Two numbers from Gartner's HR research, published in Harvard Business Review by Cian O Morain and Peter Aykens, should be read as a single sentence. In 2022, the average employee lived through 10 planned enterprise changes — a restructuring for efficiency, a culture transformation, the replacement of a legacy system — up from two in 2016. Over roughly the same period, employees' stated willingness to support enterprise change fell from 74 percent to 43 percent.
Most executives who encounter those figures reach for the second one and call it a morale problem. O Morain and Aykens are more careful: they tie the collapse to exhaustion, arguing that the pandemic asked a great deal of employees, they delivered, and the bill came due. Their prescriptions follow from that diagnosis — prioritize initiatives so employees know where to spend their energy, build in periods of proactive rest, involve employees in change plans, and push managers to build team resilience.
That diagnosis is right as far as it goes, and it stops one step short of the uncomfortable part. The willingness figure is not primarily a measure of employee attitude. It is a measure of executive portfolio discipline. Five times as many changes landed on the same people in the same number of working hours, and the resulting resistance is the predictable output of an account that has been overdrawn. Treat change capacity the way you treat capital — finite, allocated deliberately, and depleted by every initiative you green-light — and the numbers stop looking mysterious.
The Ratio Matters More Than Either Figure
Taken alone, 43 percent willingness is a number you can explain away. Survey framing shifts. Employees were tired. The year was 2022, and nearly every workforce metric looked bruised. Taken alongside the fivefold increase in initiatives, it becomes much harder to dismiss, because the two move in the direction basic arithmetic would predict.
Be precise about what the Gartner data does and does not establish. It is self-reported survey data showing two trends over the same window; it does not prove that initiative volume caused the drop in willingness. But the alternative explanations have to work harder. If this were simply pandemic malaise, you would expect the number to rebound as the acute crisis receded. And crucially, the ten changes are not the organization's total change load — they are the planned enterprise changes a single employee experienced. Layer on top of that the team-level reorganizations, tool migrations, process updates, and manager turnover that never appear on a transformation roadmap, and the real absorption demand is higher than ten.
Years Later, the Number Did Not Recover
The strongest argument against the "it was just the pandemic" reading comes from Gartner itself. In July 2025, the firm reported that just 32 percent of business leaders say they are achieving healthy change adoption by employees. That is a different question asked of a different population, so it is not a direct continuation of the 43 percent series. But the signal is hard to miss: two years after the HBR piece, and three years on from the 2022 data, only about a third of leaders say change is landing healthily with their own people.
This is the finding executives should sit with longest. The fatigue described in 2023 was framed as a hangover — something that would ease as conditions normalized. The 2025 figure suggests it did not ease. The pressures the HBR authors named — hybrid work design, digitalization, inflation, a continuing talent shortage, supply-chain constraints — show no sign of relenting, and in my reading the arrival of enterprise AI programs since then has added to the queue rather than cleared it. Nothing structural changed about how organizations decide what to stop doing.
Communications Is the Wrong Lever
When adoption falters, the reflexive corporate response is more communication: a better narrative, a town hall, a change champion network, a fresh round of why-this-matters messaging. That response assumes the problem is comprehension. The capacity reading says otherwise — people understand the change perfectly well and have no bandwidth left to absorb it.
The change-management practitioner literature has been making this argument for years under the heading of change saturation. Prosci defines saturation as the point at which concurrent initiatives exceed an organization's absorptive capacity, and its remedies are portfolio remedies: inventory what is in flight, sequence it, and refuse to launch past the line. Notably, Gartner's own guidance has drifted toward a similar logic. In one of its articles on workplace change, the firm argues that leaders today must routinize change rather than inspire it — which is a quiet admission that the inspirational-narrative model has hit its limit. You cannot inspire your way past a full calendar.
There is one communications-adjacent intervention with a quantified payoff worth noting, and it is about conditions rather than messaging. Trade press covering Gartner's research reported that psychologically safe workplaces cut change fatigue by 46 percent. That is a large effect, and it sits comfortably next to the HBR authors' advice to involve employees in change plans, since involvement is plausibly one route to that safety. It is also, in my reading, a finding about control: people absorb more change when they have some say in its shape. It does not make unlimited change absorbable.
Where the HBR Prescription Holds, and Where It Strains
O Morain and Aykens offer four moves. They are not equally implementable, and the gaps between them are where most organizations fail.
