The Transformation Plateau: Why Change Stalls in the Messy Middle
The Transformation Plateau: Why Change Stalls in the Messy Middle
Issue 241, December 4, 2025
The early enthusiasm everyone on the team had was palpable. Six months ago, leaders announced a sweeping digital transformation initiative with all the fanfare that major change initiatives deserve. The town hall was packed, Slack channels were full of employee chatter, and everyone seemed optimistic. Executives spoke passionately about the future and the problems being solved. Early adopters volunteered eagerly for pilot programs. The organization’s transformation consultant declared the kickoff was a resounding success.
Fast forward to today. The pilot programs have expanded, but momentum has visibly slowed. Meeting attendance has dwindled. The same questions get asked repeatedly, suggesting key messages never took hold. Middle managers who once championed the initiative now speak in hedged language about “realistic timelines” and “implementation challenges.” The finish line that seemed so clear at launch has somehow receded into a fog.
Welcome to the transformation plateau, the psychological no man’s land where most organizational change goes to quietly die.
The Predictable Crisis No One Predicts
At 2040, we have observed this pattern repeatedly across industries and organizational types: the gap between launch and completion is where organizational change is most vulnerable. Not because the strategy was flawed or the technology failed, but because the human psychology of sustained change is fundamentally different from the psychology of change initiation. This distinction matters enormously, yet most change and transformation plans treat the middle as merely the space between beginning and end rather than as a distinct psychological phase requiring its own strategies.
Research from McKinsey’s transformation practice reveals that 70% of change initiatives fail to achieve their stated goals, a statistic we have referenced extensively in our revised and expanded book “The Truth About Transformation” and in this newsletter.
What the headline number obscures is the timing of failure. Most change and transformation initiatives don’t collapse at launch or even at major milestones. They gradually lose energy in the middle phases, when the novelty has worn off, but the benefits remain theoretical, when the hard work of implementation has begun, but the rewards feel distant.
Research published in the Journal of Organizational Change Management shows a consistent pattern: employee enthusiasm peaks in the first 60–90 days of a major initiative and then declines steadily unless actively supported. By the six-month mark, organizations typically see a substantial drop-off in engagement—not because the strategy is flawed, but because the psychological lift that accompanies a launch has dissipated.
The Neuroscience of the Middle
Understanding why the middle phase is so psychologically treacherous requires examining how our brains process extended effort toward uncertain outcomes. The dopaminergic system that drives motivation operates on anticipation and reward. At a change or transformation launch, anticipation is high. We imagine a better future, and our brains release dopamine in response to that imagined reward. This neurochemistry is why kickoffs feel energizing even though no actual change has occurred yet.
As time passes and the imagined future remains unrealized, something shifts. The brain begins recalculating the effort-to-reward ratio. Neuroscience research, including work published in Nature Neuroscience, demonstrates that the brain’s reward system reduces dopaminergic response when goals feel distant or uncertain. As effort accumulates without visible reward, the brain recalibrates the perceived value of continuing, creating a predictable “motivational fade.” This is why the same employees who eagerly joined pilot programs early on often become more hesitant months later.
This explains a phenomenon we observe in nearly every change or transformation engagement: the same employees who enthusiastically volunteered for early pilots become hesitant to take on additional change responsibilities six months later. Their cognitive assessment of the situation has shifted. Early on, the potential reward seemed large and the effort modest. Now, having experienced the actual effort required, their brains have recalculated. The reward hasn’t materialized, but the cost has become very real.
The Visibility Problem
Compounding the neurological challenge is what we call the visibility problem. At a change or transformation launch, progress is easy to see and celebrate. The first pilot goes live. The new system processes its first transaction. The reorganization takes effect. These are discrete, observable events that leadership can point to as evidence of momentum.
In the middle phase, progress becomes incremental and often invisible. The seventh integration with a legacy system doesn’t generate the excitement of the first. The hundredth employee trained doesn’t warrant an announcement. The steady improvement in process efficiency doesn’t create a moment worth celebrating. Progress is happening, but it lacks the psychological punctuation that keeps people engaged.
Research on goal pursuit demonstrates that perceived progress strongly influences motivation. Studies in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes show that employees’ perception of progress is often more influential than actual progress metrics. When incremental gains become invisible or uncelebrated, people conclude—incorrectly—that momentum has stalled, even when objective performance indicators show steady forward movement. This creates a dangerous feedback loop. Leadership stops celebrating progress because incremental gains feel routine. Employees stop perceiving progress because nothing is being celebrated. The initiative is still moving forward, but psychologically, it feels stalled.
