Beyond the pivot and change: Organizations must design for true change fitness.

Imagine yourself standing before your executive team to announce the third strategic realignment in as many years. As you speak, you notice the subtle shifts in the room: a heavy silence, a few averted eyes, and the collective exhales of people who are already operating at their limit. You are witnessing change fatigue in its most literal form. It is the quiet exhaustion that settles into an organisation when the speed of technical “pivots” outpaces the human capacity to integrate them.

This sensation of being stalled is rarely a matter of poor strategy or a lack of individual willpower. Instead, it is a signal that the marriage between your people’s performance and your organisational systems has become strained. When the “internal” mental models of your leaders are forced to fight against “external” technical structures that remain rigid, the resulting friction creates a performance ceiling that no amount of motivation can shatter.

To lead effectively in 2026, we must shift our perspective from managing change as an event to designing for change fitness as a permanent state. This requires an understanding of how our cognitive biology interacts with the digital and procedural scaffolding we build around it.

The physiological architecture of change fitness

Change fitness is an emergent property of an organisation’s “socio-technical” health. It is the measure of how much energy is required to move from an old behavior to a new one without triggering a systemic breakdown. To improve this fitness, we must first acknowledge that our organisations have a nervous system of their own, composed of the repetitive patterns, feedback loops, and software interfaces that dictate our daily work.

In neuroscience, Hebb’s Law—the principle that “neurons that fire together, wire together”—explains how individual habits are formed. At the organisational level, your technical systems act as the primary “firing” mechanism. Every time a manager navigates a complex approval workflow or a team uses a specific communication tool, they are physically and cognitively wiring themselves into a specific mode of operation.

When you announce a “change” or a “pivot,” you are essentially asking your entire workforce to perform a massive, simultaneous act of “re-wiring.” If your technical systems are rigid or outdated, they act as a psychological anchor. They continue to fire the “old” patterns while you are demanding the “new” ones. This internal-external conflict is the root cause of the cognitive load that eventually leads to change fatigue.

The cost of cognitive friction

Every manual workaround, every redundant meeting, and every poorly integrated software tool contributes to the “cognitive friction” within your organisation. This friction is not just a nuisance; it is a drain on the finite mental energy your leaders need for high-level judgment and resilience.

When cognitive friction is high, the “mental RAM” of your team is consumed by the effort of simply navigating the system, leaving very little capacity for the actual work of the pivot. Leaders often misinterpret this as a “mindset issue,” when it is actually a systemic technical failure that has reached its human limit.

Moving from instruction to systemic alignment

Building change fitness requires us to look beyond individual resilience and toward the structures that either support or sabotage it. We often favour explanation over judgement in this context: the goal is not to “fix” the people, but to align the environment so that high performance becomes the path of least resistance.

A common workplace pattern involves introducing a new mindset—such as “extreme ownership” or “agile thinking”—while leaving the technical incentives and reporting structures of the old, hierarchical system in place. The reader may recognise this tension: the feeling of being told to drive a race car while the parking brake is still engaged.

True organisational excellence occurs when the technical implementation is designed to mirror the desired human behaviour. If you want a culture of rapid learning, your systems must make it technically easy to share failures and access data without fear of reprisal or excessive “process tax.” This is the translation of insight into grounded, systemic action.

Implementing small intentional shifts

Rather than attempting a “do everything” solution, change fitness is built through micro-practices and intentional shifts in your operating rhythm. These are designed to reduce the energy cost of change over time.

• The Systemic Friction Audit: Regularly identify the one technical process that causes the most “internal groaning” from your team. This is usually where your change fitness is leaking.
• Cognitive Load Buffering: Protect the thinking time of your decision-makers by automating or delegating low-stakes technical choices.
• Reflective Questions for Systems: Ask your team, “Does our current software allow us to be as fast as our strategy requires?”. This reframes the problem from a human failing to a technical requirement.

The quiet confidence of a fit system

Resilience in a high-pressure environment is not about being “tougher” than the problem. It is about having a system that is “fitter” than the challenge. When your technical structures and your human performance goals are in a healthy marriage, change fatigue begins to dissipate because the “cost” of the pivot is no longer prohibitively high.

As you look at the strategic horizon for the coming year, consider the state of your organisational architecture. Is it a rigid cage that forces your team into defensive, exhausted patterns? Or is it a flexible scaffold that supports their cognitive growth and allows them to move with clarity?

The path to organisational excellence is rarely found in a new motivational shortcut. It is found in the disciplined, thoughtful work of building systems that respect the way humans actually think, learn, and perform.
Is your technical environment currently a multiplier of your team’s energy, or a drain on it?

Citations

Blog 1: Beyond the pivot and change: Organizations must design for true change fitness.

[Hebbian Theory and Neuroplasticity – Wikipedia]

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory)

[The Neurobiology of Habit Formation – National Institutes of Health (NIH)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4826769/)

Author of:

• Thinking about Thinking: An Introduction to Observing Your Own Thoughts. 
• Getting Up Again and Other Stories We Tell Ourselves About Being Strong.