Prioritization: correct, and the hardest thing in the list
Telling employees where to invest their energy is the single highest-leverage recommendation in the piece, and it is almost never done, because it requires an executive team to agree in public that someone's initiative is less important than someone else's. Portfolio prioritization is a political act before it is an analytical one. Any organization that claims to have five top priorities has not prioritized; it has published a list.
Proactive rest: unenforceable without governance
Building in periods of rest is the right instinct and the most likely to evaporate on contact with a quarterly target. Rest between change waves only survives if something structural protects it — a sequencing calendar with hard gates, a cap on concurrent initiatives per team, a rule that no business unit absorbs two major system changes in the same quarter. Framed as an intention, it will be the first thing traded away.
Involving employees: supportive evidence, real cost
The surrounding Gartner evidence points the same way, even if none of it tests involvement directly: psychologically safe workplaces show markedly lower change fatigue, and the firm separately argues that proactive change management reduces employee fatigue. The honest caveat is that genuine involvement slows the front end of a program. Leaders who want the fatigue benefit without the schedule cost will produce consultation theater, which is worse than nothing because it spends trust rather than building it.
Challenging managers to build resilience: the risky one
Here I'd push back on the source. Asking middle managers to build team resilience is reasonable advice that becomes an abdication if it arrives without portfolio relief. Managers do not control how many initiatives land on their teams; they control only the absorption, and they do that twice — once for themselves and once on behalf of everyone reporting to them. Handing them a resilience mandate while the initiative count stays at ten converts an executive allocation failure into a middle-management performance failure. That is a cheap trade for the C-suite and an expensive one for the organization.
Build the Artifact You Don't Currently Have
Most organizations can produce a capital plan, a headcount plan, and a technology roadmap on demand. Almost none can produce a single document listing every change initiative currently landing on a given team, with its start date, its expected absorption demand, and its owner. Without that artifact, prioritization conversations have no object. Each initiative looks affordable in isolation because no one is holding the sum.
Gartner has started making this case function by function. In February 2024, the firm argued that finance leaders should factor change fatigue into project planning — treating it as a planning input alongside cost and timeline rather than a soft consequence discovered after launch. That is the right generalization. If fatigue is a cost, it belongs in the business case.
One related caution for anyone building that case. Resist the urge to anchor it on the familiar claim that 70 percent of change initiatives fail. The provenance of that statistic has been directly challenged, and a board member who knows this will discredit your argument with a single question. McKinsey's survey work on what separates successful digital transformations is a more defensible evidence base, and the Gartner numbers in front of you are stronger than a decades-old folk statistic.
What Leaders Should Do This Quarter
Four actions, each checkable:
- Count what's in flight, by team, not by portfolio. The relevant unit of measurement is how many changes hit one employee, because that is how Gartner arrived at ten. An enterprise with 40 initiatives spread evenly across 20 teams has a different problem than one where six initiatives all land on operations.
- Set a cap and honor it. Pick a maximum number of concurrent major changes per team and treat new approvals as substitutions rather than additions. If something goes in, something comes out or waits.
- Put an absorption cost in every business case. Name the teams affected, the hours of retraining and parallel running required, and what those teams will stop doing to make room. An initiative that cannot answer the third question is not ready for approval.
- Give managers relief before resilience training. If you are asking managers to steady their teams through change, hand them something concrete first: the authority to defer a non-critical initiative, protected time for absorption, or a reduced target during a migration quarter.
Then measure the thing you're trying to move. Willingness-to-support is a useful pulse question, but adoption rates, time-to-proficiency on new systems, voluntary attrition in the teams carrying the heaviest change load, and the reliability of initiative benefit realization will tell you more about whether your capacity account is solvent.
The Constraint Was Always the People
The 2023 Gartner figures were widely read as a story about tired employees, and the 32 percent reported in 2025 suggests the condition is structural rather than seasonal. The more useful reading is that change capacity is a resource with a hard ceiling, and leaders have been spending it as though it were free. Strategy documents routinely assume that announced initiatives will be absorbed; the data says that assumption has been false for years.
None of this argues for less ambition. It argues for honest accounting. An executive team that can name what it is not doing this year will get more change through its organization than one that announces ten priorities and discovers, somewhere around the fourth, that only 43 percent of the people who have to execute them are still willing to try.