The Comparison Trap
Another psychological dynamic that emerges in the middle phase is what we term the comparison trap. At launch, the change or transformation exists primarily in imagination. The vision of the future state can be pure, visually conceptualized, and unblemished because it hasn’t encountered the messy compromises that implementation requires. As the initiative progresses, the gap between the imagined initiative and the actual change or transformation becomes increasingly visible.
The new system doesn’t work exactly as the demo suggested. The reorganization created some efficiencies but introduced new coordination challenges. The culture change everyone anticipated, even optimistically visualized, has been slower and more uneven than expected. These are normal aspects of organizational change and really any new initiative, but they create a psychological experience of disappointment that accumulates over time.
In “The Truth About Transformation, Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty and Human Complexity” a revised and expanded new version of our book, we discuss the gap between aspirational visions and implementation realities. What we have observed is that this gap feels largest in the middle phase. At launch, the vision is everything. At completion, the realized benefits speak for themselves. But in the middle, organizations are caught between an increasingly dated vision and benefits that haven’t yet materialized. Employees find themselves comparing their current difficult reality to an imagined future that may never arrive in precisely the form they anticipated.
The Leadership Attention Shift
Organizations are not static environments, and organizational change and transformation do not occur in isolation. One of the most common plateau triggers we observe is the shift in leadership attention toward new priorities. The CEO who championed the initiative at launch has moved on to the next strategic imperative. The executive sponsor is now focused on a different set of initiatives. The change or transformation hasn’t been abandoned, but it has been deprioritized in the unspoken hierarchy of organizational attention.
Employees are remarkably adept at reading these signals. When leadership stops asking about progress in meetings, people notice. When metrics disappear from the executive dashboard, people notice. When the town halls that once featured updates shift to other topics, people notice. The official messaging may still affirm commitment, but the behavioral signals tell a different story.
This attention shift creates a permission structure for disengagement. If leadership has mentally moved on, middle managers reason, perhaps the effort isn’t as critical as initially presented. If the initiative were truly essential, surely it would still command executive attention. The logic is flawed but psychologically compelling.
Breaking Through the Plateau
Recognizing the transformation plateau as a distinct psychological phase rather than a failure of execution changes how organizations can respond. The strategies that launched the effort successfully are not the strategies that will sustain it through the middle. Different psychological dynamics require different interventions.
Creating artificial finish lines. Long change and transformation initiatives need intermediate endpoints that function psychologically as completions. Instead of one distant goal, create a series of meaningful milestones that can be genuinely celebrated. The keyword is meaningful: these cannot be arbitrary checkpoints but must represent real accomplishments that employees recognize as significant. Each completed milestone resets the motivational clock, providing the psychological refresh that sustains continued effort.
Making invisible progress visible. Develop mechanisms for surfacing the incremental progress that otherwise goes unnoticed. Some organizations create visual dashboards that track granular metrics. Others implement storytelling programs where employees share their experiences with new processes or systems. The specific mechanism matters less than the outcome: ensuring that the work people are doing feels like it’s contributing to observable advancement.
Refreshing the vision. The vision articulated at launch may no longer resonate with an organization that has been through months of implementation reality. Rather than defending the original vision against mounting evidence of its limitations, successful efforts periodically refresh their north star to incorporate what has been learned. This isn’t about lowering expectations but about maintaining an honest connection between the vision and the organization’s lived experience.
Sustaining leadership visibility. Executive attention is a renewable resource that must be deliberately managed. Building updates into standard leadership rhythms, maintaining executive presence at key events, and ensuring metrics remain prominent in leadership reporting all signal continued priority. The specific actions matter less than their consistency over time.
The Human Factor in the Middle
The transformation plateau is ultimately a human factor challenge. The same psychological dynamics that make change difficult at the individual level create collective challenges when scaled across organizations. Our brains are not optimized for sustained effort toward uncertain outcomes. Our motivation systems require regular reinforcement. Our perception of progress depends on visibility as much as reality.
Understanding these dynamics doesn’t make them disappear, but it does enable more thoughtful responses. Instead of interpreting the plateau as evidence that something has gone wrong, organizations can recognize it as a predictable phase that requires proactive management. Instead of pushing harder with the same approaches that worked at launch, leaders can adapt their strategies to address the specific psychological challenges of the middle.
The organizations that successfully navigate the transformation plateau are not those that somehow avoid the psychological dynamics we have described. They are organizations that anticipate these dynamics, plan for them explicitly, and respond with strategies matched to the human realities of sustained change.
Your Plateau Experience
Have you experienced the transformation plateau in your organization? What strategies have helped maintain momentum through the messy middle? Where have you seen initiatives lose energy, not because of strategic flaws but because the psychological dynamics of sustained change were underestimated?
What’s your experience been like? Contact us anytime!
Want to explore how these principles apply to your organization? Contact us to discuss transformation readiness, shared purpose alignment, or building cultures of belonging and courage.
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