Available December 4, 2025

Episode 009: Transformation Fatigue When Your Organization Can’t Absorb More Change
DURATION: 29 minutes
HOST: Kevin Novak
SHOW: The Human Factor Podcast

The CEO of a 500-person organization recently told me something I’ve been hearing with alarming frequency. He said:

“I used to be decisive. I could read a room, make tough calls, and sleep well at night. Now I second-guess everything, and my brain feels like it’s running a data center trying to process all of today’s demands.”

His experience isn’t unique. What he’s describing points to something deeper than traditional burnout. It’s a fundamental mismatch between how our brains work and what modern leadership demands in an era of relentless, overlapping transformation.

A 2025 HR Dive survey found that 70% of C-suite executives are considering leaving their roles to protect their well-being. Not because they’re weak. Not because they lack capability. But because their organizations have exceeded the human capacity to absorb change.

Over the last eight episodes, we’ve mapped individual psychological barriers to transformation, from resistance patterns to communication failures to the vulnerability required for psychological safety. Today we explore what happens when ALL of those forces accumulate simultaneously, without recovery time. When your organization doesn’t just face resistance to change but becomes fundamentally incapable of processing any more of it.

I’m Kevin Novak, CEO of 2040 Digital, Professor at the University of Maryland, and author of The Truth About Transformation: Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty, and Human Complexity.

Welcome to The Human Factor Podcast, the show that explores the intersection of humanity, technology, and transformation along with the psychology behind transformation success.

Today we’re exploring transformation fatigue, the invisible crisis that’s killing your best initiatives before they even start.

This connects directly to the subtitle of my book: Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty, and Human Complexity. Because human mental fatigue isn’t caused by any single initiative. It’s caused by AI mandates layered on top of return-to-office policies, layered on top of economic uncertainty, layered on top of restructuring, layered on top of new compliance requirements. Each change might be manageable in isolation. Together, they overwhelm human cognitive architecture.

And what makes this episode critical for every leader listening: You can have the perfect change or transformation strategy. You can address every resistance pattern we discussed in Episode 8. You can create psychological safety exactly as Elizabeth and I discussed in Episode 7. And your initiative will still fail if you’re launching it into an organization that has already depleted its change absorption capacity.

Let’s understand why this is happening and what you can do about it.

SECTION 1: THE INVISIBLE CRISIS NO ONE’S MEASURING

Let’s start with some research that should alarm every leader. According to a 2024 research study from IT Revolution, cognitive overload costs organizations $322 billion annually in lost productivity. But the productivity experts are missing something crucial: It’s not the big decisions overwhelming people’s brains. It’s the constant micro-decisions creating what neuroscientists call ‘decision fatigue.’

The human brain evolved for sequential processing. We’re designed to focus on one challenge, resolve it, recover, and then move to the next challenge. Modern organizational life, and even our personal lives, demands something our brains literally cannot do: process multiple and near constant changes or even inputs simultaneously while maintaining the cognitive resources needed for daily thoughts and tasks.

A 2025 study published in Scientific Reports found that each time we switch between tasks, we experience what researchers call ‘attention residue.’ Part of our cognitive capacity stays stuck on the previous task. Current research shows this task-switching can cost up to 40% of productive time as it depletes not just our mental energy but also our physical energy.

Multiply those depletions across an organization where people are simultaneously processing an AI implementation, a cultural transformation, a restructuring, changes in work processes and shifting market conditions.

Lets first look at this at an individual level.

The course I teach at the University of Maryland focuses on our inability to multitask. As I go through the lecture and provide my students with various examples, they are often surprised at their own newly recognized limitations or where misunderstandings have happened as they thought they understood a concept or conversation but realized what they missed while the mind experienced residue. The lesson helps them recognize the energy drain they have been feeling as they continuously try to do something we simply cannot.

The most successful leaders are often the worst at recognizing their own cognitive overload. The psychological research reveals that high achievers consistently fail to recognize their inability to multitask and do not connect the dots to why they are experiencing performance degradation. They interpret cognitive fatigue as personal failing rather than a predictable neurological response.

This is transformation fatigue at the individual level. But here’s where it becomes an organizational crisis: Think about what happens when an entire workforce exceeds their absorption capacity simultaneously. The problem isn’t just additive. It’s multiplicative.

To understand why, we need to look at the three distinct types of cognitive load that are draining your organization right now.

The Three Hidden Cognitive Loads

Load Type One: Information Switching Burden. Your people must maintain awareness across multiple organizational systems while constantly shifting between different mental models. Strategic planning requires one cognitive framework. Customer interactions require another. Internal politics require a third. Technical problem-solving requires a fourth. Each context switch depletes resources in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, our executive function center, and the switching cost accumulates throughout the day. By mid-afternoon, your initiatives aren’t competing with resistance. They are being confronted by cognitive depletion.

