Nobody adds it up. On change load.

How many change programmes are running in your organisation today?

Take a moment for the number. Then ask yourself the second question: could someone deliver that list within a week?

In most organisations they could not. There is a project portfolio, and it is usually well kept. But alongside it, all sorts of things are running that are not in it. A new registration system a department introduced by itself. An agreement between two departments that changed a way of working in practice. A pilot that was never formally started and never formally stopped. An adjustment that came out of an audit. When you really make that list, it often holds twice as many things as expected.

That is not the problem. That is only the first sign of it.

In 2022, Gartner counted it from the other end.

Not ten projects in the organisation. Ten on one person.

Two truths that are both correct

Sit around the table with a board and ask about the changes under way. You will hear about four or five initiatives, each with a good reason. One comes out of a savings target. Another out of a digitalisation plan. A third out of a reorganisation started last year. Defensible, one by one. Necessary, one by one.

Then go and talk to a team leader. They tell you something else. They tell you about three people who left and were not replaced, about a team that will be put together again next quarter, about a new system that has to be learned while the service carries on as usual, and about employees asking whether they will still be there next year.

Both pictures are correct. They are simply not about the same thing.

The board sees four initiatives side by side. The team leader carries them on top of each other. And in between sits precisely nobody who does the sum.

The sign that it has become too much

There is one sentence that tells you an organisation has gone past its limit.

From now on, focus on your core task. Leave the separate programmes that demand capacity for a while.

It is well meant and it sounds reasonable. But look at what happens. The board establishes that it has become too much, and puts the decision about what has to go with the managers.

With people who only see their own piece. Who do not know what is running elsewhere, do not know which programme is politically untouchable, and have no mandate to stop one.

Two figures make this painfully precise. Of managers, 41 per cent are prepared to adjust their own working behaviour to make a change succeed. And almost three in four HR leaders believe managers are not equipped to lead change. That is not the layer where the question belongs.

That is the heart of the matter. Not that too much is changing. Rather that the question of which changes may go ahead is put to the layer with the least overview and the least authority, while the overload was created at the top.

Why this is not a question of mindset

The easy explanation is that there is resistance. That people are tired of change. That a culture programme is needed to get everyone facing the same way again.

The bill, by now, sits somewhere else. In 2024, Belgium spent more than two and a half billion euro on benefits for incapacity for work lasting more than a year due to burnout or depression. That is 78 per cent more than in 2019. More than three in ten new cases of long-term absence are psychosocial today, against two in ten six years earlier. A question of mindset does not cost two and a half billion euro.

What is really going on: change load.

Change load is not about how much changes, but about what all those changes together demand of the same people. And that is not a single quantity. Change asks five different things, and they do not cost the same.

There is learning load. New systems, new procedures, new knowledge. Visible, plannable, usually budgeted for.

There is delivery load. The hours the change demands on top of the ordinary work, because the service carries on. Also visible, and usually underestimated.

There is relational load. A new manager, different colleagues, a team that breaks up. Trust built over years that disappears in a single reshuffle.

There is uncertainty load. Will I still have work. Where do I land. When will we know. That costs energy daily and appears in no project plan.

And there is identity load. Does this change who I am at work. Does what I was good at still count. Will I still be the person colleagues come to with a question.

Those last two are the most expensive, and they are invisible. What happens next is predictable: someone pushes back, and that pushback is read as unwillingness. While it is usually identity load that was never named.

Change fatigue is not fatigue

Change fatigue hides more than it explains.

What organisations call change fatigue is rarely tiredness. It is spent credit.

Something was promised during the last reorganisation. More autonomy for the teams. Less meeting pressure. Clearer roles. And then nobody ever came back to it. Not out of ill will, but because the next programme had already started and nobody had time left to look at what the previous one had delivered.

That is what people remember. Not that it was hard, but that it did not come true and that nobody mentioned it again.

And that credit can be measured.

A difference of thirty points.

Two caveats about that figure. It comes from a survey, not a measurement: people say what they think they will do, which is not the same as what they do. And it shows a correlation, not a cause. What it does show is the direction, and that is sharp enough to act on.

The distinction matters. Tiredness passes with rest. Spent credit has to be topped up, and that can only be done by keeping one promise completely and saying out loud that it was kept. That is cheaper than the next culture programme, and it works better.

What you can check yourself

Three questions. They need no survey and no external programme. Only the willingness to want to know the answer.

Does the full list exist?

Not the project portfolio, but everything that demands capacity from your people today. Including what runs outside the formal channels. If that list does not exist, you are governing something you cannot see.

Do you know where the change load piles up?

Not how many are running, but on whom they land. In every organisation there are a few teams and a few people who are in almost everything. They carry the most and are rarely spared, because nobody adds it up.

Stopped, or moved in time?

Two reflexes when it becomes too much. Stopping helps, but creates frustration among the people whose work is cut. Postponing moves the change load, it does not lower it: next year the portfolio is full again and the same conversation starts over.

The test question: when did you last really stop something? Not postponed, not reworded. If the answer is never, then prioritising in your organisation is a word rather than a decision.

Why does every change touch everyone?

The same change. On the left the whole building has to move with it, on the right a single unit.

Suppose you want to change one thing about the way one service works today. What has to move with it? In many organisations: IT, HR, communications, a support unit, three regions, two consultative bodies and the front office. Not because the change is so large. Rather because the organisation is so finely divided into functions that nothing can happen in one place any more.

That is the real cause of high change load. Not the number of projects, but the way the organisation has been cut up. Divide the work into functions and specialisms, and you divide every change across the whole building too. Every programme then has to pass through all the departments at once, every alignment asks for four meeting tables, and every team gets everything on its plate even when it is involved in only one thing.

Organisations designed around flows work differently: teams that carry a complete piece of work from start to finish, with the job control to adjust it themselves. A change lands in one place; the rest of the building carries on. The same change, a fraction of the load.

What that looks like inside one building, with the same people in the same places, is in The same file, thirteen times.

And there is the uncomfortable consequence. The organisations with the highest change load are usually precisely the organisations that need a redesign most, and feel they have the least room for it. That is not a contradiction. It is the same cause twice.

Whoever only spreads things out buys time. Whoever tackles the question underneath lowers the change load of everything that comes after.

And then AI arrives on top

AI is the largest generator of change load organisations have ever seen. AI does not touch one department but all of them at once. AI has no end date: what is possible shifts every month. And AI changes the content of the work itself: which tasks stay human, where judgement is needed, who decides.

Add that to a portfolio nobody is adding up already, and you know why so many AI ambitions stall. AI transformation that gets stuck is usually a structural problem: the organisation is carrying too much change load. And that can be designed for.

So not: how many programmes are running in your organisation. But: when something changes in one place, how many other places have to move with it?

That number says more about your change load than the length of your project list. And it is the only number you can do something about.

Does this sound familiar? Do let me know. I am always glad to have the conversation.