trust, and productivity.

In other words, leaders cannot calm the external market, slow down the pace of AI, or remove uncertainty, but they can decide how predictable, honest, and coherent their organisation feels on the inside.

This is where many organisations fall down, because their attempt to reassure people simply creates false certainty. They over-promise and attempt to communicate confidence that is not grounded in reality.

The net result is not calm, it is cynicism and more uncertainty.

In high-uncertainty environments, people do not need groundless certainty, they need People

Leaders whose behaviour is consistent, whose communication is honest, and whose decisions make sense over time.

Trust, transparency, and vision are not “soft” leadership traits anymore, they are structural supports that allow employees to keep functioning while uncertainty remains unresolved.

Why AI changes the People Leadership equation

AI has not created the need for change fitness, it has accelerated it.

What AI does exceptionally well is remove slack from systems, it speeds up decision cycles, exposes weak assumptions about workflows and processes, and it surfaces inconsistencies in how organisations operate.

This is why AI adoption so often creates anxiety - and not because the technology is inherently threatening - but because it highlights where judgement and decision-making were already fragile and inconsistent.

In this context, People Leaders face a choice, they can either treat AI as another tool to roll out, train, and “embed”, or they can recognise the deeper change that is required.

The real work of People Leadership in the AI era is not buying tools or scaling training.

It is translation.

People Leaders as translators of AI and change

Translation is the missing capability in most organisations.

AI introduces new forms of possibility and new forms of risk at the same time, and if this is left untranslated, it overwhelms people. Even worse, if used carelessly, it creates confident language wrapped around fragile assumptions, outputs and ambitions.

People Leaders are uniquely positioned here, but only if they rethink their role.

Translation means:

• turning abstract capability into concrete judgement.

• making clear where AI informs decisions and where humans remain accountable.

• slowing things down just enough for people to understand what is changing, why it matters, and how to act safely.

Without translation, organisations default to noise and performative activities.

For example, training looks successful, adoption metrics rise, and yet behaviour barely changes.

People either over-trust the system or quietly ignore or resist it.

Change fitness is built when People Leaders consistently bridge that gap between possibility and practice.

The shift People Leaders need to make now

The era of moving from “current state” to “future state” is over, we are now in an era of continuous reconfiguration.

Change fitness is the ability to maintain clarity, trust, and performance while that reconfiguration never stops, and AI simply makes the absence of that fitness visible faster than before.

The People Leaders who succeed next will not be those who deploy the most tools or run the most programmes.

They will be the ones who can see clearly, translate honestly, and design organisations that expect change as normal.

That is not a future capability. It is the job now.