Load Type Two: Emotional Labor Quotient. But cognitive switching isn’t the only drain. Leaders also carry an enormous emotional processing burden that’s rarely measured. They must constantly read, interpret, and respond to emotional cues from multiple stakeholder groups while managing their own psychological state. Research on burnout reveals that ’emotional dissonance,’ the gap between felt and expressed emotions, is particularly draining. Leaders who must project confidence while processing uncertainty, optimism while managing a crisis, and decisiveness while navigating ambiguity experience amplifying fatigue that has nothing to do with hours worked.

Load Type Three: Decision Complexity Amplification. And layered on top of both of these is the sheer complexity of modern decisions. Today’s decisions involve exponentially more variables than previous generations faced. Multiple stakeholder impacts. Regulatory considerations. Cultural implications. Long-term strategic consequences. ESG requirements. AI ethics considerations. Each initiative, project, situation adds new decision variables while the existing complexity remains. Neuroscience research shows that decision-making physiologically depletes the prefrontal cortex. For leaders making hundreds of complex decisions daily, this creates depletion that builds throughout the day.

These three loads don’t add together. They multiply. And when an organization launches a new initiative into this environment, it’s not competing for attention. It’s competing for cognitive resources that have already been exhausted.

This brings us to a critical problem: The tools we’ve been using to manage change weren’t designed for this reality.

SECTION 2: WHY TRADITIONAL CHANGE MANAGEMENT FAILS

Traditional change management was designed for a different era. The models most organizations still use, ADKAR, Kotter’s 8 Steps, Lewin’s Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze, were developed when change was episodic. You’d have a major change or transformation initiative, implement it, stabilize it, and then operate in the new state until the next major change came years later.

That world no longer exists. Change and even major transformation is no longer episodic. It’s continuous. And the psychological frameworks designed for episodic change actively harm organizations when applied to continuous change environments.

Consider the logic of these models: Traditional change management assumes people need to be ‘unfrozen’ from their current state, moved through change, and then ‘refrozen’ in a new state. But what happens when there’s no time for refreezing? What happens when the next change arrives before people have stabilized from the previous one?

You get what I call ‘perpetual thaw.’ People exist in a constant state of destabilization where nothing feels solid, nothing feels permanent, and every new initiative triggers the same psychological alarm bells we discussed in Episode 8. But now those alarm bells are exhausted. The resistance patterns aren’t operating at full strength. They’re operating on depleted cognitive reserves.

This creates a paradox that confuses the best and brightest leaders: People seem both resistant and disengaged. They’re not fighting the change, but they’re not embracing it either. They’re going through the motions without the psychological energy for genuine adoption. And leaders interpret this as apathy when it’s actually mental and physical exhaustion.

So how do you distinguish between normal resistance and organizational fatigue? The symptoms look different, and recognizing them is the first step toward addressing them.

The Symptoms of Transformation Fatigue

Watch for these five patterns:

First, passive compliance without genuine adoption. People attend the training. They check the boxes. They say the right things. But behavior doesn’t actually change. This is different from the hidden resistance we discussed in Episode 8. That resistance was actively protective. This is something more concerning: people lack the cognitive resources to resist OR adopt. They’re just surviving.

Second, cynicism disguised as experience. You hear phrases like ‘This too shall pass’ or ‘We’ve seen these initiatives before.’ On the surface, it sounds like healthy skepticism. Underneath, it’s a psychological defense mechanism. People are protecting their remaining cognitive energy by refusing to invest in changes they believe won’t last.

Third, decreased quality across the board. When cognitive resources are depleted, everything suffers, not just change adoption. You’ll see increased errors, slower problem-solving, reduced creativity, and declining customer satisfaction. Leaders often attribute this to individual performance issues when it’s actually a systemic cognitive depletion problem.

Fourth, flight of institutional knowledge. Your most experienced people, the ones who’ve been absorbing change for years, start leaving. They don’t articulate it as transformation fatigue. They say they want ‘a less stressful environment’ or ‘better work-life balance.’ But what they’re really saying is: ‘I’ve reached my limit, and I need recovery time that this organization won’t provide.’

And fifth, leadership decision quality degradation. This is perhaps the most concerning symptom. Research shows that a leader’s cognitive state directly impacts team psychological safety, innovation capacity, and change resilience. When leaders are cognitively depleted, they make worse decisions, miss important signals, and inadvertently create conditions that amplify fatigue throughout the organization.

These symptoms rarely appear in isolation. They layer on top of each other, creating a downward spiral that’s often invisible until significant damage has occurred. Let me show you what this looks like in practice.

SECTION 3: THE COMPOUND EFFECT

I want to walk you through a client scenario that I have also observed in multiple organizations. It illustrates exactly how fatigue layers in ways that aren’t visible until it’s too late.

Eighteen months ago, a technology company I work with launched a digital transformation initiative. Standard scope: new platforms, updated processes, cultural shift toward agility. The initiative was well-designed. Leadership was committed. Resources were adequate. They did everything right.

Nine months in, the company announced a restructuring due to market conditions. Different initiative, different sponsors, different objectives. But the same people were now processing two major changes simultaneously. Some of the restructuring directly affected the digital transformation team. Role uncertainty layered on top of technology uncertainty.

Three months later, the AI mandate arrived. Every department was expected to identify AI use cases and begin implementation. This wasn’t a request. It was a competitive necessity. But the organization was already operating at reduced cognitive capacity from the previous two initiatives.

Then came the return-to-office policy shift. Then an acquisition integration. Then new compliance requirements. Each change was justified. Each was necessary. And each was launched as if it existed in isolation, as if people had unlimited capacity to absorb change.

The result: The digital transformation that started eighteen months ago is now stalled at 30% adoption. The restructuring created silos that nobody planned. The AI initiatives are producing checkbox compliance but no genuine innovation. The best performers have either left or mentally checked out. And leadership is now planning the next series of change initiatives, confused about why the organization seems so resistant.

But the organization isn’t resistant. It’s depleted. And no amount of communication, no amount of training, no amount of executive sponsorship can overcome cognitive exhaustion. You can’t motivate people out of neurological depletion.

The simplest way to understand this dynamic is through a budget metaphor.

Every organization has a finite capacity for change absorption at any given time. Every initiative draws from that budget. Unlike financial budgets, you can’t simply allocate more resources. You can’t hire more cognitive capacity. And critically, each new initiative doesn’t just consume resources. It also reduces recovery time. Without recovery, the next initiative starts with a depleted baseline. And the one after that starts with an even more depleted baseline.

This is why the fifth change initiative in eighteen months doesn’t just face resistance. It faces an organization that has lost the psychological capacity to engage with change constructively. The resistance isn’t about the change. It’s about self-preservation.

Think back to our Episode 8 discussion of the twelve resistance patterns. Every one of those patterns requires cognitive resources to maintain. When people are fatigued, they don’t have the energy for sophisticated resistance. Instead, you get something that looks like apathy but is actually conservation. People are unconsciously protecting whatever cognitive resources remain for the demands they can’t avoid.

So we’ve diagnosed the problem. We understand the cognitive loads, the symptoms, and how fatigue compounds over time. The question now is: What can you actually do about it?

SECTION 4: THE RECOVERY IMPERATIVE

Let me be direct: Working fewer hours or managing time better aren’t going to solve cognitive overload. The solutions require fundamentally rethinking how we approach continuous change in organizations. I want to share five strategies that address the root causes we’ve been discussing.

Strategy One: Cognitive Architecture Redesign. First, recognize that the human brain, even the highly capable executive brain, has architectural constraints that modern organizational life systematically exceeds. Understanding this architecture reveals solutions.

Batch strategic thinking in 90 to 120 minute blocks during natural energy peaks, typically morning for most people. Group emotional labor conversations rather than scattering them throughout the day. Conduct decision audits: if a decision is both high-stakes and irreversible, it warrants leadership attention. Everything else should be delegated or systematized.

Convert recurring decisions into frameworks. Spending approvals, hiring decisions, vendor selection, routine operational choices. Standardize what can be standardized. This preserves cognitive capacity for decisions that genuinely require human judgment and contextual understanding.

Redesigning individual cognitive architecture is essential, but it’s not sufficient. We also need to rethink how we sequence organizational change.

Strategy Two: Change Sequencing, Not Change Stacking. Most organizations stack change on top of change. Multiple initiatives launch simultaneously because each seems urgent. But urgency is not the same as capacity. Just because something needs to happen doesn’t mean people can process it right now.

Sequence your changes. Identify which changes are truly urgent versus merely important. Create deliberate gaps between major initiatives. Build recovery time into your roadmaps the same way you build recovery time into athletic training programs. No serious athlete trains at maximum intensity every day. Why do we expect organizations to transform at maximum intensity indefinitely?

When you absolutely must run parallel initiatives, at minimum acknowledge the cognitive load you’re creating. Help people understand that feeling overwhelmed isn’t personal failure. It’s a predictable response to exceeding human processing capacity. That acknowledgment alone creates psychological permission to ask for help, prioritize, and protect energy for what matters most.

Of course, even with better sequencing, you’ll still have multiple demands competing for your organization’s cognitive resources. That’s where triage becomes essential.

Strategy Three: Transformation Triage. Not every initiative deserves full committed energy. Some changes can be implemented with minimal cognitive load through automation, defaults, or simple compliance requirements. Save the change energy, the hearts-and-minds effort, for changes that genuinely require psychological engagement.

Ask yourself: Does this change require people to think differently, or just act differently? Changes that require new thinking demand significant cognitive resources. Changes that only require new behavior can often be implemented through environmental design, automation, or simple policy compliance. Don’t waste change capacity on compliance when you’ll need that capacity for genuine transformation.

The first three strategies focus on reducing and prioritizing cognitive demands. The fourth strategy is about distributing those demands more effectively.

Strategy Four: Distributed Cognitive Load. The organizations that will outperform won’t be those with the most brilliant individual leaders. They’ll be those who distribute cognitive load across systems, processes, and teams in ways that preserve capacity for decisions and insights that truly require unique human capabilities.

This means building organizational infrastructure that handles routine complexity without human intervention. It means creating team structures where cognitive load is deliberately balanced rather than concentrated. It means recognizing that overloading your best performers doesn’t just exhaust them. It removes the cognitive resources they need to perform at their best.

All of these strategies require something that most organizations systematically neglect: visible, intentional recovery.

Strategy Five: Visible Recovery Rituals. Recovery can’t just happen. It needs to be visible, endorsed, and modeled by leadership. When leaders demonstrate that they take time for cognitive recovery, they give permission for others to do the same. When recovery is invisible or discouraged, people hide their fatigue until it manifests as errors, disengagement, or departure.

This connects to our Episode 7 discussion with Elizabeth Stewart about vulnerability. Leaders who admit they’re cognitively depleted, who visibly prioritize recovery, who acknowledge the load their teams are carrying, create conditions where transformation fatigue can be discussed rather than denied. And problems you can discuss are problems you can address.

These five strategies, cognitive architecture redesign, change sequencing, transformation triage, distributed load, and visible recovery, work together as a system. Implementing one without the others will produce limited results. But together, they create the conditions for sustainable transformation.

CLOSING

Let me leave you with this perspective: Human fatigue, in response to change and transformation, isn’t a sign that your people are weak or that your initiatives are poorly designed. It’s a sign that you’re operating in the age of AI, uncertainty, and human complexity, where the pace and volume of change has exceeded what human cognitive architecture was designed to process.

The leaders who thrive in the coming years won’t be those who master time management or develop superhuman change tolerance. They’ll be those who redesign their own and their workforces cognitive architecture as well as organizational structures to match the genuine limitations of our very humanness.

This is ultimately about sustainable leadership in an unsustainable environment. The human factor, the psychological reality of how our brains actually work, must inform how we structure change and transformation initiatives, not the other way around.

If you launch your next initiative into a depleted organization, you’re not just risking that initiative. You’re deepening the fatigue that will undermine every initiative that follows. But if you build recovery into your strategy, if you sequence rather than stack, if you preserve cognitive capacity for the changes that truly matter, you create conditions where transformation becomes sustainable rather than exhausting.

In our next episode, we’re going to explore the measurement problem that underlies everything we’ve discussed in this series. How do you actually assess transformation readiness when surveys show high support but behavior reveals fatigue? How do you measure psychological factors like cognitive load, identity threat, or change absorption capacity? How do you know whether your organization is psychologically prepared for transformation or just telling you what they think you want to hear? Episode 10 is about the measurement frameworks that make human factors visible and actionable.

If you found today’s episode valuable, Subscribe to The Human Factor Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, leave a rating and a review, and share this episode with your leadership team, because transformation fatigue is a systemic issue that requires systemic awareness.

To explore these concepts further visit 2040digital.com for the change leadership series and from my recent newsletter on ‘The Mental Overload of Modern Leadership’.

Until next time, remember: Your organization’s capacity to change and transform is limited by its capacity to recover. Sustainable change and transformation practices aren’t about moving faster. They are about moving at a pace your people can actually sustain.

And finally, transformation isn’t about technology, its about people.

This has been The Human Factor Podcast. I’m Kevin Novak. Thanks for watching or listening.

END OF EPISODE

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Upcoming: Available December 11, 2025

EPISODE 010: Measuring The Human Factor

Explore how to measure the human factor: the psychological readiness that determines whether your change effort will succeed or become another casualty.

Here is the fundamental problem when organizations measure transformation: we measure what people say instead of what they do.

More Episodes Coming Soon

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